Learning to Live Beyond the Pain of the Past

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For the longest time I struggled with doing whatever I had to do to avoid facing the pain of the past. I had learned to "don't think, don't talk, don't feel"...to avoid anything that had anything to do with being "me" or expressing any of my own thoughts, feelings or even making my own choices.

From the recent archives, here is a post about making that mind shift from living in avoidance of the past to learning to embrace it - and finding freedom from it...

And this is the conundrum we seem to face in this discussion. (((Conundrum: a difficult question, a riddle)))

Each of us who is on this journey of healing has their own story, their own pain, their own suffering.

Each of us has found in our journey different ways of coping, surviving, healing.

The one commonality seems to be that most of us agree on what Ellen so eloquently yet simply stated: The first part of healing it - is feeling it.

You can read the entire post here.

And here is a post from the archives about making that mind-shift from coping, managing and surviving to living in freedom from the pain of the past...making that mind-shift from being a victim or surviving day to day by "managing" symptoms to learning to live in freedom....and creating my best life each day...finding my way "though" the pain of the past in order to find my way "out of" the pain of the past...

This is where the knowledge of the emotional healing process came into play. As I gradually moved from talking "story" and on to "processing" emotion - the darkness began to lift. The pain began to subside inside me.

Things that had been horrible triggers for me began to be things I could experience with intention. I began to see how events and situations that in the past would send me off the deep end were identifying opportunities for healing, grieving - that here I could go through to get out of the connected avoidance and pain.

I no longer had to hide from the world because I could now become a part of the world.

You can read the entire article here "I DON'T want to talk about it".

Q: How has avoidance affected your ability to move beyond the past? How have you overcome this to find your way through the pain to get beyond it?