12 - FUHGEDDABOUDIT!

TRANSCRIPT

 

One of my favorite books has a passage where the characters are having a conversation about a decision that had been made 20-30 years previously. At the time, it seemed like a good decision. but here they were 30 years later, and it was coming up to... well, not quite bite them, but coming back and needing to be faced again.

 

 And as they have a conversation about it, one of the characters says something that resonates with me every time I read it.

“We all did it,” she said. “And for us - for me at least - it came from taking the quiet way, the easy way. Forget, I thought.  Forget what’s behind. Look to the future. As if the future were not built grain by grain out of the past.”

 

 There is so much truth in that one sentence.

 

 And yet...  stop me if you've heard this before:

• Really, you just need to forget that
• that's in the past
• you should move on
• forgive and forget
• just let it go
• that's old history

 

Have you ever heard anybody say that to you when you're trying to deal with something out of your past?  I don't know why people say that kind of thing.

 

I don't know if it's because they don't want to be part of the conversation because it's uncomfortable for them.

 

I don't know if it's because they truly believe it.

 

But I'm here to tell you... our present is built from our past. Our future is built from our past. Grain by grain out of the past.

What happened to you in the past determined how you acted. It determined choices you made, behaviors you did. And until you understand that, and deal with that, the future is not gonna change. We touched on that in the episode about the monster in the basement.

 

Hi, I'm Mary Young. Thanks for joining us on this episode of lessons from life. Today we’re talking about “FUHGEDDABOUDIT.” Do we really need to forget the past, or can we study it, deal with it, learn from it, and just let it be part of our past?

 

Some people tell us to move on. Some people tell us you can't change the past so why bother looking at it. You know, I had a monster in the basement. It got loose and I was trying to protect it from the scientists. I tried to protect the monster. That was in the last episode. That’s what it feels like to me when people say don't think about the past. Let the past bury the past. They’re saying put the monster back in the basement.

 

NO.

 

Look at it.

 

It might be scary.   

 

It might be painful.

 

Get a healing partner, but look at it. Don’t get stuck in it, don’t wallow in it.  Don’t sit there and reread old journals and let it spiral you down. That’s not healthy. But it is healthy to look and see why did you behave a certain way, or where are the parallels between what happened to me when I was four and the decisions that I made when I was 28.

 

 And believe me there are parallels that I did not see until I was 56. If I had studied my past earlier, I might not have made those decisions when I was 28.

 

 If you don't look at it, you can't heal from it. If you just throw a Band-Aid on a gaping wound, all you're doing is hiding it.  We’ve hidden enough in our emotional healing journeys.

 It doesn't matter what you’re healing from. You could be healing from abuse. You could be healing from some other trauma. At some point, something happened that requires you to be on an emotional healing journey, and you will not successfully manage that journey if you don't come to grips with your past.

 

 People tell us “just move on.”

 How can you move on when you're standing in quicksand?

 

 Looking at the past with a trusted healing partner helps firm up the ground beneath your feet.

 

Here’s an example. From the time I was a freshman in college until I was in my 40s --so a 20 year time span --October was always a bad month for me. The closer we got to Halloween, the worse it was. I didn't know why. I just knew that I would go into a blue funk. I would get melancholy. In college I would take to my bed for two days over Halloween. I had no idea why, and I never looked at my past because I was afraid to.

 

And because the one time I said something to my mom, because I had seen a movie that triggered me. And I said to her “hey, I just watched this movie in this class, and it was about an alcoholic family as seen through the eyes of the four-year-old, the kindergartner or five-year-old little girl, and it was really hard to watch.”

 

 And mom's response was: are you saying were alcoholics? And like a good little girl, I backtracked. “No, mom. I’m saying that maybe we had a drinking problem somewhere.”

 

When I was in my 40s, I sat down and looked at that alcoholic thing again, and found all of one side of my family was alcoholic. Or had a drinking problem -  phrase it how you will. Only one of them ever admitted to being an alcoholic, but I never saw any of them without a drink in their hand.

 

All.  Day.  Long.

 

I started coming to grips with the fact that I come from an alcoholic background, and when I knew that, then a lot of other stuff made sense and I could deal with it. I went to Al-Anon and got some coping techniques there.

 

But let's go back to October. I never said anything to the family about October being a bad month because as the above incident shows, I would not have gotten much help from them. But in therapy, I started trying to remember. Late October. Halloween timeframe. I mean, seriously, all we ever did was go trick-or-treating, so what else could there be? And I remembered an incident, and when I remembered that incident it all made sense.

 

Here is the amazing thing to me. I don't have a problem with Octobers anymore. I don't even notice it.  I remember the first time, it was November and I was like wait what happened to Halloween?  Where did the end of October go? I did not get melancholy. I was not in a blue funk, because I had dealt with the issue.

 

 You have to deal with stuff, and you can't deal with stuff by forgetting it. You can't move on when you're stuck in quicksand.

 

Don’t get mired down.

 

Work with your therapist to come up with a definition of when you're wallowing as opposed to studying. And try not to wallow, because that's just not healthy. But studying, looking for clues, looking for patterns and parallels -- that’s part of getting healthy. And that's what we want.

 

We want to be healthy. We want our past to not control us anymore, and every time you sweep it under the rug, you're just letting it control you for a little bit longer.

 

I know it can be scary. I was terrified.

 

But you can do it with a good healing partner, with a good support system.

 

You can do this.

 

So don't forget about it.

 

Study it.

 

Learn from it, and let it go where it belongs, just as a piece of your history not as something that is still controlling you

 

Thanks so much for listening.

 

Go make it a great week.