How do I heal from the past when I get triggered all the time?
It’s all in the past, it doesn’t matter. Just move on.
I’m pretty certain somebody has said this to you at least once in your life...OR maybe you’ve heard it A LOT. It always makes me roll my eyes just a bit, because its true and yet so very misleading. Virtually everyone knows this, and yet, there are things from the past that we just haven’t been able to get past! The tricky thing is that the demons and ghosts from our past (that’s what I’m calling our trauma) are not only just memories we carry. They become neurological patterns of behavior and deeply embedded habits. That means physiologically they are default reactions to specific triggers programmed into us. The only way to really move on from the past is to build new and heal old neurological pathways in the nervous system that allow us to respond to situations and people the way we want.
That sounds easier said than done, I’d say. So, of course, the resounding question is how do I do that? We have trauma because something that happened to us in a moment (yes, trauma happens in a moment), shocked us. In other words, we were caught off guard, surprised, didn’t see it coming, the thing came from left field! In that moment, the thing that happened could not be processed inside the limitations of what we believed could be true at the time. In a flash, we become split, conflicted from within. That divided energy within us keeps us in fight or flight, defended, and stressed out. The eventual wear and tear on the body can be insurmountable. To get out of being divided from within and fighting ourselves, to resolve a conflict involves a choice to accept what we didn’t want to be true. Perhaps, if we consider it, there’s a little bit of denial in all of us.
Even after we love ourselves because we’ve faced the truth of the matter, we still need to heal from all the damage we did to ourselves by being in denial, real physical damage from the stress. We feel better upon choosing acceptance, but then we can feel worse weeks into the healing process until we make it through the healing crisis, the moment when we remember what happened to us, often previously hidden in our consciousness for protection’s sake, therefore letting go of it and integrating the lessons. This is natural healing at its best!
Let me break it down one more time. If we are to get over the past, which doesn’t exist, but that we recreate as an experience daily, because of our neurological patterns, we need self-acceptance, new beliefs and the power of choice in that order. The rest will take care of itself.
Let’s choose to live right now. Working from the present moment is where good discernment comes from. It leaves the third eye open.
Everyone deserves that, including you.
