Amy Morin
Author of What Mentally Strong People Don't Do
1. Get a realistic perspective of the past.
You may need to spend a little time thinking about why you're stuck in the past. Do you feel like you aren't worthy of moving forward? Maybe you hurt someone and you think staying stuck in the past is your punishment.
Are you holding onto a grudge because you think your anger diminishes someone else's life? Maybe someone hurt you, and you're afraid moving on would mean what they did wasn't that bad.
Sometimes, dwelling on the past is an easy way to distract yourself from the present. If you find yourself unhappy now, you might be tempted to romanticize how much happier you were "back then." Perhaps you recall all the good things that happened in a previous relationship, and you filter out all the arguments and problems that led you to break up.
Or maybe you beat yourself up for making "the wrong choice." But the truth is, you never know what life would have had in store for you if you'd made a different choice. Depending on your circumstances, you may just need to give yourself permission to move forward, and then make a conscious effort to stop yourself every time you keep dwelling on the past.
Did something traumatic happen, and you never sought treatment? If something serious or a tragic event is what is causing you to focus on the past, you may benefit from professional help to assist you in healing that old emotional wound. Speaking to a licensed mental health professional could help you finally leave the past behind you.
2. Focus on the lessons you learned.
Thinking about the unfairness or the unpleasantness of an event will keep you stuck. To heal, you may need to spend some time focusing on the facts, not the emotions.
Walk yourself through a painful memory, and think about the facts, not your distress. Remember where you were sitting, what you were doing, who was there, and what happened to you. Then consider the lessons you learned from surviving that painful thing or for enduring that difficult experience. Some of the best life lessons can be learned from the toughest times you've endured.
So whether you write in a journal or you replay the story inside your head, practice going through the details as if you were a narrator who simply recounts the facts. Doing this a few times can help take the emotional sting out of the experience.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/what-mentally-strong-people-dont-do/202005/how-make-peace-your-pastI was looking for psychology magazines and I stumbled upon this short article on a couple of strategies on how to make peace with a past event so that you can move forward.
The first strategy is to look at the situation objectively without the emotional aspect of the situation to get a different understanding of what happened.
The second strategy is focus on what you can learn from the situation and reframing your thoughts around how you can change as a person instead of focusing on how you were.
Letting go of anger or guilt like she implies in the article will allow you to move forward. It’s not something happens overnight obviously, you can’t just get over it, it takes time to work through all of the feelings and the experience is different for different people and some people will get stuck and need professional help because they may PTSD traits etc.
There’s no shame in getting help when you need help from a professional, a doctor or a T or a P and get help from the group concurrently is probably the best strategy.
If I go back on my first post here I was really angry and rightly so and like everyone else here suffered silently in an experience that I don’t want to relieve. I thought that at the time that I had suffered enough through the several years that I was with her and from all of the past experiences before that point as well.
I wanted to work through the pain as hard as it was because it was an opportunity to work on a lot of things and changing things that needed changing and letting go of my anger, guilt, frustration, resentment that I had towards an undiagnosed individual with BPD traits would allow me to find my inner peace and to never find myself in a similar situation in the future.
