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Letting the past stay in the past
I am not an overly sentimental Human. And there is a very good reason for that — a lot of my past is quite painful. Most of the time I didn’t so much live My Life as simply survived it.
“But wait…there’s more.”
Many, many years ago, I sat on the orange couch of a very good therapist. We had a running joke — because the best way to strip trauma of its power is to flog it with humor. The joke would come after he and I talked in-depth about whatever issue had arisen. He would ask gently probing questions that would lead me to answers written in my own truth. But for the longest time those conversations would always end with the words — “But wait…there’s more.”
More trauma. More PTSD. More pain. More anxiety. It would take us years to finally get to the place where I stopped waiting for The. Next. Thing. to come along and annihilate me. Emotionally, or physically, or financially, or spiritually. It would take years before every hurt in my psyche had been probed and categorized. It would take years before I felt like I was exhaling all the way.
At the last therapy session I attended, I knew — I was no longer looking back. I was finally settled into Now. The Ghosts of Traumas Past had left the building.
