Many of us feel plagued by a past that hurts us, defines us, or otherwise traumatizes us. These pasts can often follow us forward into everyday life, crippling the interactions we have with others and setting us up for failure in more essential things. This is no way to live; by holding onto your troublesome past, you’re only limiting yourself.
That being said, those of us who find it difficult to let go of the past aren’t holding on to it willingly. Either we don’t know we’re holding onto it, or we can’t bring ourselves to let go of it. You waste so much potential, though, when you make the past define you.
In this guide, we’ll go over several methods that might be able to help you let go of your past. Every person is different, and some trauma will be harder to let go of than others. Fortunately, if you’re serious about letting go of the past, it is possible to do so. With the many varied methods provided in this guide, you should be able to find something that speaks to you and helps you learn how to make peace with your past.
Forgive Yourself
This is the most basic – and one of the most effective – methods for moving on from your past. Many people feel responsible for or guilty of things that happened in the past, even by no fault of their own. It’s important that you forgive yourself for these things so that you can move on.
If you never forgive yourself for something that you did wrong, it will always haunt you. While it’s essential to learn from things in the past so that they never happen again, making yourself feel trauma, guilt, and sadness over those things is counterproductive. You might think that feeling miserable is the best way to atone for your sins, but it isn’t.
Instead, forgive yourself, move on, and resolve to become a person who never makes that mistake again. That’s a better atonement than any amount of wallowing could ever be. While being sad for what happened in the past is understandable and okay, it shouldn’t define you, nor should it hold you back from moving forward with the future.
The beautiful thing about forgiving yourself is that you can do it whether you were guilty or not. If you were guilty, you’d now be absolved of that guilt and ready to live on. However, even if you weren’t guilty of the crime in the first place, forgiving yourself has the same effect. You can move on with your life and make peace just as quickly.
Guilt can come from many sources, and we can even carry unconscious guilt that we aren’t fully aware of. By shedding this guilt, you can make it so that you never find yourself in the same situations in the future.
Own Your Failures
As human beings, we have an uncanny propensity to fail. We fail all the time, both when we’re trying something new and when we’re doing something we’ve done before! Many people carry their failures like crosses, but this is the wrong outlook. If you’re a perfectionist, it might be difficult (or even feel impossible) to own your failures, but it’s necessary.
No one is perfect, and expecting yourself or others to be perfect is utterly unfair. You will need to learn to accept failure if you want to move forward and be happy in life, even if you never learn to own it completely. This becomes especially clear to people after a significant or catastrophic failure, but some people can go their entire lives without learning this lesson.
Here’s the secret: everyone on this Earth fails, even if they don’t think that they do. If someone else is biased towards you because you’ve failed, it simply means that they haven’t learned this lesson yet. While repeatedly failing because you fail to try is something to be ashamed of, failing because you are a human being is not.
As long as you tried your best, failing is okay. Humans aren’t omnipotent, and as much as we’d prefer otherwise, there’s no way to know for sure if one course of action is the right one. If you didn’t try your best and you failed, that’s different, but you can still own that failure and move on.
If you think you’re the only one who’s made a big failure in your life, think again. Some of the most famous people in the world were failures before they were successes. For example:
- Bill Gates’ first company, Traf-O-Data, failed
- Oprah Winfrey was fired from her job because she was “unfit for TV”
- Walt Disney was fired from his newspaper job because he “lacked imagination”
- K. Rowling was rejected by publishers twelve times before being accepted
Let It Out
Sometimes, you just need to feel and express your pain before you can let it fade away. Often, it happens that people bottle their grief and push it away instead of experiencing it when it happens. This is very common with the death of someone close, especially if it was unexpected or unfair.
Sometimes, the key to getting over grief and other bottled-up emotions is just to revisit them and let yourself feel them. This might feel like the opposite of what you should be doing. No one wants to feel pain intentionally, after all. Just try it, though. Take the time to remember what’s hurting you, and let those feelings of pain and grief wash over you. When you’re finished, you may feel that they’re not as painful or as scary anymore.
However, grief isn’t the only emotion that can get you stuck. Jealousy, injustice, anger, hurt, and more can all leave you feeling like something was unfinished. If you don’t let these emotions out, they can stew for years and years, keeping you stagnant instead of letting you move on.
One of the best ways to let these feelings out is to write a letter to the person (or people) who wronged you. You don’t have to send this letter; try just writing it out instead. You can always send it if you’d like, though this may not be the best idea in practice.
If you do feel like you need to send this letter you’ve written, consider sending it to a fake email you make instead. That way, you can have the satisfaction of sending it off without honestly confronting someone else. We’re not going to go over facing someone in this article, as that can be a delicate process, but if that’s what you need to do to make peace with your past, then you should do so. Just make sure to plan it out carefully first.
Another alternative is to take the letter, address it, stamp it, then burn it instead of sending it. You can keep it, too, instead of dropping it in the mailbox. Any of these methods are great ways to help resolve these lingering feelings without becoming confrontational with another person.
Sometimes, the case might be that the person who you have lingering feelings over has passed. If they have, burning a letter to them is an even better option. Some people consider burning a letter the best way to send a message to someone who’s passed on. Alternatively, if you’re a religious individual, praying to them might be a way to find closure, too.
Occasionally, all that’s needed to get over your lingering emotions from the past is to talk to someone about them. It doesn’t have to be the person who caused them, either. You can talk about them with people such as:
- A parent
- A spouse or significant other
- A trusted friend
- A therapist
- God (or another religious symbol)
- A stranger on the internet, if they’re willing to listen
Sometimes, the sympathy and the ear of another person are enough to soothe the wounds made by the past. They might not be enough to erase them, but it’ll most likely be enough to at least jump-start the healing process.
Get Support
This point relates to what we were just saying above. If you have something in your past that plagues you today, find some support in dealing with it. A therapist is the most reliable way to do this, but an essential person in your life who you trust not to be judgmental can be a great help, too.
While some people are capable of overcoming the past on their own, people are rarely capable of healing alone. The support of others is the very best medicine when it comes to past wounds. Even if you don’t feel comfortable going to a therapist or psychiatrist, consider asking someone close to you for help.
One of the most significant parts of having someone (or multiple people, if possible) to support you is the stability that it offers. It’s invaluable to have someone in your life who you can always count on for healing, lending an ear, or even just being there when you need them.
Another option you can look into is support groups. While support groups have varying degrees of effectiveness for different people, they’re an excellent thing to try, and many of them are free, too. If you’ve ever felt like you’ve been limited by your finances and unable to go to a professional, then a support group might be something to try.
The beauty of a support group is that you’re with a group of anonymous people that are all in the same boat as you. All of the people in attendance are equals, so you don’t need to feel nervous or bashful about what you’ve been through.
Acceptance
Sometimes the worst part of having traumatic events in your past is learning how to accept that they happened in the first place. When something happens suddenly or drastically to change your way of life, it can follow you for years as a sense of disbelief. Sometimes, it feels like time just stops for you until you can get over it again.
While the key to getting over this is pretty easy in theory, it’s not in practice. All you need to do is accept what’s happened. Why, then, is it so difficult? For most people, it’s because they don’t want to believe it in the first place. This desire not to understand can easily be what keeps you from feeling at peace with your past.
In the worst situations, the refusal to believe what happened in the past can lead to anxiety, fear, and even psychosis. If you refuse to believe in reality, that can eventually cause your sense of reality to become warped. This is a genuine danger for people who refuse to accept something in their past.
Reality is a strange thing. You can’t blame people that refuse to accept something that happened in the past; all of us wish we could change the past or the choices we’ve made at some point in our lives. There’s no changing the past, but you can change the future.
However, there’s one catch: to change the future, you have to first be at peace with your past. If you’re not at peace with your past, you can’t start changing the future. For people who can’t or won’t acknowledge the past, this creates a vicious, never-ending cycle of rejection and pain.
That’s why, no matter how painful it is, accept what happened in your past. You don’t have to think about it hard or even confront it if you’re not ready. Just acknowledge that it happened, to start. Once you do, you can start moving forward again.
Another sticking area for people that have trouble with acceptance is the “would-haves” and “should-haves.” All of us have these would-haves and should-haves that we regret from our past. As they say, hindsight is 20/20; it’s not always possible to see the right course of action as you’re taking that course.
Letting go of these should-haves and could-haves is just as important as accepting the final outcome. Dwelling on what could have happened does nothing for you now but waste time. There’s no way to change it now.
Thinking about other ways that the situation could have played out is educational in a brief sense, of course; that way, if you ever get into a similar position again, you can try a different tactic that might work better for you. However, those should-haves and could-haves shouldn’t haunt you. They should merely be used as a learning exercise, and nothing more.
Forgiveness
Many things contribute to how to make peace with your past, but of them all, forgiveness is often the most difficult. We talked about forgiving yourself earlier on, and while that can be difficult in its own way, it often pales in comparison to the difficulty of truly forgiving others.
If you have something in your past that was traumatic enough to give you trouble even today; it must have been quite bad. If there were other people involved in it – other people who contributed to that trauma – then they’re going to be very hard to forgive.
However, as hard as that is, forgiving others is something you must do. In fact, the reason why many people find it hard to forgive others from their past is that they have the wrong idea about forgiveness. There are things that forgiveness involves, and there are things that can go along with it, but they don’t have to. Forgiveness does include the following:
- Exonerating the blame from someone who hurt you
- Letting go of feelings of anger or resentment towards their current self
- Understanding that someone who wronged you in the past may be different today
- Accepting the apology of someone who wronged you
- Refusing to let the past event define you
However, as a part of forgiveness, you do NOT have to do the following:
- Become friends with the person who hurt you
- Love the person who hurt you, either in their current form, their past form, or both
- Speak to or associate with the person who hurt you
- Trust them
- Welcome them (back) into your life
You can forgive someone from your past without letting them back into your life. Recognizing that someone from your past is capable of hurting you again is a part of your natural growth, and if you have any suspicion that they could be dangerous to you or your livelihood, don’t welcome them back! Forgiveness is not the same as trust, and it isn’t approval, either, but some people don’t understand that there is such a distinction there.
Awareness
Once you’ve started unearthing the things in your past that are holding you back, you’ve made an excellent first step. However, not everything in your past can be solved with just one exercise. In fact, dealing with most trauma is more similar to running a marathon than a sprint; the first start is excellent, but you’ll need to put in work and effort after that to finish the race.
Mental awareness and awareness of your thoughts and emotions is what comes next. You might find that your thoughts and feelings could end up returning to the way you felt before. You might find yourself reverting to thinking about could-haves or should-haves, or you might catch yourself playing the victim instead of accepting something that’s happened, for example.
It might seem disheartening to hear that making peace with your past is a process, not a one-and-done event. However, as long as you’re serious about leaving your past behind you, you’ll be able to do this naturally over time. Human beings are resilient, and we typically want to leave things behind that hurt us or negatively change us.
All we’re saying is that you should be aware of your current state of mind, especially while you’re in the process of making peace with your past. Unearthing your past is not something to be taken lightly, and it can sometimes uncover things that you don’t expect or aren’t prepared for.
Give Back
Giving back is an excellent way to help make peace with your past. For many people, helping others who have been through similar situations is a unique way to experience catharsis and find closure for what they went through. This is especially true if these people have no other way of getting through their trauma.
Giving back to others is a particular course of action, though. The choice to give back is a deeply personal one, and it shouldn’t come from a place of selfishness if you can avoid it. While you can attain closure through giving back, try to avoid that as your primary reason for doing so.
Regardless of whether you start giving back because you want closure or just because you want to help others, your efforts always go to someone else. That’s the beauty of giving back. As you work on bettering yourself, you better others around you, too. For some people, it’s the other way around; as a result of improving others, they better themselves.
When you’ve been through a traumatic event in your past, it gives you a unique sense of compassion and empathy for people going through the same pain. While that’s no excuse to inflict pain on others, it’s an empathy that only extraordinary people share.
Compassion
Like we said above, you never have any obligation to love or trust those that hurt you in the past. However, if you dig deep enough, you might find that compassion and sympathy for them aren’t out of the realm of possibility. Usually, the reason why someone hurt you is that someone hurt them first.
This becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. However, one of the most significant benefits of being aware of this cycle is that you can put an end to it. Perhaps someone bullied you when you were young and left you with emotional scars. However, they may have only been doing that because they were abused at home. While this doesn’t make what they did to you permissible, it does make sense.
For some people, this sense of why is enough to provide the closure they need. It gives a sense of understanding. However, other people never get the chance to figure out why, and some never will get that chance.
This makes having compassion for those that hurt you a bit tougher. However, it’s important to remember that the why isn’t always necessary. If you can understand that there is a why knowing what it is isn’t essential.
Count Your Blessings
Counting your blessings goes right along with having compassion for others. It’s likely that the person who hurt you was hurting then, even more than you are now. Somewhere, deep inside, something was poisoning them.
Trauma can act as a poison, and it often does work that way if it’s left to rot for long enough. However, like a poison, trauma can be extracted or even healed. You may have scars for many years afterward, but scars are something to be proud of. They’re a sign of what you’ve been through and how you’ve grown as a person.
Blessings are like scars, but they’re signs of all the good that’s happened in your life. Blessings can be people, events, things, animals – anything that means a lot to you and changes your life for the better can be a blessing.
Gratefulness is a direct result of your blessings, and feeling grateful is a powerful thing. Humility and gratitude are like balms to a painful past, and over time, they can even heal the pain that comes from it.
Change
Change is an immutable, unstoppable force that drives our lives. No matter how much we cling to the past, the future will change eventually. This is a fact that no one can disprove, but it’s also something that scares many people.
Some people are used to being the victims of their past. If you’ve lived with a painful past for a long time, you might be afraid to change simply because you don’t know any other way. You might feel like you shouldn’t have to change because you were a victim. You might be afraid that change could be more painful than what you’re already enduring.
Regardless of why you’re afraid to change, it’s a part of making peace with your past. Making peace with your history is an inherent change on its own. However, you should also know that, when you make peace with your past, you will proceed to change as a person, too.
If you’re held down by the chains of the past, you’re not your best self. You’re probably dealing with pain, guilt, or other unpleasant feelings every day without even realizing it. Alternatively, you might recognize it, but you don’t know any other way. You might not trust in any other way.
Give change a chance. There is so much good waiting for you when you know how to make peace with your past.