Your past will control you if you let it....

We all have the friends (or maybe you are the one!) who say repeatedly how X happened to them as a child/teen/adult and so they think that today they do Y because of it. In fact I used to be one of those people. I used to allow my past to control my future (and in some ways I am still). It was easy to do much easier than admitting that I was giving control to something and someone that wasn't me. It is far easier to blame someone else for what is wrong than to look at yourself in the mirror and point the finger right at you. I don't discount the impact that past wrong doings can have on you....some of them can literally bring you to your knees. They are real. They happened. They left a mark. At some point though we all get to a place to where we have two roads we can go down one with the past hanging around our necks by a chain and the other where we take off the chain and walk freely without so much weight.

I had an instructor who once asked me what going back and having someone from my past say they were sorry for doing X would do for me and you know what I honestly couldn't answer. I had spent so much time and energy into thinking about how wrong that person was and how wrong it was that they did X to me that I hadn't given two thoughts to what it would mean to let it go. I clung to it. I shaped my life around it. I acted in ways that I shouldn't have because of it. I excused my behavior because I blamed it on (insert name here). What would it mean to you if you heard I am sorry from someone in your past? Do you really believe that hearing that would change everything for you?

 I  have to be a realist here and tell you that it most likely won't. You might get some small sense of relief by hearing it but it won't bring to you the peace you think it will. What will bring you that peace is accepting that it happened, that the person might have been wrong and then allowing yourself to move on knowing that humans are prone to mistakes sometimes HUGE mistakes. It doesn't mean you think what they did was right, it most likely wasn't, but what it does mean is that you are taking back to power of controlling your own life.

Forgiving your past is hard. Trust me I know I am still in the process of doing it but once you start chipping away at all those past hurts it really does free you. You begin to see what you have been missing out on and in some cases the hurt that you have caused others because of it. I have said many times on this blog...you control you even if you don't want to admit that, you are the only person who has any control over you. Not your past :)