I struggle with letting go of things. How can I move on for a calmer life? | Life and style

I find it hard to abandon things. Painful situations, which occurred 40 years ago and more, always come to mind and stressed me. I do not seem to be able to overcome and forget them. Even unrelevant little things bother me and make me work. How can I forget them or prevent them from raising my blood pressure? It seems to me that it is continuously stress on insignificant things that I cannot change anyway. Can you suggest techniques to move on and lead a quieter life?

Eleanor says: Since you said that many of them were small or insignificant on reflection, I suppose that we are not talking about big trauma, or types of insults that a person should not aspire to forget. I suppose that these are the types of bitter memories that we all have: unluckiness, light bad. Being fired over time towards these hurtful memories can be so unpleasant. Not only for us, but for the people around us; He can keep us psychically stuck in an old distress, each new event seen as a trace of the past.

So why do we continue to come back?

One possibility is that we do not think that we have not changed. Time could have passed, but in respect that counts, we always have the impression of being there. Always frightened in the same way as these situations made us feel, always vulnerable to these same stressors, even not insured against the same errors. If you have the impression that many have changed since an unworthiness, in you or in your situation, the memory is more like a postcard of somewhere remote. But if you feel the same thing in the way it matters, a overwhelming thing of the past can always seem threatening insofar as this version of us persists today.

Or maybe we return to these memories because there is an unanswered question that we are trying to resolve. Why did I say that? Why did they do this? If I had done it differently, would that have changed?

Maybe more rarely we go back because we are bored. Sometimes, if current life does not feel entirely stimulating or sufficiently agent, we can return to conflicts or hard choices of the past, because even if they were unpleasant, they feel more real.

Therapy can help determine what it is for you. When painful thought is hitting, why does it seem to open the door? It would really help you adapt your strategies. The calm you will need if you try to resolve a question may not be the calm you need if you always feel vulnerable in these same ways.

Well -intentioned people could say that you need closure, a way to tell a coherent story. The closure is great if you can get it, but I am not convinced that it is essential. My concern is that hunting for narratively satisfactory means of transmuting bad memories ultimately rang our ability to move on to our ability to give meaning to events. Coherence can be truly out of our reach. Bad luck does not make sense. People do not always have a “why”, even less one than we can accept as an explanation. Our trials are not always an act 1 to which our life later may be satisfactory law 3.

I think – at least sometimes – it’s less “I have to get the closure” and more “I have to see this as past; finished”.

On good advice, I went back to some of my haunted places and I saw the size of the trees, how the buildings had disappeared. The world I came back to in my head did not literally exist. Other people write bad things and tear them away, have a little funeral, set them up (in complete safety).

While you are trying to understand what is captivating about these memories, it could also try to see them in the past. Not resolved, just finished – not a source of new pain, not to be part of a model; An echo of past injuries.

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