Healing the Past

“Life becomes easier when you learn to accept an apology you never got.” ~~ author, Robert Brault

My inspiration for this week’s piece dropped into my head as I was driving to deliver a late birthday present to my eight-year-old great niece. As I drove, I thought about family. The view through the windshield is different from the view through the rear view mirror, in the way that looking back into my family ancestry produces a very different view than looking forward into the life ahead of a little girl in 2026.

Considering driving as a metaphor for life got me thinking about whether I spend too much time staring into my personal rear view mirror and not enough time keeping my vision on my present and future. What I might find in my personal rear view mirror are past hurts, wrongs, mistakes, failures, and losses mixed in with celebrations, laughter, play and times of love and joyful connection. What I do know is that it can be hard to move forward while looking backward, especially if the images I see in my personal rear view mirror are painful ones.

I asked myself the same question posed in the quote that begins this week’s musings. How do I accept an apology I never received? It is, for me, a massively important question, one that I have wrestled with throughout my life. It is a question that pushes me to remember that releasing long-buried hurt to accept the apology that will never come takes not just courage, but the willingness to put myself first. It reminds me that I can stand in integrity even if another does not.

My emotional healing is a process of acknowledging the past, accepting what I cannot change and then learning from the experience. I find there is always something for me to learn, so I look at the past, however difficult, as time in the playground of life. Sometimes I fall off the swing. Sometimes the other kids don’t play fair. Sometimes I have to try something again and again until I conquer it. But in each situation, I am growing and learning about myself, about life and about how to keep my heart open. And this is the very definition of healing.

Healing is such an important part of life regardless of how life has been. If I am growing and learning, then I am also healing and my growth and self-healing helps others.

“True healing is the willingness to treat yourself and others better than the past ever did.” ~~~Matt Kahn, TrueDivineNature.com

I love this quote. I might carry the past around including messages of self-criticism. But if I keep treating myself as that person that others felt unworthy or of little value, then I allow the past to truly define the future. And that I will not do. The essence of healing the past is the process of coming back into balance and being-ness with what there is about me that is incomparable, unique and eternal. Healing is about love - love of self, love of the Divine, love of others and love of life.

Wishing you a beautiful week,

Cathleen💖