Painful experiences in life affect people in significant ways. They can cling to you and invade everything you do daily, coloring your existence with doubt and questions about your self-worth and value. Some people and events have hurt us down to our core, and it seems we may never get over it, but we need to heal to move on and be the productive people we were meant to become. There are valuable life lessons to learn here, which are well paid for.

It may seem that forgetting the person or thing that hurt us is impossible, and perhaps it is, but one thing is for sure; until you do stop dwelling on it or them, that bad experience will be following you around, sapping your energy and stealing your happiness until you decide to put it in the past and move on. You have control over what you think about.

I Can’t Possibly Forget Life Lessons.

You may believe that whatever hurt you was so vast, significant, massive, and traumatic that, of course, you can never forget it. Isn’t this a choice? What if you did forget it? What would change? Just for a moment, imagine how your life would change if this “thing” weren’t with you anymore. Would your life be happier?

Some sound advice I got was that once we have released the energy of bothering us, we make room in our lives for other things to enter that will fill those spaces. Since we are wiser and have learned our lessons, we will only let things in that are there to serve us.

Letting go of things that hurt us can be challenging because the pain has become a part of our lives. I guess we learn how to deal with it and that coping has given us some strength—remembering the painful things people have done gives them power and takes us from them. Maybe a better way to say this is to change your focus on the positive decisions you can’t make. One horrible and painful experience doesn’t define you or diminish the power, strength, kindness, caring, and love in you all the time. It just makes it hard for you to see it in yourself.

We Have No Choice About What happens to Us.

Sometimes we have no choice about what happens to us. People lie to us, steal, take advantage of us, or hurt us physically. That is their choice: how we respond to that is our choice. It always will be. If you choose to remember a wrong and carry it with you as a reminder of how poorly people can behave, you will isolate yourself from so much of the good that people can be.

Because there is always an opposite side of all things, where there is violence, there is peace. Where there is stealing, there is giving, and where there is hate, there is always love. I think that when you let a bad situation pervade your life forever and become a part of your story, there is no room for healing. Healing can’t come until you focus on the recovery and not on the person or thing that hurt you. You alone decide what defines you in your life, and there is no way anyone else could.

Remember The Life Lessons

The lessons we are taught through pain allow us to avoid being hurt in the future. The lessons that pain teaches are vast and deep. Being hurt will enable us to grow and positively change our lives if we decide to move that way. Each of the scars I have accumulated has gone a long way in developing wisdom and understanding that was not there before. I would like to have avoided them, but they happened, and I can’t go back and change the past.

The best I can do is to take the lesson, move forward with a positive attitude, and understand that I did the absolute best I could. Most other people are doing the same thing. Learning in the school of life is not an explicit curriculum. The lessons can come from the strangest places, and experiences always allow you to see a path to becoming your best self. Perhaps you will find this person right there, just on the other side of a painful lesson.

Time to Forget……………….