You don’t owe your past anything.

You don’t owe your past anything. 

You don’t owe it allegiance. 

You don’t owe it attention. 

You don’t owe it your suffering. 

We trauma survivors can be weirdly, morosely “sentimental” in a way. 

We can be reluctant to create and nurture our present and future, because we feel “bad” about leaving our past behind. 

Maybe we feel like in leaving our past behind, we’re leaving that version of ourselves behind. 

We’re not. 

We’re leaving behind the relationships and situations that hurt our past self. 

Our past self is actually coming with us into our new, recovery-focused future. 

Trauma recovery is not about rejecting or abandoning our past self. 

It’s about choosing not to worship our past or our pain. 

Many of us have been programmed and conditioned to do exactly that. 

I remember how furious I was when I realized that’s what I was doing. 

I would save sh*t from my past— not because those things were useful to me, but because I felt to let them go would be to somehow dishonor my past or my pain. 

Now, I understand: holding on to those things— or those people— does not “honor” anything worth honoring. 

It just ties me back to that time and that place. 

We don’t need to be connected to our past. We’re already too connected to our past. 

I hate when people tell trauma survivors to “let go” of our past in the abstract. What the hell does that even mean? 

I’ll tell you what I’ve come to understand about “letting go” of the past: it means being willing and able to redirect our self talk and mental focus, over and over again, every day, when either tries to go down old pathways. 

“Letting go” of the past means being willing to throw certain sh*t out. To declutter— mentally, spiritually, and, yes, physically. 

When I say “release the past,” I’m talking about literally throwing certain sh*t away. 

Not having it in front of our face, to look at, to read, to ruminate on. 

You don’t owe you past a goddamn thing. 

You do owe yourself— including that version of you that got you through the sh*t— undivided focus on realistically creating a life, here, now, that you don’t hate. 

When in doubt, throw it out. 

Trauma recovery has a lot in common with hoarding clear outs.