Why did this happen to me?
Who among us hasn’t asked this question at one time or another? It’s human nature to ask why. Asking why seems easy enough. It’s just a little word and asking it should provide a simple answer.
After all, “why” gets to the root of the problem, right? If I know WHY it happened, I can move forward. If I believe it happened for a reason, I can let it go. It is only because I don’t know the exact reason this happened that I can’t fix it. Knowing why will give me the answers I need.
I’d like to propose that it is possible to move forward regardless.
Maybe someone has deeply hurt you. Perhaps you dealt with something severely traumatic as a child. Maybe you can’t seem to get your life together after that one thing. Maybe you really screwed up. Maybe you were given a sucky childhood. Or you feel you did something really, really wrong and now you feel ashamed. Maybe you lost your job and can’t seem to recover. Maybe everyone around you seems to have healthy families and yours is screwed up. Maybe you have health problems, experienced a death or loss or financial problems.
We think there has to be a reason. It’s hard to admit that there aren’t answers to everything. We want to believe that our suffering is a symptom of something we must change or a lesson learned.
When you face tragedy, people tell you there is a reason you’ve gone through this. They tell you it will make you better or stronger. Or it was meant to be and had to happen so you can be a better person. It is all simply not true.
SOMETIMES YOU CANNOT MAKE SENSE OF YOUR PAST. YOU CAN ONLY CARRY IT WITH YOU.
Healing from the pain of the past doesn’t mean your memories are erased or that you’ll never have those difficult feelings again. You will, but they won’t define you.
Sexual abuse cannot be fixed. Death cannot be fixed. Divorce cannot be fixed. Loss cannot be fixed. Betrayal cannot be fixed. Chronic illness cannot be fixed. Time does not heal all wounds and God doesn’t always have a plan.
The only thing we can do is learn to cope. Some people will say they have been “fixed”. Some people will take this pain with them to their graves. Most of us are somewhere in between. “Why” rarely provides us the with coping strategies we need to heal.
Don’t get hung-up on the “why”. You still have to do the work. You still have to look at when and how you’re going to heal. Floundering in the “why” keeps you wallowing in the pain. The anger and hurt are happening now. If you want to heal from the past, you have to put your attention on your present moment experience.
Therapy helps you neutralize the story from the past so it loses its power over you. This old story no longer serves you. The work is in changing your relationship to your thoughts so they don’t sit like over you like a dark cloud.
Acknowledge your pain and honor your journey and ask for help.
Carrie
