The Expiration Date on Blaming Your Past

I can’t remember where I first heard this but it was definitely from a friend who was tired of my pity party. I’m sure I was blaming an ex for how I felt that day, and I promise you, this friend had heard the story before.

There have been long stretches of my past where I sincerely believed that my current mood, employment, housing, drinking, sleep, attitude, and just my approach towards life in general was all because of something someone did to me. Did; past tense.

You see, there’s something very tempting about using what happened to me and justifying my current behavior with it. Like, she cheated on me so now I can’t trust anyone. Or, they gave me an unfair review at work so now what’s the point in trying my best. And my favorite; my parents weren’t good parents so now I can’t be a good adult. This reasoning comes in a variety of flavors and severities.

Now, there are truly traumatic things that happen to people that do affect them for a long time. Many, many people are living with the ongoing impact of trauma, spiritual abuse, emotional harm, and generally not getting enough of what they needed when they needed it.

But it’s kind of like getting in a bad car accident, or breaking your leg. It will take time to heal, it will need specialized care, and it will leave you different than you were before. But that doesn’t mean that the broken leg defines all of who you are today. It’s just something that happened to you. You get to decide how you’d like to respond to it.

It took me a long time to really internalize this lesson. Primarily because some of the things I’ve lived through really did have a huge impact on my life. They changed me, ultimately for the better, but at the time it was such a shift that I really struggled. It seemed like my whole life was consumed by The Thing, and so I began to start identifying with it, really as a way to justify my belief that I wasn’t healing fast enough.

In other words, I had thought that if I was still struggling that I wasn’t healing. This comes from my quick-fix culture of take-a-pill-and-make-it-go-away kind of solutions. So I bypassed the deep work of my healing process and just pointed back to the original incident to say, “See, this is why I’m an asshole. I can’t help it.”

I’m also seeing a lot of this in our culture. I don’t feel like going too deep into it but basically it seems like folks are hyper-identifying with their past, their traumas, their categorical definitions of themselves in a way that narrows their being, not expands it.

This is sort of a natural outcome of my country’s history and laws where people who were reduced to certain identity traits (skin color, for example) had to use those traits to fight for equal protection under the law for things that should be universal rights.

I’m not sure we would have such vicious identity politics, cancel cultures, ‘culture wars’, and whatnot if we didn’t have such a racist history, but that really is a MUUUUUUCH bigger topic than can fit in this newsletter. I do still think it’s worth mentioning.

The other thing worth mentioning is that Jesus (yes we always get to him eventually) was kind of against identity politics too. In fact, I would say he was really against trauma-identities in general. His most powerful healings were often with people who had been suffering from trauma for a long time and it had become not just their identity, but society’s identity for them.

Think of the lame man by the pool of healing waters, simply commanded to take up his mat and walk. Or the woman who’d been bleeding for 12 years, simply touching Jesus’ robe and being healed. Or for Chrissakes (haha), Lazarus himself! This guy was very firmly identified by both himself and his family as D-E-D, ded!

To all of these people, Jesus came and said, “What you’ve been through is not who you are,” and restored them to their true identity; pure Spirit, beloved one, life and light everlasting.

So whatever it is you’re identifying with today - that breakup, that job loss, that childhood - remember that it’s not who you are. It’s what you’ve been through, but more than that it’s an opportunity for you to uncover your true nature.

You are always, in all times, in all places, a beloved of Spirit herself. A cherished being made of pure light, power, truth, and love. And nothing and no one can ever take that from you.