Spending Too Much Time Looking Back?

Sometimes does it feel like you are spending too much time looking back. 

In the case of this scooter, it appears like you are being more cautious if can see clearly whats behind you.  But in reality, it will cause your more harm by looking back instead of forward.  Living your life always looking back is no different.  If you are dwelling on the past, you will miss the present and tarnish the future. 

For the better part of my 50+ years I kept allowing the past (my painful childhood) to stay ever present in my thoughts.  Somehow I thought, not on a conscience level I'm sure, that I could fix it, make it better.  I had a verbally abusive mother who neglected me emotionally and transferred her own self-hatred on to me...as a means for her to unburden herself of the negative feelings she felt.  I spent all of my childhood and most of my adulthood trying to somehow win her affections.  To convince her that I was lovable and had some worth.  It didn't work however, she wasn't capable of loving me 'the child' or me the adult.  We hadn't had any contact for at least the last 4 years when I decided that something needed to change.

In the beginning of my 50's I decided it was time for some kind of therapy to help me let go of this.  I couldn't move on in my life if I couldn't stop looking back.  I did several sessions of E.M.D.R. treatment with a specially trained therapist.  In doing so, I was finally able to open all those hurtful emotional times from my childhood and look at them now through the eyes of an adult - a strong, independent adult at that.

After one particularly difficult session I spent the next several days actually feeling the emotions of my hurt child-self, but while being this strong adult.  It was so very helpful in sorting out what baggage was mine, and what was my mothers that was forced upon an innocent child just wanting to be loved.  One night just about a week after that session I had a nightmare that turned out to not be scary at all.  Through this dream I was able to finally see myself, through my mothers eyes.  It was the wildest thing I've ever experienced.  I woke up very upset, but as my mind sorted through every tiny detail of the dream I came to understand completely how my mother was unable to love me...it wasn't me at all, it was her inability to love...anyone including herself.

That was the first time in my life that I was honestly able to forgive her for all the pain she caused me in my childhood.  I previously thought there was no way I was ever going to accept that I needed to forgive in order to let go.  I thought that would be condoning her behavior.  But suddenly I realized that her awful treatment of me had nothing to do with me.  It wasn't because I looked too much like my father (who she hated), it wasn't because I was too needy, it wasn't because of the color of my hair, or the extra weight she thought I needed to lose.  I did look more like my father, and I was desperately in need of love and tried so hard to win her affections, and my hair color was the opposite of hers, and I was a skinny child forced to follow drastic diets because she felt fat.  Everything negative she expressed to and about me, was how she felt about herself.  It had absolutely nothing to do with me. 

Almost immediately upon having this 'revelation', if you will, I was able to let it go and stop looking back.  Previously I could not talk about my painful childhood, or my mother, without tears welling up in my eyes and my lower lip beginning to quiver.  I could not look in the mirror and smile lovingly at the person looking back at me because my mother had convinced me that that person was unlovable.  But now I had finally released the emotions attached to that pain.  That was about a year ago and I have not looked back since.  I did not tell my mother that I forgave her, because it wasn't about her.  I don't want her in my life, but now I don't feel anger or guilt related to that choice.  I am finally moving forward without any of the pain pulling me back in time.  I am finally free.