I Am Not What Happened To Me, I Am What I Decide To Be

I am more than all my lost battles or my hours of grief. I refuse to also be part of the one who hurt me. What my mirror reflects in the present is the attitude towards that past that far from erasing, I accept and overcome to be someone more beautiful, stronger, more worthy.

Boris Cyrulnik, a famous French neurologist, psychiatrist and ethologist, comments in his works that resilience is like a woolen sweater that we have been weaving without knowing it throughout our past. Each strand that makes it up and defines it is an emotion, a thought, a positive and courageous behavior that has allowed us to be what we really want and deserve: stronger people.

Approaches such as Gestalt psychology also provide us with very interesting strategies on the subject. For Gestaltists, the only experience that matters is that of living in the “here and now”, being aware of ourselves. Now then … where is our past?

The past exists and is important because it can determine both the reality and the quality of our present. Therefore, we must act responsibly, managing those conflicts that, in some way, cloud our balance at this very moment. We invite you to reflect on it.

I’m more than everything I’ve been through

You are not that voice that constantly yelled at you as a child that you were clumsy and that you did everything wrong. Now, you are your attitude to that memory, to that past. You are the person who has proven to herself “that you are skilled and that you do things really well.”

Between the traumatic experience of yesterday and the reaction of the present, a whole path of delicate and deep personal struggle opens up. It is simply a matter of “knitting” every day our broken pieces and our wounds thanks to the threads of self-esteem, the buttons of hope and those threads of resilience that Dr. Cyrulnik defined.

The craft of healing broken hearts and sorrowful souls cannot be solved overnight. . The person who has adequately managed that complicated experience will advance towards their personal horizon in a more mature, courageous and renewed way.

On the other hand, those who cling to their past blindly and obsessively lose their future. Whoever insists on immersing himself again in its dark holes, in the voices that yelled at him or in the faces that hurt him, will fall into a complex psychic agony. In a very painful personal maze. We offer you, below, adequate strategies to avoid it.

The art of the good navigator requires knowing how to maintain balance. Restlessness, the rumor of negative thinking, fears or resentment are like stones in the heart that will inevitably cause us to sink into our vital rivers. Do not let that happen.

• From Gestalt they remind us that it is necessary to become aware of those events from the past that cloud us at this very moment. We have to break them down, put them under our microscopes to understand how they are affecting us in the here and now.

• Once we become fully aware of how they deform us, how they take us away from what we really would like to be in this present moment, it is time to face them.

• Think that you are not your mistakes from yesterday. You are not the one who denied you his love. Nor are you the one who belittled you or the one who left you for someone else. Now look at yourself in the mirror and think about who you would really like to be.

• All of us are our attitude towards life and not a simple result of everything that has happened to us. The mind interprets, evaluates and faces each act lived through self-esteem, resilience and hope.

Put it into practice, don’t just “let yourself be carried away” by the channels of this river. .