What’s one thing you know now that would have saved your younger self a lot of pain?

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Ooh my husband and I were actually talking about this topic this morning lol.

As a child, I was dealing with a bunch of deep rooted and oftentimes subconscious negative feelings. I would go through my daily life ignoring it all; acting like it was never there to begin with. I knew I was just continuously lying to myself, but this was a better option at the time than dealing with that whole scramble of a mess. Needless to say, this passive attitude made things so much worse going forward.

I started having nightmares pretty consistently. The content of these nightmares would scare me so bad, I would jolt myself awake and not want to go back to sleep. Being unable to keep myself awake; I would eventually fall back asleep just to find myself in the same dream. A lot of the time the scenario would even start itself over, forcing me to go through it all again sometimes even worse than the first go-around. This whole cycle would repeat itself a few nights a week. There would be good dreams scattered in between the nightmarish ones, but I was so on edge about how bad the nightmares would be that I started not wanting to sleep. I noticed that I would never have nightmares taking naps, so that is how I would get most of my rest from. Even though it was impossible to get genuine rest from this since I still had school and/or work. Basically, I was running on fumes.

I began seeing a pattern in these nightmares as far as my own emotions. Anger and Fear were always the two most prominent feelings being personified. Funny enough I was consistently having these emotions in real life as well. As I came to understand finally, I was having to deal with these emotions in my dreams because I was not able to fully face them in real life. In some cases, dealing with them in real life was impossible (or felt like it) because there were always other people involved that saw no issue with their own behavior. I was craving closure from something that I could not realistically escape from to begin with. 

This is when I realized that sometimes moving on from past trauma or just your past in general does not always come with any sort of apology or acknowledgement from the other person or people. Unfortunately. Sometimes you deal with people who are so self-absorbed that in their minds, they genuinely did nothing wrong, no matter how hard you make your scars known. While this may make the whole moving on process more difficult, it is still not impossible to eventually move past the heartbreak. 

It took quite a bit of grace and patience, but eventually I found myself being about to think of all the bad stuff in a more positive light. Yeah, this and that occurred but there is a reason I am still here. Honestly, I still struggle in the whole forgiveness aspect still, but I can sit here and think about the past without getting consumed by the negative emotions. This control has helped so much with the nightmares that I have had only one nightmare in several months’ time at this point. 

I guess what I am trying to say is that I wish I would have known that there are multiple pathways to finding closure with things that have hurt you in the past. Finding just the bare minimum of peace in any situation, can give you the confidence and ability to stand on your own two feet and banish those heavier emotions weighing you down. 

I definitely would have had less sleepless nights otherwise.