The process to tackle issues that you’ve been battling your entire life is terrifying, nerve-wracking, and anxiety-producing.  The fact that you have to face these demons from the past may cause us more hurt than we’re willing to deal with right now, so what do we do?  We push it away so we can remain sane for a moment.  We deny it so we don’t have to deal with it.  We use drugs, sex, and food to self-medicate.  We end up lying to ourselves because we can’t face the truth.  When we refuse to ever look at the underlying issues, we become a shell of who we once were.  We are trying to protect who we are now from what happened to us before, not realizing that we are damaging ourselves more in the process.  However, change comes at a price

Change is messy, painful, and scary.  We must be ready to face change if we want it, but realize it is not in the cards for everyone.  Change can only be done if we’re in a relatively safe place.  If we are constantly in a state of flux such as homelessness, being battered, or on drugs, change will be very hard to come by.  For some, change means confronting terrible things done unto them that they must revisit, bringing even more shame, anger, and fear, so they don’t change.  We shouldn’t judge those that can’t change because we don’t know what they are going through.  If someone never chooses to change, that is their decision and we must make peace with it.

But if they do decide to change, they will revisit all the hurts they have experienced before and bring back the ghosts that have haunted them all their lives.  This painful experience may cost them relationships or undue hardships, but that is what comes with change.  There are a million of us out there who refuse to change or acknowledge our pains and as such, we continue on, carrying this hurt and trying to cover it up, only for it to spill out in our lives in ways we could not predict.  What we don’t realize is that even if we don’t face the hurt, the hurt will always be there right beneath the surface and if we don’t do anything about it, it will change us so much that we won’t recognize who we are anymore.

Photo by Alexander Krivitskiy on Unsplash