by Sylvia Woodham

Created on: September 02, 2008

Facing Your Ghosts

I'm a BIG fan of closure. Don't start something new until you've wrapped up the past! No one you're bring into your world wants to be compared to whatever came before.

By "closure," I don't mean just wrapping things up neatly in a nice little bow, or getting rid of painful influences. If the scars don't heal properly, they are always going to haunt you. As much as I like comfort and being pain-free, sometimes the only way really to live that way permanently is to face and re-open the pain from the past to understand its causes, real or imagined.

We all have those memories that haunt us, that make us defensive when we face someone new who do something to dredge them up. Like a ghost that cannot rest in peace, sometimes we LIKE the comfort and sense of entitlement those memories bring us, don't we?

I always thought I could never go back, because things change. Home wasn't the same, the people who mattered most were gone, making it feel like a skeleton of the memories of my childhood. Unlike previous generations, though, we can reconnect with people we thought were gone from our lives forever, to relive the good and the bad, if we are brave enough not to let them define us anymore.

Through the miracle of the internet, I have found my best kindergarten friend who introduced me to Rock n Roll when I was 5, and my next door neighbor who knew me when I was born. Kind of an unusual "homecoming" to memories which were so much a part of my childhood development! Now we really can repaint the canvas of the past to see exactly what role we did play. We no longer have to ask the question "what would I have done differently if I had known then what I know now?" without being able to find those answers, if we have the imagination and ability to accept them, liked or not.

One realization that becomes clear to me is that I have spent too much of my life bottling up my reactions to people who hurt me instead of learning how to process them constructively. Now I find those emotions are still there, raw, in the corners of my past, waiting to lash out if I don't take the responsibility to capture and throw them out. It may be ten, twenty, years late, but I would rather, now, identify and confront those people who did not care for me well. I know releasing whatever resentment I held toward them frees me from the control those emotions have over me.

Though an internal process, I never undermine the value of the external triggers a picture, a person, or a voice can bring. Sometimes the exact source of the pain cannot be found, but there is always some door that can be found to open up memories of the past, if and when you are willing to face them.

It is amazing how quickly those ghosts evaporate and dissolve once they are confronted. Once they are told they no longer have a place in my life or my past, I find I no longer have to tiptoe around them, wondering when they are going to jump out and show their decaying stench, or who will be around to witness them when they do.

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