Beware The Pull Of The Past

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Over the years, I’ve noticed an odd conundrum. While many of us are a little tired of telling our tales of woe to yet another sympathetic soul, we may also secretly be a bit enthralled by the high- stakes drama of it all. We might even adamantly defend our right to be defined by all that we’ve endured, covertly insisting that we be witnessed, again and again, in the fullness of our anguish. As though we are wearing little badges of honor that both explain and excuse our own dysfunctional behavior in the here and now, our traumas give us a hall pass for why we are the way we are without being responsible for outgrowing this version of ourselves.

What happened to you in your past might be unbearably harsh and profoundly unfair. Being compassionately witnessed by people who care, and tended to by those who are trained and capable of validating the shock and sorrow of it is critical to healing. What happens in the body and the brain in response to early childhood trauma is no small matter and is brilliantly explored by pioneering practitioners such as Bessel van der Kolk, Judith Herman, Richard Schwartz, Gabor Maté, Dan Siegel, Bruce Perry, Peter A. Levine, Janina Fisher, and others. Sit at the feet of these masters and discover how your own body is still impacted today by hurts and heartaches that happened long ago.

Yet, I also want to caution us to beware the human tendency to fall in love with the stench of our own sad stories. Like a dog tenaciously sniffing for you-know-what, or Lot’s unfortunate wife, who was more fascinated with what was behind her than the possibilities of what lay ahead, we need not be so loyal as to continually turn our attentions to a disappointing, painful past. Rather than dwell too long in that house of horrors, we want to look around us to see if we can locate a doorway that can liberate us from this haunted home and seek a path that plants us firmly on a heroic journey beyond it. It’s here that our pain becomes our purpose, and connects us more deeply with compassion, wisdom, strength, and hope. For these are the fruits of suffering.

The Diagnosis Of PTSD Is Not Just Reserved For Soldiers

The diagnosis of post- traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is not solely reserved for returning soldiers of war or the victims of a crime. One does not have to have survived a war to be the walking wounded. If you were bullied, neglected, abandoned, or abused in your formative years, you, too, might identify as traumatized.

Some traumas are more challenging to identify. Maybe you were habitually and mercilessly teased by an older sibling, and your parents found it funny and failed to intervene. Maybe you felt that the real you was unacceptable and you needed to only be who your parents wanted you to be in order to be loved by them.

Often, we dismiss our own early traumas as insignificant because we think that others had it so much worse. You need not measure your trauma against the trauma of others. Your experience, and the unfortunate imprinting that has remained ever since, is valid and worthy of your love and attention.

Nor is it a betrayal of your early caregivers to acknowledge their failure to give you what you might have needed in order to feel loved, safe, happy, and whole as you grew up. It happened, and you have a right to be sad about what you did not receive — unconditional love, protection, respect, mentoring, and sponsorship of your gifts and talents. We may want to give our caregivers the benefit of the doubt by suggesting they were doing their best. Yet is it true? Maybe. Maybe not. I mean, if everyone was doing their best we’d be living in a very different world. But for whatever reason, they did what they did, and they didn’t do what they didn’t do, and that impacted you. It’s important to just give that to yourself.

We Tend To Treat Ourselves The Same Way Our Parents Treated Us

However, the biggest problem most of us have now is not how mistreated we once were by our parents and other caregivers or teachers who mattered. Our biggest challenge is how we internalized those ways of relating to ourselves, and now tend to treat ourselves in much the same way. For example, if the pattern in your childhood home was neglect, then you likely now struggle with a chronic pattern of self- neglect, the source of which may be a deeply embedded source fracture story of “I don’t matter, others matter more than me and I am insignificant in this world.”

A narrative that lodged in your belly at the tender age of two, and which drives you to continually, unconsciously put the feelings and needs of others before your own, training those in your life today to mirror back to you that you’re right — you don’t actually matter. The remedy is not to get others to change. The remedy is to start relating to yourself with greater love and respect — as though you do matter, and to cultivate the healthy habit of caring for your own feelings and needs before automatically caretaking the feelings and needs of others.

Reprinted from What’s True About You: 7 Steps to Move Beyond Your Painful Past and Manifest Your Brightest Future with the permission of Penguin Life. Copyright © 2026 by Katherine Woodward Thomas.

Katherine Woodward Thomas is a licensed psychotherapist and a recognized pioneer in transformational psychology. She is the New York Times bestselling author of “Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After,” and her latest book, What’s True About You: 7 Steps to Move Beyond Your Painful Past and Manifest Your Brightest Future. 

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