The Past is Present — and What to Do About It
The doors we closed to the past will open
Trauma therapy changed my life. It’s a dramatic statement but an accurate one. I didn’t just intellectually and emotionally process my past. It was more than that. I learned how to regulate my nervous system. I was able to heal and integrate my history in a way that deactivated so many lifelong triggers.
But lately, a long-buried trigger has come to light. It wasn’t a primary focus of those trauma therapy sessions, and it’s been dormant so long that I assumed it was no longer a problem — until that assumption became laughable. The past is present — and, yes, it’s a problem.
My parents are moving away. Every time I visit, there are more pictures removed from the walls and more boxes filled to the brim with their possessions. All of the time spent decorating their home and creating a particular aesthetic is reversed. It becomes less of a home and more of a house anyone could inhabit.
And it is breaking me.
For a long time, the story of my life was this: I was impermanent. Not in an existential way, or not only. Every three years, I changed schools. Whether it was redistricting or moving to a new house in a different school district, I never stayed in the same school or with the same peers longer…
