When Your Past Keeps Creeping Up on You
Editor’s Note: This article offers one counselor’s suggestions for working through a painful past. Please read with discernment knowing that the ideas shared here may not be appropriate for all situations. For further support, please reach out to a counselor, pastor, or other professional, and check out our Suffering & Loss Resources and Moms in Crisis page.
As a counselor, I often hear statements like these from moms—and they’re usually accompanied by tears:
“I grew up in such a harsh household. And even though it horrifies me, I sound just like my mother when I’m mad at my kids.”
“Ever since I dropped out of college, I’ve felt so insecure about myself. I’m worried I’m not modeling confidence for my kids.”
“My twenties were full of partying and avoiding responsibility. I feel so ashamed because I know I’d be such a wiser mother now if I hadn’t wasted all that time back then.”
It’s so difficult to think about the ways our issues might impact our children. And when we’ve experienced really hard events in our pasts, we can be particularly concerned. Hard past events leave deep wounds, and deep wounds take a long time to heal.
If you have a painful past, you might still be struggling with the fallout from it. As much as we’d love it if we could just bounce back, it’s often not that easy to do. A painful past does impact us—and it can impact those we love, perhaps in ways like the moms expressed above.
So what do you do if your past keeps creeping up on you and hindering you from being the mom you want to be? Here are three ideas.
Receive Compassion
First, receive your heavenly Father’s compassion. Receiving might seem like a counterintuitive first step. Shouldn’t we get busy changing, growing, and working on ourselves? That might sound right, but it’s usually not the best place to begin. Healing starts when we know how God really feels about us, and, mercifully, he tells us how he feels about us in his Word.
In Psalm 103:14, the psalmist says that God “knows our frame.” That means he knows what we’re made of. If we’re broken and wounded by our pasts, God knows it. And even though he knows our frames—who we really are, how we really struggle with the past, the way we stumble along because we haven’t recovered from it—he doesn’t hold it against us. We're not robots who can just live through painful events and "get over them." That’s not an expectation that God has for us, and it’s not an expectation we should place on ourselves. In fact, the psalmist describes our frame as “dust” (Ps. 103:14). That isn’t a flattering description. Dust is weak. It passes away. But God, well aware of our weaknesses, says that he has “compassion” on us (Ps. 103:13). Whereas we might be frustrated with ourselves for struggling, God has compassion on us for those same struggles. He is grieved for the ways you are broken. He’s moved with sympathy for you—and so he has given you his Spirit, who is always with you, comforting your sorrows and helping you fight your sins. He sees you, and he doesn’t revile your weaknesses. He understands why you still struggle with your past, and he has compassion on you.
And his compassion is not just an aspect of his character. He means for it to reach you. So receive his compassion and let it bless you. It’s a gift for your hurting soul, and he longs for you to receive it.
Identify What You’re Carrying
Second, identify what you’re carrying with you from the past. From this secure place of knowing your Father’s heart for you, you become free to name the particular ways that you struggle. When we know that God has compassion on us, it’s safe for us to identify what we’re carrying because we can be certain that whatever we uncover, God will not reject us when we are in Christ. Because of Christ’s sacrifice on our behalf, nothing can separate us from his love.
We’ve all heard the phrase “having baggage from the past.” This idea captures something accurate and true: we do end up struggling in the present because of the past. We are carrying baggage—heavy things—from our past.
Think of the mom we heard from earlier who is horrified that she acts like her own mother when she’s mad. If she were to go beyond making the obvious connection that she struggles with harshness because that’s how her mother treated her, what else might she find that she’s carrying? As a result of the persistent mercilessness from her mother, she might find she believes the pernicious lie that she is unlovable. If she interpreted her mother’s harshness as a message that said, “I see you, and I don’t like what I see,” it would be easy for her to doubt whether she was lovable or even worthy of love. Working on strategies that help this mom respond well to her children when she’s angry would be good and right. But an even deeper healing will come when she identifies the lie she carries in her heart and she grows in her understanding that Christ’s message to her is “I see you, and I love you so much that I died for you.”
So we prayerfully ask God to help us identify what we’re carrying and to examine our own hearts. And we do so in faith, believing that he is a compassionate Father who actually wants to unburden us from the baggage we carry. Here’s why I can say he wants to unburden you with confidence: “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things” (Rom. 8:32)? You can trust and be utterly convinced of his open-hearted generosity toward you.
Pursue Healing
Third, pursue healing. Once we are secure in our status as beloved daughters and aware of what we’re carrying, we’re now ready to pursue healing by asking ourselves questions such as these:
What does it look like for faith to work itself out in love—for me, my story, and how I struggle?
Since we won’t heal all at once, what’s the next, logical, and reasonable step of growth for me?
Who can I invite into the story of my past pain? If your painful past is impacting your parenting and you feel stuck, now is a time to invite others in and to ask for help.
Remember that needing and seeking help is a sign of strength and faith—not failure.
As moms, we want to be the best we can be for our kids—and that’s a beautiful desire! God, too, wants your healing from past pain to be a blessing to your children. To that truth, though, we must add that he also cares about you—as a woman, as his child. He heals you not only so you can grow as a mother, but also because it is his delight to make you whole. He will do this over your lifetime—faithfully, deliberately, and definitively—until the day you see him face to face and are made whole in that instant.
