Has Your Past Let Go of You?

How many times have you heard someone reflect on a painful or difficult childhood experience and then given one of the following responses:

“But that experience made me who I am today.”

“Anyway, I’ve forgiven my parents for what they did,” or 

“It happened. I can’t change it, so I’ve moved on.”

Maybe you’ve said one of these lines yourself.

Now, while these statements can appear like they reflect resilience—because growth can come from adversity—I find that in many cases, people think negative experiences won’t continue to affect them if they just don’t think about them or find a positive to pull from it.

While you might rationalize you’ve let go of your past, has your past let go of you?

Offering forgiveness or surviving, even when we draw some strength from the experience, doesn’t negate negative consequences. Spiritualizing, rationalizing, or dismissing the emotional impact of our trauma does not remove it.

What many people are unaware of is that we have two types of memory: Explicit and implicit.

Explicit memory is the conscious recall of an event, but implicit memory is bodily-feeling and emotion-based and often stored in the subconscious.

Subconscious implicit memories continue to affect us without us knowing it. It’s those uncomfortable emotions we quickly pull away from.

But, as world-renowned psychiatrist and attachment expert Daniel Siegel says, we must “name it to tame it,” and “feel it, to heal it.”

Adverse childhood experiences are not necessary to build strength, resilience, and character. Research shows that those things also develop through secure bonding, and with fewer negative effects on a person.

It’s not the severity of what happened to us that determines how emotionally secure and resilient we are, but how we have learned to make sense of our experiences.

True emotional resilience doesn’t mean something doesn’t bother us at all — it’s the ability feel and manage emotions, maintain a balanced perspective, and bounce back, rather than avoiding thinking about it.

If you had an emotionally mature caregiver who helped you tell the story of your experiences, who comforted you and reflected your feelings back to you, you likely learned how to understand and regulate your inner world. And you’ll be more likely to tune into your implicit emotional states to acknowledge and manage difficult emotions.

But if that wasn’t your experience, you can still heal.

Therapy can be transformative because it helps put language to implicit feeling states. When you tell your story in a safe space, your brain begins integrating what once felt unsafe, isolating, or overwhelming. You’re no longer just living around your pain — you’re making sense of it.

That experience processes the memory and moves it to long-term storage without the strong emotional charge. That’s how true healing happens.

So, when someone says, “That made me who I am today,” the deeper question becomes:

In what way did it shape you?

Have you become more secure because of it? Or has it made you guarded or afraid of being truly known?

You may not have chosen your caregivers, but you can choose healing and grow toward secure attachment.

And that’s the kind of freedom we want to help you get to.