Burdened with a past?

Some people have pleasant lives from the day they were born to the present day. However, not everyone is that fortunate. Some have difficult childhoods, miserable teenage years and guilt-ridden adult lives. Some remained scarred by their past to the end of their lives, unable to remove the shackles that held them down.

There is one lady who has a difficult past because of her community and her family. Her parents was not one of those happily ever-after couples and both her parents were constantly quarreling with the older members of the community so inquisitive as to want to know all the sordid details of the problems.

Now this lady was from nature quite defensive of her parents' behaviour. So, whenever possible she would not want to be around to answer the 'busybody's' questions. She wanted to be left alone. Well, let's put it this way: she did not wish to have the family's dirty linen to be washed in public. She wished to safe-guard her family's name and dignity.

However, every now and then questions cannot be avoided and when confronted by these people she became defensive. Although she is always polite and smiling to all those people's meddling, inside her, she hated those people who seemed so delighted to hear of her parents' problems. Those people seem to enjoy the misfortune of her family. And that hurts her a lot.

At the same time, she knew her parents were not on good terms and that brought the children a lot of unhappiness. So she put in effort to have the parents come to an understanding and to reach the stage where communication can flow so as to have mutual respect if not love. She became even more frustrated as all her efforts to improve the parents' relationship failed. She failed and developed the guilty feeling of not having put in sufficient attempts or consistency to find a solution.

Meanwhile, self-survival instincts kicked in and she tried to avoid everybody, even her parents. She tried to forgive her parents for not wanting to come together again. She also forgave herself for having failed in reconciliation between her two parents. She said that to a certain extent she had managed to let go of her problems.

Her decision to overcome her guilt and torments was based on the realisation that when she felt guilty she can lose her temper and be abusive. Such temper and words of anger were thrown at the person who loves and care for her the most. And despite what she had said, this person, her husband, merely keeps quiet and was so understanding of her problems. His attitude gets to her and she feels that she is most unfair and so needs to change, to remove the toxic guilt before it destroys what she holds most dear. Thus she has started on the perhaps long journey to recovery by understanding that the past was no fault of hers and ought not to bring guilt but the present deserves her courage to stand up and face it correctly so that it stands the chance to develop and mature into something beautiful through this effort of guilt removal.

Well, she has certainly moved in the right direction by knowing that the guilt was not hers and whatever had happened was not within her control and the past is definitely past and over. She rightly should not allow that dark gloomy cloud of guilt to shadow her days in the present time or the future. She must leave that cloud behind and move on in life to days in which there can still be darkness but not for long as with each day, there could always be some sunshine.