3 Emotional Wounds from the Past that Keep You From Moving Forward

Emotional wounds from the past are also pretty similar to physical wounds. They heal and then scar over. They leave a mark, but they never hurt again. Except that if you don’t treat them properly they’ll just keep on causing problems. They might re-open, or even get worse.

A lot of people think it’s enough to forget what happened. You just don’t think about it or make anything of it. But wanting that to be true and making it that way are two different things. The fact is that all your emotional wounds from the past will stick around in your unconscious mind. Now we’re going to look at three emotional wounds that can hover over your life and drag you down.

1. Emotional wounds from the past related to self-esteem

There are times when your self-love really gets put at risk because of past experiences. All the different kinds of rejection lead to suffering. It doesn’t matter what causes them. The truth is that it’s a kind of pain none of us are immune to.

But when the rejection is consistent, happened at an early age, or comes from loved ones, that’s when you’re dealing with an emotional wound that’s hard to heal. Taunting, humiliation, devaluation, constant criticism, and unfair blame are all really harmful to whoever is on the receiving end.

Blows to your self-love are the kinds of emotional wounds from the past that can weigh you down for your whole life. There are some kinds that you can never fully heal. But if you deal with them properly, you can always make a difference. They don’t have to bring down your self-confidence, assertiveness, and optimism about life.

2. Emotional wounds that are to do with independence

Emotional wounds with a link to independence come up in situations where someone is too controlling with you. Usually what happens is that someone with power over you uses that power arbitrarily. But by doing that they do a lot of damage to your personal feeling of independence.

These wounds come from any actions that try to limit your freedom and ability to make decisions. They happen when someone regularly corrects you and punishes you, for unclear reasons. They can also happen when someone constantly disapproves, or makes you account for things up to the smallest details. Lastly, it can happen when someone treats you as useless or incompetent.

These kinds of emotional wounds from the past can cause you to have a hard time taking initiative or making decisions about certain things. They can make you submissive and passive. Or, on the other hand, they can make you extremely rebellious without any obvious reason for it.

3. Emotional wounds related to lack of affection

The heaviest emotional wounds from the past are the ones related to lack of affection. These ones happen when someone has been abandoned, pushed away emotionally, or shut off. The main people who cause these kinds of wounds are parents. They do it while they’re raising their children. The truth is that they might have been victims of the same things, but then they repeat the cycle with their children without even realizing it.

Wounds related to lack of affection can lead people to feel extremely alone a lot of the time. It especially happens any time they feel vulnerable. It makes them think that no one sees them as important. It also gives them the idea that no one understand them, or that no one accepts them.

These wounds from lack of affection can also have huge consequences for anyone suffering from them. The biggest one is that they sometimes become extremely dependent on others. They have a constant need for outside approval. They also try to please everyone all the time, and will often completely forget about themselves. Their moods are also all over the place, and always depend on other people’s attitudes at the time.

All these emotional wounds from the past can slow you down in life. They usually stop you from growing and evolving in at least one aspect of your personality. That’s why it’s so important to settle up with the past experiences that have such a big impact on your daily life. It’s a process that will take you down a path of reflection about what exactly happened, and how it has affected you.