Each and every one of us is blessed with a precious gift of life. We try our hardest to make the best of it and appreciate everything it has to offer.

But life has many things in store for you, and some of them are tragic and soul-wrecking.

You know for a fact, that at some point or another, terrible things are going to happen to you and someone you love. Unfortunately, it’s inevitable.

A serious illness, divorce, death, bankruptcy, cheating, abuse, losing a job, betrayal… Some of these events can traumatize you, and leave a mark that you’ll be carrying around.

You make your best effort to leave “what happened” in the past and try to move on as quickly as possible.

You’re hoping that time will heal your wounds and things will get back to “normal” again. You try your best to bury it deep in your memory—as if it never happened.

However, you can’t really do that, can you? Since major life-altering events traumatize you in a way that changes your reality. Things are not going to be the same.

Ignoring that fact can cost you dearly. Just because you are trying to forget what happened to you, or act as if things are as they used to be, that won’t make that darkness go away. It’s here to stay.

Here’s something not everyone is aware of. Our memory sucks BIG TIME. Almost every memory you have from your childhood was made up by you depending on what “story you’re telling yourself about your past”, and then your subconscious fills in the rest making it feel real.

You can easily forget things that happened to you a month ago and never be able to recall them. God knows you can forget things that happen an hour ago. 15 minutes. 30 seconds ago. It’s pretty bad.

However, traumatic memories are totally different—they don’t degrade with time.

Those memories will stay precisely the same as how you were able to register the events in the first place. There’s a problem there. As you know, any major life-altering events are overwhelming. So your memory of such events will be highly fragmented.

So there is no solid timeline of how things unraveled. Nor is there any sense in it. It’s just separate pieces: feelings, sensations (particularly smell), images, associated with your traumatic event.

Every one of those bits might trigger you without you realizing what’s happening.

It can happen a year from now. Or 30 years later.

You’ll have an idea when it happens, other people, affected by your actions or inactions, will often try to point out your unreasonable or chaotic behavior. They wouldn’t know what happened, just that you’re not being “yourself” as they know you.

It can jeopardize many great things you have cultivated over the years: your relationships (romantic and otherwise), your career… your life.

Don’t be surprised, if it gets worse. Since you’ll have many other tragic things happen to you throughout your life, which will pile up on your already difficult situation. Bad things, just like good things create momentum and can snowball out of control.

Now you are gonna be carrying your unaddressed issues—your baggage—everywhere you go, affecting others around you as well.

It will make you bitter, resentful, and all-broken. 

If you find yourself in that difficult situation, there are things you can do to get your life on the right track. But you need help. In fact, you need all the help you can get. 

It might be helpful for you to understand that no one’s got it together.

You should be tired pretending that everything is fine when really it is not.

Trauma, unresolved and unaddressed issues don’t go away on its own.

They grow bigger until they get in a driver seat of your life and you just sit there in a backseat watching your world crumble.

Understand, that we all have tragic things happened to us, it’s not just you. And if it hasn’t happened yet, it soon will. The timing of bad things happening can never be worse. They always catch you off guard.

On the bright side, at least you already know what beast you are dealing with and can actually do something about it. 

Unfortunately for us all, suffering is an inevitable part of life. And when it happens, you can’t turn a blind eye to it. Because that won’t do anything, other than cause more suffering. I know all you want to do is to escape that dark place you found yourself in right now. Rightfully so.

So we do escape, eventually. And then we carry our baggage around and bring it into new relationships instead of trying to fix what is wrong in the first place—us.

It’s one of the most difficult things to admit to yourself, that what’s wrong is you. You need help. And even more difficult is to accept it. 

There is no way around it—if you want to piece your life back together—you have to do it.  Or your other option is you can continue to do nothing about it, suffer and wither away… 

This is not the way to live!

One of the most popular and cliche advice out there is, “You need to leave your past in the past.” It’s great advice.

However, it’s easier said than done. The fact of the matter is, If it traumatized you, it’s not leaving you, you’ll be carrying it around. You gotta deal with that. 

You already know what happens if you don’t—you get those demons. Some of them are bigger, scarier, and more dangerous than others. They can destroy your world.

Unfortunately, it’s not always a pretty picture.

However, that is YOUR picture. You gotta own it.

If some of your demons are interfering with your life, you need to face them. And facing demons with a professional DEMON-FACER, a psychologist or psychiatrist, is a good place to start.

Get Help, See a Specialist

Give it a try. Stop believing that it’s okay for you to live a broken mediocre life. It is absolutely not! There is so much more to life than just coping with it. 

I understand that one of the biggest reasons people don’t seek help is the cultural stigma behind it. People will judge you and think you are crazy if you seek help. Well, a lot of people are dumb and ignorant.

Here’s the truth, that every mature and open-minded person knows:

It takes a great deal of strength and maturity to acknowledge you have a problem, and even more so to then do whatever it is necessary to deal with it.

Not only it’s not a weakness. Far from it. It’s a sign of true character. Having an issue and working it out is what separates kids from adults.

More than that, You, fixing your problem, DIRECTLY is making the world a better place.

That’s how you change the world! Humans are social beings, we are all connected. If only everyone did the same as you, we’d be living in a far better world right now. But don’t compare yourself to what others are doing. 

You do the right thing! Take care of yourself. You gotta start paying more attention to how YOU feel, and less and less to what others think of you. 

The suicide rate among young people is at its highest. People are scared to seek help. In this day and age self-image becomes more important than your own health. It’s very sad. Everyone is judging everyone. Everyone is playing a comparison game. 

You can break that cycle. 

I say, if you surrounded yourself with highly judgemental people—doesn’t matter what they think. Let them worry about their own life which could desperately use some “fixing” and “tweaking” too if they paid attention. 

But hey, it’s easier to judge other people, isn’t it? Let them be. 

Get your priorities straight!

Your Health is the Most Important Thing

Remember, people that love you, and who have your best interest at heart would want you to get all the help you can get, which includes talking to a specialist. 

These are the doctors that are professionally trained to deal with highly specific situations just like yours. 

It might be a relatively slow process to piece your life back together, but hey, do you have anything better to do? This is just way too important not to. 

And even the smallest of improvements can have the most profound impact on the quality of your life, and that of your loved ones.

You might not get this right now, but even the slightest of improvements matter. Incremental progress is a big deal. I know from personal experience that the difference between having an OKAY day and the one, contemplating suicide is truly life-changing.

Try out different therapists and see with whom you have a good connection and trust.

You have to feel safe and comfortable in their presence.

Therapists will help you develop an actionable plan and skills necessary to deal with your specific situation, and help you make peace with your past. 

As I mentioned before, you need all the help you can get.

Yes, you have friends and family, but they are not trained to deal with your unique situation. Asking them to help could be like asking a doctor to fix a military jet.

They can and should support you along the way, which is a big deal, obviously—no one is discounting that. But sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the people close to you are the ones who judge the most. You gotta let them be.

You just gotta do what’s right. It’s not easy—doing the right thing never is. But it’s right.

Do you think they know how much strength and will power it actually takes to acknowledge the fact that you need help and then to actually go and do something about that?  

Rather than what most people do, and just cope with life, you are different. You won’t settle for mediocrity. Because that is given. Do nothing, and that’s what you gonna get. 

You can do better. In fact, much much better. You can create a far better world for yourself and for the others in your life.

How easy it is to turn a blind eye and bury your problems deep within you, only to let them grow out of proportion and to make your life unnecessary harder than it already is.

And life is hard, to begin with.

Yes, it brings a lot of suffering. And terrible things will happen.

However, it’s your decision what you will do with the cards you’ve been given that matters. You will not let your circumstances define your life! 

You will use it as a fuel to become a better human being for yourself and for others.

It’s not an easy road. But your life is on the line here. You might as well go and make the best of it!