The past has brought you here. You only have two choices: moving forward or staying in past. So what do you do now?

PTSD wants to keep you stuck in the past, frozen in place, frozen with fear. To heal yourself, you have to get moving. Forward. And that means you have know where you’re going, or at least why you are making this journey. You can only move forward if you believe you really have somewhere to go that you want to be, and believe that the journey will be worth the effort. You can do it for yourself, you can do it to show those SOB’s who hurt you, or to help someone else.

I chose to move forward, to heal myself, and maybe help a few others along way. Sorry, I don’t have a big save-the-world plan.This is enough for me, enough to get me moving forward.

Don’t worry if you find yourself going back over the same old thing, time and again. You’re not trying to scale the mountain by climbing its sheer face. While a hardy few may succeed, most of us won’t. We need to wind around and around the mountain in ever higher spirals. Engineers build roads that way, because it’s safer. The drive may be take longer, but what a view! Each time you circle the side of the mountain, you see it from a higher elevation, a higher vantage point. Each time you circle back to the pain in your past, you’re stronger. Each time you can see things more clearly, eventually you see what really happened to you.

You have faced evil, smelled the stench of hate. And you survived. What you do now, determines whether you won, or whether you lost. You are learning to trust again. If you can look the devil in the eye, and still choose to love, you have defeated him, no matter what scars you carry or what fears haunt you. You may never really be “over it” in the sense that it doesn’t affect you. But you can have a life. Your are moving forward. Healing is not about forgetting the past. It’s about being in the present and creating a future.