8 Signs You Have a Difficult Past!

Shadows from the past. Publicist and Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal once coined the phrase: "There is no future without a past." What he meant by that was: we are nobody without our past, we would not even exist without it. However, our past also contributes significantly to the kind of person we have become and where we are still headed. A difficult childhood, toxic relationships, the experience of trauma and loss: these are all incidents that cast long shadows over our lives, and there is no easy escape. Some people are able to come to terms with them at some point, while others struggle with the wounds of these times for the rest of their lives. Maybe you’re not even aware of how much bad experiences from the past still influence you today. In this article, we'd like to share eight signs that your life may have been more difficult than you thought.

1. Trusting others is hard for you.

The trust thing isn’t easy even under ideal circumstances. If you've come to know people primarily as potential risk factors, you'll struggle even more in this area. Children burned by flame will shy away from fire, emotionally injured people will be wary of ever again exposing themselves to danger from others. Unfortunately, what this defensive attitude means in practice is that interpersonal relations are reduced to the absolute minimum. Maintaining friendships or even entering into romantic relationships is unthinkable for many former victims of traumatic circumstances. Unfortunately, there is no magic formula for regaining or relearning trust in humanity. However, before choosing a life of loneliness and isolation as the only way out, give professional help a chance. Some paths might have been overgrown by a dark past, like a trail by thick brush, but not entirely blocked and made impassable.

2. You tend to withdraw.

People who struggle with trust issues naturally prefer to live alone when in doubt. But people who have had bad experiences specifically with their peers generally tend to withdraw more. Like wounded animals, they prefer to retreat to a quiet place to lick their wounds and give the prospect of healing a chance. The experiences once suffered weigh heavily on them. No well-intentioned advice in the world can erase or undo those memories. Hurt and disappointed people choose the safe lot of loneliness. There, no one can harm them and the risk of suffering another emotional shipwreck is low.

3. Problems give you more trouble than average.

What many people don't consider is that a happy childhood and youth are important prerequisites in terms of our problem-solving skills. This factor is often overlooked, because happy children grow up to be confident adults who can easily overcome stumbling blocks, big and small, by themselves, without outside help. The situation is different with people who have had to shoulder heavy burdens in the past. Every problem that appears on the horizon seems to them like an echo from earlier days or like a harbinger heralding more difficult times ahead. In their minds, small challenges become problems of epic proportions even before they have really crossed the horizon. The very fear of difficulties turns them into overpowering enemies. The helplessness that often results presents these people with a never-ending cycle of worry and difficulty.

4. You don't maintain a good relationship with yourself.

We don’t have to feel total self-love and care for ourselves dotingly every day. But if you can barely look at yourself in the mirror and your inner critics never shut up, there is indeed something wrong with that picture. You may be blaming yourself for what happened to you in the past, or at least blaming yourself in part. No matter what it was that is still bothering you, forgive yourself for it. People are not perfect and never will be. But you can still make your life a beautiful experience for yourself in the here and now. Take your inner child by the hand and comfort one another. Nothing that happened at any point in time should destroy your inner life currently and certainly not your future.

5. Your emotional life is hard work.

Whatever it was that troubled you in the past, it has had a lasting effect on your emotional life. The ground for healthy living and processing feelings is laid in our childhood. We learn to deal with disappointment and that life doesn't always play out the way we want it to. Those who either don't learn these important lessons at all or learn them under the wrong circumstances face a lifelong deficit. Joy always lasts only a short time for these people. Shame, anger and fear, on the other hand, determine their emotional barometer.

6. You find it difficult to be happy and carefree.

This point follows on seamlessly from the previous one. For people with a difficult past, happiness is a very fleeting feeling that rarely touches them and that, in their opinion, they do not deserve. Whenever cheerfulness or joy grace the horizon, mistrust follows on its heels and admonishes us that the happy state will not last. Getting out of this negative thought carousel will be difficult without help.

7. Relationship status: complicated.

This unfortunately follows from the points already mentioned. People with traumatic experiences in their baggage are not granted an easy time with relationships. The lack of trust, the tendency to self-isolation and the chaos that emotions entail are not good conditions for a stable partnership or starting a family. Those who nevertheless manage it will always be challenged not to repeat their own childhood or, conversely, to compensate with their own family. Both can lead to disaster.

8. A negative self-image torments you.

The worst thing about a dark past is the guilt and negative self-image it imposes on us. We feel like failures, weaklings, creatures who are not lovable and never will be. These thoughts are poison, destroying us a little more every time they cross our minds. Those who are at war with themselves in this way will never know a contented life. A life surrounded by other people is unfortunately even more unthinkable under these conditions.

Today’s Conclusion

Who you are and who you can be. We cannot undo the past. What we can do, however, is decide where the future will take us. We have all the power in our own hands, provided we succeed in freeing ourselves from the baggage of earlier times. Perhaps the best way to understand a difficult life is in the words of an American author: "We are who we are for many reasons, and we may never know most of them. But even if we don't have the power to decide where we come from we can still choose where we go from there."