← Ready For Love with Hilary Silver
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If you've been carrying something for years, something that happened to you or something you did, and you've been waiting and waiting to finally feel free of it, I want you to really hear me today, like, literally put down what you're doing and just listen. Because what I'm about to say is going to save you years of suffering. Years, I am not exaggerating. I mean, years of your one precious life that you can never get back. So if you've been looking for relief for a long time now, you've read the books, you've listened to the podcasts, maybe you've sat in therapy for years, maybe you tried the retreats, a healer, Reiki, all the things including plant medicine, psychedelics, ayahuasca, all of that stuff, trying to dig up the memory, trying to understand why you are the way you are, why you react the way you do, why you can't seem to just move past it. And you're still searching, still turning it over, still waiting for the answer, the permission, the closure, and the relief. Then here's what nobody else in your life is going to tell you. You don't have to wait for any of that. You can set it down. Not in five more years, not after you finally do the work and crack the code and solve the whole mystery. You can do it now if you decide to. And that is what today is all about. Hi, it's Hillary. Welcome to the Ready for Love PODC past. If you're new here, I'm Hillary Silver, former psychotherapist turned master coach and founder of Ready for Love. I'm here to flip the script on mainstream self help, showing you how to look, feel, and be your best so you can get anything that you want in this life. So if that sounds good, subscribe to the podcast and to our YouTube channel so you never miss an episode. And it really is the best way to support the show. Okay, so before we dive into all of this, I just want to say one thing. Really important thing first. I am not here to minimize your pain. I am not here to wave away what happened to you like it was no big deal, because it was a big deal. I know that, and so do you. So let me be really clear about who I'm talking to today. If you are in the middle of it all right now, if something just happened and you're in this acute crisis period and you're not okay, then what I'm saying in this episode does not pertain to you. That is not what I'm talking about here. When you are in the thick of it, freshly wounded. That's when you reach for real help and real support and someone to help you climb out of the hole and find the surface again. What I'm talking about today is different. I'm talking about the thing that you've had distance from. And it doesn't even matter how big that thing was way back when. It could have been something major, genuinely painful, genuinely hard and life altering. But it's not an emergency anymore. It happened. And time has passed and you are functioning. But yet you are still carrying it around. It is still sitting on you, weighing you down and running in the background of your whole life. You're not in the hole anymore. You climbed out a long time ago, but you never put the weight of it down. That is the thing you and I are going to be dealing with today. And that is the thing I'm going to help you release. And here's why I have to be the one to say this to you. Because. Because nobody else will. No one in their right mind is going to tell someone who is suffering what I'm going to tell you today. Your friends won't tell you to let it go. They will just keep sympathizing, keep agreeing about how awful it was. Your family won't tell you. And honestly, a lot of the professional help out there won't tell you this either. Because so much of it is built around going backwards. Keep digging, keep analyzing, keep telling the story. What one more time. So you chase answers, seek clarity. Or you wait. You think that you have to understand it completely first and remember it perfectly first and get to the bottom of why first and years just slowly tick by, year after year after year. This thing holding you in the past while your real life, the present life, the one happening right now, the one with actual joy available to you, sits right there waiting for you to show up. You're living back there. You are not living right here and now. And nobody is going to come along and cut that anchor loose for you. You have to do it for yourself. And that's why you need to hear me. Because I am telling you the truth today that will completely set you free. I'm going to give you two things. First, why you can let this go, even if you don't have it all figured out. And then how you actually do it. So let's start with memory. Because so many of you are stuck waiting to remember it all before you let yourself heal. And I want to take that pressure off of you completely right now. Because the truth is here's the truth about memory. It is so much less reliable than we think it is. Do you actually remember the thing? Or do you remember the photograph of it? The story that someone told you so many times that it became a memory? And did you have a dream once that got filed away in your brain as something that really happened? We treat our memories like a video recording, like there's a tape, and if we could just press play, we'd see exactly what happened, frame by frame, like it's the truth. But that's not actually how memory works. Not even close. Memory gets reconstructed Every time you pull it up, it shifts and it fills in the gaps with guesses, and it blends things together imperfectly every single time. For all of us. So if your healing plan has secretly been, I just need to remember exactly what happened, and then I can deal with it, or then I can just let it go. I want to say this as gently and clearly as I can. You may never, ever get that. You may never have perfect certainty about all the details. And here's what's most important. You don't need it. You never did. So the first thing to really know and accept is this. You don't need to remember it all to be free of it all. Second, and this builds on the first. If there is something you can't quite get to, something blurry, something in your mind keeps sliding away from you every time you get close. I don't want you to treat this like a failure or something that you just have to chase down and grasp, because that might be protection. The memory you are trying to chase down that continues to be elusive is your brain doing its job, keeping you away from something that it has decided you are not ready to hold yet. And forcing it, clawing at it, trying to drag the memory up out of the dark before you were ready. Going to person after person to help you extract it, verify it, or corroborate it does not heal you. A lot of the time, it just rewounds you. So. So I'm not telling you to avoid anything. I'm just telling you to trust your own timing. And if it's not coming, maybe it's not supposed to come right now. And furthermore, what I really want you to know is this. You don't ever have to know. Not now and not ever. Actually. You do not need to know for certain that something happened. You do not need to know for sure the impact of something you did on someone. You do not need to have verification of the past and to move on. So Put those two things together and here's where we land. You do not need to see it clearly and remember it to move on from it. You can do something that I love. Agree to disagree with your past. It sounds something like this in your mind. And when you're talking to yourself, something might have happened to me. I suspect that it did. Maybe it did, but maybe it didn't. I don't really know. I don't need to know. Frame by frame, signed and notarized and delivered to me to to decide. I'm done carrying it around. We're talking about how to be done in a minute. But first we're talking about what to do if you do remember it clearly. But either way, you are moving on. And that is the best news ever. Because the missing memory was never the thing keeping you stuck. You waiting around to solve it before you let yourself heal, was the thing keeping you stuck. So now let's talk about the harder one. Because for some of you, the weight is isn't only about what was done to you. It's also about what you might have done. Something you are ashamed of, something that you've been beating yourself up over for years, maybe even decades. So I'm going to give you a clean way through it. Whether it was an accident and you didn't mean to. If you hurt someone or you hurt yourself without intending to, or if you did something intentionally that was genuinely hurtful to someone else or or to yourself. Follow these steps. Step one. You make amends, you apologize, or you make it right in whatever way the situation calls for. You take a real world action to repair what you can. In some certain situations, this is an actual conversation and sometimes it's just something that you do within yourself. Because to have that conversation with someone else might be more damaging to them in the long run. If they've already moved on, then hearing from you may not be what's best for them. And so in those certain situations, your personal responsibility and accountability is something you are doing just inside of yourself. And then step two is this. You do something that seems radical but actually isn't at all. You forgive yourself. Yeah, self forgiveness, my friends. Because no one is going to give you a gold star for all your suffering. Consider who you were at the time that all this happened. What were you thinking? What were you feeling? What were you going through? Consider all the variables and conditions when it all went down and have compassion for yourself. Because I believe it takes a rare kind of truly disordered and fucked up person to truly want to hurt People. And that isn't you listening to me right now. I know it and so do you. So you forgive yourself and actually let it go. That's it. You are human. Humans make mistakes. And newsflash, you are not perfect. So what you're doing here is making amends with yourself so you can let it go. If you were hurting or struggling at the time, then just acknowledge you were doing the best you could at that time. You weren't in a good place. You didn't have all the answers. You hadn't grown to the point where you are now. I can go on and on about this, but there really is no need to belabor the point. It is a simple but very powerful decision to finally let yourself off the hook. Because here's the thing you cannot do. You cannot beat yourself up for the rest of your life for something that you did one time at one point in your life. That is not accountability and that is not justice. And it doesn't undo a single thing. It doesn't help the person that you hurt one bit. It is just suffering on a loop forever. And the only person it is punishing is you. And how long are you going to punish yourself? So let me give you an example from my life, something real. And it doesn't sound like a big deal, but it is very painful for me when I allow myself to think about it. My son is three years older than my daughter, and when they were little ones, I used to read to them every night at bedtime. And my husband at the time was working 12 hour shifts in the hospital. So I would often be home alone with the two of them all day. And after a full day of work and dinner time and activities and bedtime activities and all of that stuff, it was a lot. And if you're a mom, I'm sure you remember those days. So at the time, it was very important to me that I separated my kids at bedtime because my son was a high energy little boy and just full of play and rambunctious. And in order for them to settle down and get ready for bed, I needed them to be calm and not egging each other on. So I insisted on separating them in their own bedrooms. And I read to my daughter first because she was the younger one, redirecting him back to his own bedroom, telling him I will be there shortly, asking for him to just be patient. And I fully intended to go into his room and read to him next. But here's what would happen. I was so exhausted that I would often fall asleep Reading in bed with my daughter. So story time with him was often way shorter. He. If he even got it at all. And for a long time when I indulged in reliving all of that, it ached. I imagined him lying there in his bed waiting for me. And when I didn't come or stay very long, that he was thinking that his mommy loved his sister more than him. And I'd feel the guilt like a heavy hole in my heart, like a punch in the stomach. I'm a bad mom. I'm so sorry to my sweet little boy that I did that. And how he must have felt left out and abandoned and not loved. And all the stories that I made up about what he was feeling and how horrible I was and that I let him down. There is nothing like a parenting fail to perpetually make you feel like shit because there is nothing you can do to go back in time and fix it. There are no redos in parenting. But I finally had to forgive myself. I know I was doing the best that I could. I know how exhausted I was and stretched in a hundred different directions and. And since I've talked with both of my now older kids about it many times and they tell me I'm a great mom, not a perfect mom, and man, are they quick to point that out, but a great mom nonetheless. So why on earth would I take that memory back out and turn it over and make myself suffer over and over again? Why would I do that to myself? I don't do that to myself anymore. I made peace with it and I let it go. If I allow myself to pull it back up, yes, it can still hurt. But there's no reason for me to do that anymore. It's about deciding to let it go, not looking back anymore and moving on. I just don't go back and relive it. There is nothing back there for me to fix. It is done. And that is the choice I'm telling you that you also have. Which brings me to the most important thing I'm going to say to you today. So listen very closely. The things that have happened to you and the things that you have done do not define you unless you let them. Listen to that again, because it's everything. It doesn't define me unless I let it. And those things do not define you unless you let it. This is the whole secret. The meaning of your past is not some fixed fact sitting out there in the world waiting for you to finally dig it up and discover it. The label is not permanent. I'm the Woman who was abandoned as a child. I'm a bad parent. I'm the one. That thing happened to you put the label on which means that you are allowed to take it off. You are not what happened to you. You are not the worst thing you've ever done. That is a story and you are the one telling it. You are the author and you always have been. And all those signs that you've been hunting for, the clarity, the permission, the closure, the meaning, somebody else finally saying the words that you needed to hear. You've been searching for all of it out there in an office, in a memory, in an interpretation or an apology that actually may never come. It is not out there, my friends. It is right in here inside of you. It is available to you anytime that you are ready to claim it. The decision is yours to make. You decide what your past means. You decide what you are going to do with it from here. You decide the meaning and impact the past has had on you going forward. So let me bring all of this home for you. You don't need to remember it perfectly to be free of it. If your brain is protecting you from something, let it. Trust your own timing and no matter if it's something that happened to you or something you did, make it right if you need to and then let it go. End the life sentence today and the meaning of all of it, that is yours, your decision and nobody else's. Your past is not your identity unless you hand it that power. And you can stop handing it that power anytime you choose. If you want the actual tool for doing this, the tool for sitting down and deciding who you are going to be going forward and instead of staying who your past told you that you are. That is exactly what the Daily Journal is for. It's not about looking backward and digging and rehashing and reliving. It's about your future self. It's where you make the decision on the page a little every day until one morning. It is not something you're trying to believe anymore. It's just who you are. So if you want to find out more about the Daily Journal, I will put the link in the show notes and in the description or the you can go to readyforloveinc.com journal. I'll leave you with this. You can stop suffering. You really can put it all down. The day you decide that is the day your new life starts. See you next time.