Facing the Block

S.J. Elliott
3 min readNov 14, 2022

Stop letting ghosts of the past make decisions in the present

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Way back in 2020, when I started writing here on Medium, I had every intention of doing so in an authentic way.

For the most part, I have tried my best to do so.

But I’ve always had a little bit of a love/hate relationship with writing. Words, once they are out there, can’t be taken back. Stories and secrets, once shared, can never be stuffed back into the dark corners of your private memory — they take on a life of their own. Passed down, passed around, whispered, or shouted about long after they are first pressed to page or spoken aloud.

When I was 11, my mother read my diary.

It was filled with love notes about the boys and girls I thought were cute, re-tellings of the not-so-exciting shenanigans my friends and I got into, and my most personal thoughts and opinions about the things that went on at home - especially with her.

In the recent work I’ve been doing around healing my childhood trauma, there is a lot of “re-parenting” the inner child. This is most often done by having conversations or doing visualization exercises with your younger self and offering up the support, advice, or love that the actual parent failed to give during those vulnerable moments in childhood & adolecence.

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S.J. Elliott

Aspiring story-teller. Ordained coffee connoisseur. I write about processing personal trauma, & my quest to be a better version of myself as a human/woman/wife.