Dear Doctor:

I am pestered by bad thoughts and feelings from the past. How can I desensitize my past and live more in the present?

Dear Bothered:

In some strange way, we are enablers of our own bad feelings. I guess that, as long as we feel bad, we think that there is a chance of undoing some awful event in the past. We think that we can step back in time.

Also, giving up bad feelings means (in part, at least) giving up one's identity. We think that who we are is defined by awful things that happened to us. If we get rid of our bad feelings, who are we? This is a frightful question.

Step #1 is to acknowledge the irreversibility of bad events. They seem to be alive, because they are connected to the present by the continuity of time, but they are, in truth, over and done with.

If we are obsessed with guiltiness, we are trying to justify our bad behavior. Just as we do when we worry, we go over and over the incident in a vain attempt somehow to make ourselves out to be in the right. The truth is, we can't justify ourselves. We can't change what we have already done. Our only hope is to seek self-forgiveness instead of self-justification.

As Emerson said, "[Every man] must take himself, for better or worse, as his portion." This portion includes everything in the past - the awful happenings along with the awful thoughts and feelings that accompanied them and that still reverberate in the present.

Step #2 is to notice them. We can notice them and name them (the feelings and thoughts, not the memory itself of the happening). If, after a little while, they don't disappear, we can say, "That thought/feeling/mood has emerged into consciousness" or "I move on."

It might be that you are a particularly sensitive person, naturally. Who are you, then? Answer: you are a very sensitive organism pained by a thousand assaults (physical assaults, punishments, insults, humiliations, disappointments, bad news, etc., etc.).

The disadvantages of being this kind of person bring along with the disadvantages the advantages, as well. It might be that you are better attuned to reality than most people.

• You are suffering a wave of bad feeling.
• You are feeling terror, you are feeling terror, you are feeling terror, . . . (horror, pain, a breach)
• Whether I was right, justified, and innocent, on the one hand, or wrong, not justified, and guilty, on the other hand, it doesn't matter. The facts remain.
• The more significant one's present is, the less significant one's past becomes.
• Self-love, self-kindness, self-compassion, self-forgiveness, self-mercy
• No two people are the same. You are not like that (other person whom you envy). You can only be the person you got.
• You are as you are, not as you wish you were.