[00:00:00]

You may be through with your past, but your past isn’t through with you. We all carry the unresolved stuff, pain questions, moments that never get closure. And if we want to feel freedom in the present, we have to process it, reframe it, and face it, not because we want to wallow in it, not because we’re looking for someone to blame or because we want to stay angry.

We do this because until we resolve our past, it will continue to haunt us, showing up in ways we don’t expect, in places where it doesn’t belong. So what does it actually mean to resolve the past? For me, resolution means I’m no longer projecting the past onto the present. I see situations, people, and relationships for what they are in the here and now, not as echoes of old wounds.

That’s my goal. Why does that matter? Because if the past isn’t resolved, then the younger version of me, the one who was scared, hurt, and angry, is the one responding to today’s challenges. And that younger version of me, he’s not equipped to handle the life that I live now, but the current version of me, he’s wiser.

He has more perspective, more tools when I choose to turn the spotlight of attention on those past experiences, especially with the help of a therapist or a coach, I’m bringing adult insight into childhood pain.

I’ve spent years trying to figure out what still feels unresolved in me. I wanna move through life without that invisible weight, that shadow of old stories and old wounds. I do this work because I want to step fully into who I am now, not the version of me that was shaped by fear or shame, or someone else’s expectations.

Wanna live as the person I was born to be, not the one I was told I had to be in order to earn love, acceptance, or safety. It’s about reclaiming myself. Not just intellectually, but emotionally and spiritually and energetically.

It’s about clearing the fog of the past so that I can walk forward with clarity and conviction.

Let me bring this into focus with something personal.

Hey everybody, it’s Chad Peevy. Thank you so much for listening. If you’re enjoying the podcast, please make sure you subscribe. Also notice in the show notes that there’s a link to get on the Mindset Monday newsletter. This is the newsletter I send out every Monday morning to help you start your week with a great mindset.

It is also where I share more insights and give you information about the latest things that are going on. I also do drawings for the people that are on that list. I give away four books every month to somebody that’s subscribed and I announce the winners. You guessed it on the newsletter. Once again, thank you so much for listening to the podcast.

Let’s get right back to it.

What keeps coming up for me in my search for resolution around my past is still my dad.

Yes, even still at my age, I still struggle with issues with my dad. That anger that I feel, it keeps showing up for me in places outside of the relationship with my dad. It keeps showing up in friendships where I get disappointed when a friend doesn’t show up for me in the way I had hoped. In the same way that my dad didn’t show up for me in the way I hoped he would.

That anger gets transferred onto friends who remind me of that part of my past. It shows up in my marriage, particularly around conversations around money, that anger doesn’t stay in its own lane. It has a way of leaking into other areas of life. And when I notice this happening, this is how I know that a reframe around something is necessary.

It becomes necessary to reframe how I think about how my dad showed up for me as a kid, if I want more peace in my relationships today, if I want peace in the present, I have to reexamine how I see the past. The task here is to consider the issues from my past that I’ve allowed to sit there inside of me existing through the lens of a child, and now bring it back to the surface and look at that situation through the lens of the person I am now.

So when I do this, I ask myself what is another way of looking at how my dad showed up for me or didn’t show up for me? And something new always occurs to me when I put myself through this type of exercise because the answer that occurred to me. Around this issue as the person I am now said something like, maybe the universe kept a distance between you and your dad to protect you from him.

And when I think about that, my adult self is able to look at the distance between us not thinking that he didn’t like you or you were unlovable or you embarrassed him, which by the way, may all be true. It may be true that he didn’t love me. It may also be true that he was incapable of really loving me.

It may be true that I embarrassed him, especially before high school. I was a very effeminate little boy. It may be true that he didn’t have the tools or the desire to learn more tools in order to know how to deal with that. All of this can be true, but the key is those things may be true, but they’re not all that’s true.

And with time and with perspective and with more life experiences and wisdom today, there’s another possibility. There’s a possibility for a deeper meaning that perhaps the universe was protecting me from him. , and when [00:05:20] I realized that it, it took a little bit of the edge off the anger, but as I saw it with it, something else began to bubble up.

If the universe was protecting me with the distance, why didn’t it protect me from the beatings? That question, that raw and searing question brought up a new layer of anger that I wasn’t expecting. When we work through things like this, sometimes we get surprised. This surprised me, and that’s the thing about healing.

Just when you think you’ve cleared something, a deeper layer appears. Again, you have to make that choice. Am I gonna sit here in the pain or am I gonna search for a new way to see it? And as I let that anger simmer, a thought came to me. You know, I’m not the first son to be forsaken by his father. When Jesus was on the cross, what did he say?

He cried out to his father. My God, my God. Why have you forsaken me? Now the irony of an anti theist quoting scripture is not lost on me. It’s the fundamentalist Christian upbringing. It’s hard to get these reverences outta my head, but it helps me make sense of it, and that’s what matters because it’s that cry, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

That’s the cry of every wounded child, every forsaken son or daughter. So why did God let them crucify his son, God, allowing it to happen? Might as well have been God himself nailing him to the cross. Why? When we ask why, whether it’s about what happened to us or the crucifixion, I think what we’re really asking is what is the meaning of this ’cause?

Asking why is a fool’s errand. You will never fully satisfy the question. Why? ’cause there’s always gonna be another reason why. Why is a merry-go-round with no way of getting off? Why did my dad beat me? Who knows He’s a sadist. ’cause he was in a bad mood that day because he thought he could beat the gay outta me.

He thought it made him a man because he liked to brag about it to his friends because his dad beat him because that’s what the church told him to do. You see, why is a fool’s errand you never fully satisfy it, and to try is to leave open the possibility of un resolving the issue all over again, and then go on a quest to satisfy the at answer once again.

We can search for meaning. While there’s no satisfying answer to why, we can satisfy the meaning. And as I think about meaning, I return to the story of Jesus. The point wasn’t the crucifixion. The power is in the resurrection. That’s what Christianity is built upon. Not the death, but what came after.

That’s the whole point. That’s the whole idea that Christianity itself is built upon. Had there not been a resurrection, there would not be a Christian Church without the resurrection. You’ve just got a tragic story of a do-gooder, liberal hippie with some good ideas about the human condition, who pissed off the wrong people and got himself killed.

Sad and end of story. The power is in the resurrection, and that’s what our lives are too. Cycles of life and death and resurrection again and again and again. We do this inner work not to wallow in old misery, but to rise to emerge as something new. It’s to find a new way forward in a new season of our lives as a renewed spirit according to the Christian faith before the resurrection.

Jesus spent three days in the tomb, three days in darkness, three days of being unseen. And I can deeply relate to the idea of time in the tomb, the in between, the transition, the space between who you were and who you’re becoming. Sometimes it’s a shift from trauma into suspense.

Not healing yet, but no longer breaking. We all experience this kind of tomb time. It might be someone who’s gone through cancer, something they never asked for, but when remission comes, they emerge transformed, or the retiree, the version of them who worked for decades is gone, and now they have to figure out who they are without the job or the entrepreneur who closes one chapter and stares on to the blank page of what’s next.

Or the person leaving a job to finally bet on themselves. There’s this time, the tomb time where it’s dark, disorienting, and quiet. Nothing is blooming yet. You are not who you were and you’re not quite who you’re becoming, and it can feel like the end if you let it.

I’ve been in my own career tomb for about four and a half years, and I’ve learned it’s not a punishment as much as it seems like it is Sometimes it’s not a punishment, it’s a passage. Yesterday I was on a walk with my [00:10:40] husband, tears in my eyes, and I asked him, how long must I stay here? I know how much he wants to help me.

I see the love in his eyes. I see how hard it is for him to watch me sit in the tomb. but The truth of this situation is that no one can roll away the stone for you. You must stand, you must be the one to rise again.

So how do we find meaning? What happens to us? What was the meaning of God? Allowing them to crucify Jesus? What’s the meaning of the beatings I got from my dad? What’s the meaning of the struggle I’ve experienced in my career? We use our time in the tomb to sit and ponder these questions, and as you sit there and mourn for the loss of who you once were, that anxiety crawls over your skin from the uncertainty of what’s next.

And yet there is inside of us that still small voice that reminds us that the meaning is always in the resurrection. A resurrection that demands a shedding of what was and a renewal to become what will be. You may be through with your past, but your past isn’t through with you. It will keep showing up.

And continue to haunt you until you face it, until you reframe it, until you give it the attention that it is begging for from you. And that tomb time is a necessary period for the quiet, for the stillness and for the healing that it offers, it is necessary. The burial, the respite, the retreat, the healing, the break, the reflection, the reset.

It is all. Necessary. So give yourself the grace for that period. And when you are ready, let us rise. May you rise and resurrect yourself. May you renew yourself and your spirit. May you walk into the light of your greatness and find joy in the mystery of what waits for you on the other side.

And may you have joy, peace and happiness, good health and wellbeing, a life of ease and prosperity. The courage to get what you want from this life. The clarity to know what that is. The imagination, to not sell yourself short and the discipline to see it through.