The past does not define you.
Lady Gaga, whose real name is Stefani Germanotta, is a famous multi-awarded celebrity and icon in the music industry.
She’s in the headlines just recently. Not about her latest song or concert. But about her past. And mental health.
She said, “I was 19 years old and I was working in the business and a producer said to me, ‘Take off your clothes.’”
She refused, but was eventually raped and left pregnant on the corner of their family home.
Now 35, that past still haunts Lady Gaga. She confesses that this caused PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) that she still deals with at present.
Her past appears as if it’s still present. In the way she defines her self – her music, her emotions, her styles, her relationships, her work, among others.
Dr. Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, said that our past can condition us so that we express the hurts that it inflicts. In varied ways, in our present.
He has a point. But only up to a point … for in the rest he’s wrong. He’s wrong in allowing permissiveness, denial of personal responsibility, or man’s ability to change for the better.
Healing is a choice. We can take personal responsibility.
We are not stuck with our past history. We can choose to move forward rather than still live in the past. We can choose to get the whole picture of our lives together.
As psychiatrist and Nazi Holocaust survivor Dr. Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning,” put it,
“Everything can be taken from a man, but the last of human freedoms: to choose one’s attitudes in any given set of circumstances.”
Remember always, the past does not define you.
“ … I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:13,14)
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