Time heals nothing, so stop expecting the passage of time to heal what is hurting or haunting you.
Let’s first look at the difference between being hurt by the past and being haunted by the past.
For the most part, we are hurt by things that have transpired from relationships, either intimate ones or not, but from interacting with others and things not working out or coming to an end. We are usually haunted by something we did or something malicious that was done to us. And in either of these instances, we can have a combination of carrying hurt and being haunted.
So how do we stop it?
We need to take the time to process it. That is the only way for any situation to lose its power over you.
How do we process it?
We learn the lesson, find the gift or skill and/or seek forgiveness.
Without doing this we cannot let go and we drag this crap with us into the rest of our lives.
And when it does creep back into your head, because our brain can suck sometimes and remind us of the things that hurt or embarrass us or that we are ashamed of, we just need to remind ourselves, remind our brain that we have already processed that and it can’t hurt us anymore.