Can time heal all wounds? It is said that this is usually the case. In this article we will go to see what is true and false in this statement and what are the consequences for those who support it.
Last update: Augusts 10, 2021
There are pains so intense that they tear the soul. It is as if we have fallen into a deep abyss with a hard-to-find exit. In these situations, it is said that time heals all wounds, in reality this is not always the case.
Life is made up of ups and downs and everyone, in their uniqueness, experiences them differently. The truth is that, sometimes, it is difficult to overcome complex situations because the sea of ​​emotions overwhelms us. So, we never know where to start.
We have always been told that time heals all wounds. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. In this article we tell why.
“There are wounds that, instead of opening your skin, open your eyes”.
-Pablo Neruda-
Time does not heal all wounds, it hides them
After overcoming a deep pain, we tend to say: “time has cured it”. But is it really so? If we let the second hand advance while maintaining a passive attitude, it is difficult for deep wounds to heal. Rather, we can anesthetize them, but not heal them.
Why do we do this? We may not want to see that pain, therefore, we prefer to engage in other activities, not think about it and move away from the stimuli that can remind us of unpleasant situations. Also, it could be a masked emotion. In this sense, pain would not manifest itself as sadness, but as anger or even euphoria.
Thinking in this way can help us push our emotions and thoughts away
There are pains that are difficult to express, sufferings that we cannot label, that slip away when we try to express them in words. In these cases, we can try to package the pain and send it to the most remote place of our memory.
This is a defense mechanism. They move away and remove desires, feelings and thoughts from consciousness. According to Sigmund Freud, father of psychoanalysis, it is a way to make unacceptable contents unconscious.
Time does not pass when we have a passive attitude
By giving time a healing power, we attribute our responsibility to an external factor. It is as if we let events accumulate on a book that we must return to the library in the hope that, once given away, the unpleasant events will be eliminated from our psychic reality… like that book from our desk.
The great danger of proceeding in this way is that what remains buried does not stop eroding our motivation, weighing down our will or penalizing our goals. Thus, we can get to a point where we continue to hurt ourselves without being able to identify what is hurting us because we have buried it inside of us.
It can also happen that time is given a leading role that it doesn't really have (is a possible scenario). This means belittling all those strategies that we have been able to put in place to identify and bring out the scars that hurt us.
This can be an obstacle to overcome future difficulties and to reuse strategies that have been successful in the past. This attitude could undermine our self-esteem by diminishing the footholds on which it grows.
It follows that the idea that time heals all wounds can be our worst enemy because it prevents us from proceeding, psychically, in the choice of coping strategies.
We must be the proponents of our change, resilient people who accept pain, express it, transform it and give it a different meaning to improve the quality of our life.
