In psychology, the concept of closing or not closing doors is understood as a psychological and emotional phenomenon that involves closing vital cycles, or not doing so. The consequences of closing the doors or not means leaving behind what has been lived and moving on or continuing forward dragging both the advantages and the grievances of the past like a heavy slab.
In the following Psychology-Online article we will talk in more detail about the psychological meaning of not closing the doors. We will detail the consequences that this fact causes in people's lives and we will show possible ways to leave the past behind and learn to close doors to move forward in our lives.
For a person to leave the doors open means that Let everything that happened in your past, good and bad, continue to influence and condition your current moment in life.. We might think that leaving the doors open regarding positive events can be a good thing because it strengthens us in our new steps.
However, in reality it means sticking to what happened and, based on what happened, setting expectations regarding the new that is to come. It is much more profitable to extract from these good experiences good
If it is not advisable to leave the doors open with respect to positive past events, much less it is to do so with respect to negative events that have occurred in our lives. Not closing the doors to these facts supposes strengthen defensive mechanisms, fears and insecurities created in those moments, strengthening them and turning them into dark armor that, in principle, protects us from the world but, in reality, they condition us negatively, not allowing us to live our life as something beautiful, new and in constant and permanent change.
When we have lived in the past negative experiences that have caused us certain emotional wounds and we do not close the doors we give rise to a series of negative consequences in our lives that condition our next journey in the world.
By not constructively working through bad experiences and leaving the doors of this past open, our next steps in life are tied to these experiences, so we stop being free in the choice and execution of our acts. The traumatic experiences they model us internally so that a whole series of mental schemes and negative thoughts based on fear and pain are settled within us.
If we do not work on all this, elaborating everything that has happened and taking advantage of the experience as life learning that allows us to mature and grow, we leave the doors open and, with this, all the negative modeling received from said experience will remain intact in us, negatively conditioning our transit in the life. All defensive mechanisms and negative thoughts will continue to activate automatically in our inner censoring all our new experiences and limiting them to the irrational mental schemes accepted.
Some practical advice that can help us to definitively close the doors to the past and be able to move forward in our lives could be the following:
- Carry out a deep introspection work to see how our past experiences are limiting us
- Learn to reject all these negative mental patterns, investing great effort to stop feeding reasoning since that is where all these mechanisms work and are strengthened.
- accept life experiences and our neighbor as instruments that the wisdom of life uses to grant us great learning opportunities that allow us to improve daily as people
- forgive people that they hurt us
- open the heart (closed for wounds) and create a new outlook on life seeing it as something beautiful, happy and alive where each life experience constitutes an interesting and new adventure on our way
For all these reasons, both in the face of positive and negative experiences, and especially with the latter, It is very important to learn to close the doors as the only and essential means to advance in our life. Leaving the past behind becomes a necessary step if we want to live life in its immensity and beauty. Leaving the past behind does not mean forgetting where we came from.
However, on many occasions it will be necessary to reject parts that have settled within us and that, in reality, they are limiting us, hurting us and preventing us from uniting with others and living life in fullness. Only by closing all these old, dark and limiting doors will we be able to continue on our path, moving forward with great joy and true life force.
This article is merely informative, at Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
