MAKING PEACE WITH THE PAST.

I once had a housemate who was as deliberately unpleasant as you could get. He was someone who was an alcoholic, who became sober who later went back onto the alcohol. I was never a huge drinker, and I haven't touched alcohol for nearly eight years. Not because I wanted to be a teetotaller, but because it didn't interact well with medications I take and because I knew, in myself, that one drink was not enough. Oh, and because I tend to like sweeter drinks and with my irritable bowel, wine and cider are not good as they have fructose and give me the trots.

This housemate could not understand, or didn't want to understand, why I needed to talk, or write about my past. He'd say, "Why are you talking about school?" "Why aren't you talking about today?" For someone who was taking anti-depressants, that was a strange thing to say. Whether he was depressed, bi-polar or schizophrenic, it was a case of double standards. He then talked of CBT, which I knew, in itself was garbage and ineffective. CBT may be about recognising when you start to feel depressed, but on its own, is not the best, and it really only scratches the surface.

So why do we need to talk about our pasts? To make peace with them. To make sense of what happened to us.

In my native Australia, at the time I started learning Japanese, anti-Japanese sentiment was still prevalent in my grandparents generation (my grandparents weren't anti-Japanese). On the one hand, I remembered reading about a man who went from Changi Prison to part of the British Commonwealth Occupation Forces (a leap if ever there was one), yet I remember a woman I went to university with whose father had served in the war, and up until he died in 1993, wouldn't have anything Japanese. Another man I can remember reading about, who died in 1980, was asked by his son why he wasn't anti-Japanese when he had been tortured as a POW, and he said, "I saw those who tormented me punished. Some were executed, some received lengthy prison sentences, some were acquitted, they were individuals, not a people."

Anger is a natural part of healing, and I, myself, have been abused by people of certain nationalities, but the most frustrating thing for me is that my mother, whenever I have a positive experience with one, cannot say, "You're making positive progress," she always harks back to the past. She can't accept that I may want to let bygones be bygones.

We need to be able to feel what we felt. If we have anger, we need to let the anger escape. You can do so destructively or constructively. Destructively is by setting fire to something (burning down your old high school may appear to be cathartic but will only result in the loss of important facilities for other students and arson charges if caught) whereas constructive anger is about harnessing it to fight for anti-bullying policies in schools, which will benefit all students.

You need, however, to eventually let it go. You need to be friends with the past, as the only person who will otherwise be destroyed is you.