Digging up the past

If you loved me, you would forgive me and stop digging up the past.”
This sentence is often used to silence, not to heal.

Let’s get one thing straight:
You are not “digging up the past” when you are still living in it.

Psychology: Why this phrase is manipulative

In healthy relationships, accountability comes before forgiveness. In abusive or erosive relationships, this phrase functions as emotional coercion. It shifts responsibility away from the person who caused harm and places it onto the person who was hurt.

This is a form of:

Emotional invalidation – dismissing your lived experience
Gaslighting – reframing ongoing harm as your “inability to move on”
Moral blackmail – suggesting love requires silence and endurance

Love is not proven by how much pain you can tolerate.

Neuroscience: Why the past doesn’t stay in the past

The brain does not store trauma as a neat memory with a timestamp. Repeated emotional injury keeps the amygdala(threat detection system) activated. When the behaviour continues or remains unresolved, your nervous system stays in survival mode.

So when something feels “triggered,” it’s often because:

The pattern is still present
The brain recognises danger, not history
Your body is responding to current threat, not memory

You cannot “forgive your way” out of an unsafe nervous system.

Forgiveness vs accountability

Forgiveness is a personal, internal process.
Accountability is an external, behavioural one.

True repair requires:

Acknowledgement of harm
Changed behaviour over time
Emotional safety and consistency

Without these, forgiveness becomes self-abandonment, not love.

The difference to know

Digging up the past: Repeatedly revisiting resolved issues where behaviour has genuinely changed
Living in the present: Responding to ongoing patterns that continue to harm you

If the wound keeps reopening, it’s not because you won’t let go —
it’s because someone keeps touching it.