Moving on after a difficult experience is something everyone wants but isn’t easy to do. There’s all sorts of contradictory advice. One of the reasons you can’t trust online advice is that the person who wrote it isn’t the same person today. They’ve also moved on. (If they haven’t, what are you doing still following them or their advice?) People rarely go back to correct themselves. Online forums where you can share your woes, are filled to the brim with people who haven’t gotten to the core of their pain yet. They post there because they haven’t managed to put aside what isn’t theirs to carry. And they haven’t picked up what is. Those who finally got that far, have left the “group”, for lack of a better term. When you change opinions, positions, or outlook on life, rarely do people re-enter the room with a “By the way…”. Mostly, people just leave quietly, after realizing the mistakes they made.
What is keeping you from moving on is probably the fact that you can’t forget. And you can’t forget because you haven’t yet processed it. And you can’t process it because you’re repressing what needs to be heard. You think you know what needs to be heard and you repeat it to yourself all the time. If you’re still in pain, you’re probably wrong. What needs to be heard is not the thing that is bothering you. You’re mulling over the same event, experience or story. But if you’re still in pain, you’ve probably got the story all wrong.
Now please don’t think you need to start making up some better story and forcing yourself to believe that. The bad thing happened alright. But you’re missing something, some insight that would spontaneously, without any effort on your part, turn things around for you. An insight you haven’t had yet. And here’s the difficult part: No amount of grinding, pushing, pleading or staring at it will give you the insight that will cure you of your pain. You can’t force insight, or will it to come to you. The best you can do is to get on with life and follow your hunches. Once you let go of the problem you’ve been gnawing on 24/7, once you step back and just focus on living your life, your subconscious can do its thing. It can start to digest things, unhindered by your need for control. You may suddenly need to cry, or get angry. So be it. You may read something that makes you go “Huh, maybe I should try that.” But you can’t grind at it. The more you insist that you need to heal, that you need to be better, to do better, to feel better, the more you’ll get in your own way.
How to move on? Get busy living your life. Accept that you haven’t processed everything yet, but that in time, things will come to you.