Sometimes the healing comes not from "gratitude" or manufactured inner purification, but from diving into the humiliation of accepting our human broken-ness, our imperfection.
While I'm not yet ready to talk about the evils I am enduring in this lifetime, what I want to say is that past life traumas are way, way harder to process than I ever imagined. And these impossible difficulties finally began to bring me into real surrender. Really just accepting how fucked up I am from past life traumas alone, and accepting that I deserve love despite being "unhealed".
One past life trauma that has deeply broken me (though thankfully it was not repeated in this lifetime) was child sexual abuse. And more than that, but we'll leave it at child sexual abuse for now.
Although it did not happen again in this lifetime, it has carried over in other ways (including my experience of soul-rape, though that goes deeper than past life wounds.) It led to new and different traumas in this life. It set me up for an inner censorship right from childhood in this lifetime and into my whole adulthood, which had progressively more devastating consequences.
Added to that, I have incarnated repeatedly with the express purpose of being a scapegoat so that humanity can continue to prosper. I'm supposed to eat sins and die so everyone else can live. I'm supposed to hold magical power like a butler, carrying it but being unable to use it, so others can avail themselves of that magic. This false life purpose has been deeply beaten into me.
Which makes it even harder to heal the past life wound of child sexual abuse, because this programming interferes constantly. Yet the child sexual abuse trauma is at the core of many other traumas, so it needs to go.
It's a vicious cycle. I've found that trying to strategically target these wounds and heal them is a trap. The methods and attitudes of most shadow work processes don't work for me because they are inherently built on a foundation of spiritual perfectionism.
And not just shadow work teachings, but every major school of spirituality or personal development. Teachers feel they have to represent an ideal in order to get clients/students, and clients/students think they need to purify their energy bodies until they reach an idealized self that just never arrives.
All of this just takes us away from Love, in my opinion.
I'm never going to be a perfectly zen, purified human being. I think there an enormous collective shame around being human and living this primitive Earth life, with all its failures and evils. And there is shame around being a victim who unable to "heal" her way out of devastating injury.
Honestly, there are some wounds I carry which may not go away until after my death.
And that's okay. I have found that Love is willing to meet me here, in my "unproductive spiritual practitioner" imperfection. Love does not reject imperfection.