I've found constanty revisiting without learning from the situation does nothing but breed more hate. fear, loathing, anxiety etc. However, I find that revisiting past events with a view to learning from them and understanding them helps me enormously - once I understant a situation and the actions/reactions of the people in it I release a lot of guilt/anxiety/self-doubt etc (as I usually feel that everything that happened in my life was my fault, regardless of the actions of the other people involved).
I've learnt a lot about myself through revisiting old events - that I'm not responsible for other people's actions, for example, and I've learnt what healthy boundaries are by working through old events with a therapist and coming up with a framework of what would be acceptable now.
I don't think you're denigrating others if you speak the truth about them? If the truth makes them look bad to other people, doesn't that mean the truth of the situation is unacceptable to most? If someone close to you asks why you don't speak to your mum, should you lie to protect their reputation or tell the truth, even though you know the other person will think less of them? For me, honesty is so important. I don't run my mum down any chance I get to anyone that will listen, but if someone close to me asks me about it, I'm honest with them and I tell them what life was like for us.
I agree with Mud's analogy of the machete attack. I have found my emotional health to be central to a happy life and physical health. Without focusing on it there's no healing - and I think many of us have no experience of focusing on ourselves for so many years that it probably takes a while of doing little else to get the balance back. I've had periods where I have ate, slept and breathed me me me - and then I get sick of it all and don't think about anything for a long, long time.
I think there's a balancing act to achieve. Every day of my childhood my mum would tell me a tale of how her mum didn't love her and preferred her sister over her. I have no doubt she was telling the truth. But I heard it every day through my mum's thirties, her forties, her fifties and now she's in her sixties and her mum's been dead a long time she still goes over it on a daily basis. To my mind, she's stuck in this - she hasn't worked through it, she hasn't dealt with it and she hasn't let it go. In the meantime, she's become an alcoholic, four of her six children don't speak to her and she has six grandchildren that she never sees. She was my example of what to avoid - I didn't want my whole life wrapped up in my past, but I do think you need to wrap yourself in it for a time to get through it and come out the other side. I don't know if any of this makes sense?!
Hugs
