Letting Go of the Past: Saudade, Attachment, and Impermanence

Cibele is twenty. She has moved to another state to study at university, far from her family, and she is finding it hard to make friends. Her loneliness has a particular shape: it keeps pointing backward, toward the years of high school when everything felt easier and closer. In Episode 129 of the Portuguese-language podcast Autoconsciente, psychologist and host Regina Giannetti uses Cibele's story, along with several others, to ask a question most people have quietly asked themselves: what do we do with a past that still hurts, when the good things in it are gone and the bad things will not stop replaying? Her answer moves from the situations that need more than self-reflection, through the difference between a healthy longing and a painful clinging, to the one idea she returns to again and again, which is impermanence.

Why does the past keep coming back to our minds?

Giannetti opens by naming the pattern plainly. Unhappy memories return: a mistake we made, a wrong decision, a regret, a disappointment, something that hurt or angered us. But so do memories of something good that ended. Both kinds of recollection, she argues, bind a part of us to a moment that has already closed. Her reasoning is simple and worth holding onto: continuing to suffer over a past event means a piece of us remains "mentally and emotionally" stuck there, so we cannot fully move forward.

The episode is framed around the end of the year, a natural moment for taking stock and closing cycles before a new start. That framing matters. Letting go is not presented as a dramatic act of willpower but as a practice of noticing where our attention keeps going and deciding whether to keep feeding it.

When is rumination more than a habit?

Before offering practices, Giannetti draws a boundary. Some situations that keep us tied to the past cannot be handled through reflection alone. She names three: trauma, obsessive thoughts, and depression. Each deserves a closer look, because the distinctions are practical. Knowing which one you are dealing with changes what kind of help you need.

Emotional or psychological trauma, she explains, follows very disturbing or shocking experiences that deeply mark us. These can be single events, such as an accident, a violent act, or a disaster, or they can be prolonged, such as continuous abuse, living in a violent environment, or being the target of bullying or harassment. She gives a concrete example: a person trapped alone in a blacked-out elevator for a couple of hours, in total darkness, who panics. Later, when that person needs to ride an elevator, the body remembers. The heart races, the body trembles, memories flood back along with fear. Giannetti calls these typical reactions to trauma.

When such reactions persist, they can become post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, which she notes typically appears a few weeks after the traumatizing event. Its signs include flashbacks, difficulty sleeping or frequent nightmares, mood swings, avoidance of places and situations that recall the event, and sometimes depression. Because it alters behavior, it is classified as a disorder.

Obsessive thoughts form the second category, and here Giannetti uses the case of a father who lost his job and began to dwell on the ingratitude of people he had helped in the past, who were doing nothing for him now that he needed them. He kept replaying what he had done for them and their lack of gratitude, and the replay produced hatred and resentment. He understood that the thoughts were harming him, yet he could not stop having them. That gap between knowing a thought is harmful and being able to stop it is exactly what separates ordinary rumination from something that calls for help.

Depression is the third. Its signature, in her description, includes repetitive thoughts about how things used to be, about times that will not return, and about what we did or did not do, alongside profound malaise, lost interest in life, sadness, and dejection. Her guidance is direct: if you recognize yourself in these situations, seek medical help, because the work goes beyond the mind's ruminations and requires therapeutic resources. She points to Brazil's CAPS, the Psychosocial Care Centers linked to the SUS, the Unified Health System, as a place where psychological and psychiatric care is available to everyone.

What is the difference between saudade and attachment?

Once those cases are set aside, Giannetti turns to the more common situation: remembering and emotionally revisiting a past that is gone, specifically something good that we had and lost. Her first move is to rehabilitate the feeling itself. It is natural, she says, to remember the good things in life that belong to the past, and Portuguese has a word for this: saudade, usually rendered as longing or nostalgia. (The episode is one of a series, and she points listeners back to her earlier episode on saudade.)

Saudade, in her account, is not a symptom. To feel it is to miss something. The lack it reveals can bring back good memories, make us sigh, and can hurt a little, opening what she describes as a small empty space in the heart. That emptiness is natural, and it carries a message: we lived something memorable and worthwhile. In this sense saudade celebrates the experience even as it aches. She puts it this way:

"Being aware of this is already progress," Giannetti says, referring to the way remembering a happy past can make the present feel lacking.

Attachment is different. Giannetti defines it as a desire to retain and preserve something beneficial, something that gives comfort, pleasure, and security. When that thing no longer exists, the mind keeps returning to the past in order to relive it and, in her words, to eternalize it. The result is sadness, discontent, a sense of helplessness, a suffering that is quieter than trauma but still real. Saudade honors what was. Attachment tries to bring it back and, failing, keeps paying for the attempt.

This distinction is the spine of the episode, and it is useful well beyond the podcast. Two people can feel the same longing for an old home. One feels it and then goes on living in the present. The other keeps measuring every current day against the lost one, and so every day falls short.

Why do we keep clinging to times that are gone?

Giannetti grounds the distinction in lived examples. Cibele, the student, tells the reporter Valéria that the past which comforts her is the same one that makes her sad, and that she wonders whether her best days have already passed without her noticing. In a second voice from the same material, a woman who remembers her children when they were small says she often cries, and that after twenty-six years, with her children grown and living their own lives, she still thinks, "If I could go back in time and live it all again." (Quotes from the episode are translated from the Portuguese.)

The third story is quieter and more visual. Nilde walks through the city where she was born and lived for much of her life. Every corner holds a memory: her late grandmother tending plants in the backyard, the bar that was a gathering place for friends and is now an ice cream parlor, the passenger train where people used to sign through the windows, now a train that hauls grain. Everything has changed. She returns from these walks feeling low, because it hurts to keep thinking about where those times have gone.

Giannetti's observation is that remembering a happy past and comparing it to a present that does not match our wishes increases dissatisfaction with the present. The comparison is almost automatic, and it is rigged: the past is remembered in its best light, while the present is lived in its ordinary, unfinished form. Naming that mechanism is the first step. It does not yet let us put it down.

How does impermanence help us let go?

For the path forward, Giannetti returns to a principle she calls the way out: understanding and accepting impermanence, which means nothing remains the same, ever. This is not offered as consolation in the sense of pretending the loss does not matter. It is the recognition that the moment you cherished was a moment, and that the desire to hold it is what keeps the suffering alive. The episode's later sections, in the portions available in transcript, make the point directly: happy moments are impermanent, and the real question is what happens to us while we cling to them.

Practically, this suggests a shift in how we treat a memory. The aim is not to erase the good time or to force a cheerful face on a painful one. It is to let the memory be a memory: something that was real, that gave something to us, and that is complete. Saudade can stay as a warm ache. Attachment is what we release, by seeing that the wish to relive a moment is not the same as being able to live it again.

The episode also makes clear that letting go is not a single decision. It is a repeated noticing. Each time the same scene plays, the same question applies: is this a sweet remembrance I can hold lightly, or a loop that is taking something from my present? Giannetti presents recognition as the beginning, not the end.

Where to go from here

If this episode speaks to you, start by sorting your own experience into the categories it draws. Is the past hurting you because of a traumatic event, a loop of obsessive thoughts you cannot stop, or a depressive pattern of dwelling on what was and what you did or did not do? If any of these fit, Giannetti's advice is to seek professional help, and in Brazil the CAPS centers within the SUS are a starting point. If the feeling is more like saudade, a tender longing for something you lived, you may simply need to name it and let it be.

For listeners who want to go deeper, the episode is part of a serial sequence, and several related episodes are worth hearing in order: 39, on embracing life as it is; 45, on the power of self-acceptance; 67, on guilt; 68 and 69, on forgiving yourself; 80, on saudade; and 123, on rumination. The episode also cites Pema Chodron's book Quando tudo se desfaz and a video by psychiatrist Ana Beatriz Barbosa, both of which Giannetti recommends as further reading.

Cibele's situation is a useful mirror. Her best days may feel behind her, but the question Giannetti leaves open is not whether the past was good. It is whether we are willing to let the past be past, so that the present can begin to be the one we are actually living.