When we experience pain as a result of trauma, conflict, abuse, and abandonment, we are left with scars and beliefs that can follow us in our shadows for life.
Our minds create thoughts about what happened and/or what could have been. This creates a subconscious fear that finds its way into our life and moves forward with us into our future.
If not healed, the experience haunts us, and we become mere shells of the person we were created to be. We make decisions and choices that are contrary to our best thinking. We give credit to the limiting beliefs designed by the things that hurt us.
The emotional pain gets worse as our sense of failure and dissatisfaction grow over time. When we cannot let go of something that happened or the pain it caused, it is usually because we don’t understand it.
When the emotional experience still causes pain, we probably haven’t received the message it is sending us, and we are likely to repeat history. But there is hope and there is real healing.
While physical healing usually requires rest and rehabilitation, emotional healing requires work. It requires us to get vulnerable. Then we can dive in, find wisdom, and make the choice and commitment to change our lives.
Here are 3 ways you can heal emotionally:
- Admit your role in the situation.
Identify the situation and the root of the problem that created the pain. Using as few words as possible, describe the situation.
What was within your control? What action did you take? Where did you fail to take action? Where did you take the wrong action? Did anything influence your actions?
In order to get crystal clear on the reality of the situation, it is imperative not to justify, analyze, judge, nor alter the situation.
Make sure that you allow yourself the time and space you need so that you are able to feel the full range of emotions that may come up as you unpack the details.
- Release & Review your feelings.
When we are scared, upset, or confused, we tend to stuff our emotions and limit our capacity to feel so that we can move on. This behavior does not actually stop the negative feelings. Instead, it lingers in our bodies and in our shadow.
Releasing your feelings means allowing yourself to cry, shake, scream, yell, pound a pillow, and journal about the raw pain you are experiencing. This is critical to healing, allowing yourself to feel, validates your emotions.
Reviewing the emotions might mean reminding yourself that anyone in your situation would feel the exact same way. Or, it might mean sitting and thinking about how deeply disappointed you are and allowing that emotion of disappointment to pass entirely through you.
Allow yourself to completely feel your honest emotions, even when it gets uncomfortable. This is essential to the releasing and healing process. It is also necessary for figuring out what you need to do next.
- Choose your course correction and change.
Getting clear about what happened and how it has been holding you back will help you live differently. Feeling the full range of emotions should help you find out what you really care about, what really matters to you, and what you really want so you can create a life you love.
When you identify a limiting belief during step 2, step 3 provides the framework to challenge the belief and create a new empowering belief.
Now you are ready to address yourself. What do you need and what do you want? You have the power to make decisions about you behave and to choose what you want to and do not want to do.
This 3-step process for emotional healing is how we grow and develop. Sometimes we can do it naturally with effort and other times we need a little help. Either way, it is critical to your well being that face what make you hut and do not stuff it away.
You can always ask yourself these three questions:
Why am I upset? What do I really want? What do I have to do to make it happen?