Emotional Healing | What it Takes to Heal
If you are reading this, I applaud you for even opening this post. It takes SO much courage to embark on your own healing journey. It often feels safer to leave our “skeletons” in our closets rather than face the decay that has been going on for years within ourselves. Getting honest about our wounds can feel unbearable.
Is ignorance bliss? Unfortunately, when it comes to emotional healing, ignorance is almost never bliss. Your wounds will either surface as you work through them, or they will come out sideways, slowly sabotaging all that you love in life.
It takes courage to heal, and I’m so glad you are here.
4 Essential Contributors
Emotional healing requires the presence of…
Safe Relationships
Radical Acceptance
Self-regulation
Courage
These four components lie at the heart of the healing process. They empower you to become an integrated person capable of healthy interdependence, genuine love, and freedom of your will. These four elements will support you on your path toward releasing shame and fear and exchanging it for connection.
Safe Relationships
Every single one of us are inherently relational beings, made for healthy interdependence. As a therapist, the number one burden I hear my clients carry with them is the burden of feeling alone—disconnected from a community of people they feel safe with. I see this in my clients suffering from anxiety, depression, trauma, and relationship issues. Having safe relationships in our lives is not only a goal for so many of us, but it is also part of the process. We heal in the context of relationships.
Healthy relationships with our higher power, others, and ourselves contributes to this sense of wholeness. To heal is to become whole again. As a therapist, I strive to be a safe relationship for my clients. I want them to experience a profound feeling of acceptance and empathy as they share the parts of their story that they had felt ashamed of for so long. This experience of empathy and acceptance in the therapy room creates a sense of emotional safety, which promotes change. As a result of this safety, I have seen my clients discover new insights, experiment with new ways of being, and experience love in the face of truth. My hope is that these experiences will become the foundation for their ability to love themselves.
Whether it is with a therapist, friend, your partner, or someone else in your life, a safe relationship goes a long way in helping you heal. Healing does not happen in isolation. Who are the emotionally safe people in your life? How can you welcome them onto your healing journey?
Radical Acceptance
Shame drives us into hiding and stunts our healing process while radical acceptance opens us up to the healing we long for.
If you are to heal, you must not only encounter the truth about yourself but also radically accept that truth. The non-judgement that you experience in the therapy room is only the beginning. This non-judgement serves as a scaffold for you to love yourself. As you grow in your self-awareness and your capacity for self-love, you begin to draw back to yourself the disowned or denied elements of your story or personhood. You become the resounding voice within you that says, “All of me is welcome here. All of me belongs.” The emotional healing process consists of facing the realities of our own experiences and allowing those mental, physical, and emotional parts of us to join together and carry us along the path of healing. Each time we welcome and accept a part of us, we become more whole—we become more integrated.
Self-regulation
Healing—especially the healing of trauma—requires a sense of safety. You need to feel safe in your relationships and your environment, and you also need to feel safe with yourself. If you have experienced trauma, suicidal ideation, or self-harm, you can probably identify with that desperate feeling of wanting to jump out of your skin. After experiencing a trigger, you feel so unsafe with yourself—as if your whole body was attacking you—and you long for a way to make it all stop.
Feeling safe with yourself by learning to regulate is core to the emotional healing process. When you find that you are capable of your own regulation, safety begins to emerge. There is both an element of surrender and empowerment in self-regulation. You learn to surrender to what you are powerless of, knowing that at the end of the day, you have the power to take care of yourself. This allows for healthy detachment. You no longer feel the need to make demands on your relationships or environment, but instead, can approach life with radical acceptance and confidence, knowing that you are safe. As you learn to regulate, you will begin to enjoy relationships with detached love, which recognizes every person as a gift rather than a tool for your own regulation. The stability that self-regulation provides is linked to your ability to differentiate and have healthy, interdependent relationships.
Courage
Entering into the wounds that need healing demands courage. Healing requires that you be honest with yourself about your wounds and let the therapeutic pain of honesty serve as a vehicle for healing. The result of this process is becoming an actor rather than a reactor in life. Relational support, regulation skills, and radical acceptance, will help you do the difficult work of integrating the parts of yourself that you have tried to dismember from your life. Courage makes the first three components of healing possible as it sustains you in this process.
If you would like to take your first step toward healing, feel free to reach out. I am here to support you on your journey toward wholeness.
