EMOTIONAL HEALING -Bonus
This article is about a different type of human issue that is often overlooked. It was planned for my www.facebook.com/HealthAnswerr Face Page, however, I kept getting this urging by the Holy Spirit to include it on my www.facebook.com/Revelationsofheaven Face Book page also. This writing deals with physical and emotional trauma in the person’s body and methods to free yourself. Trauma-whether emotional or physical- is a painful, horrifying experience that overwhelms your capacity to cope, and its effects often last for decades. Vitamins are more likely to be irritable, anxious, and depressed. Focusing, missing work, having financial problems, sleeping issues, and addictions are some of the concerns facing the person with a trauma. At best this person has a major health problem; at worse they feel suicidal. There are so many ways to be traumatized and expects estimate that an astounding 75 percent of us have experienced one or more traumatic events of varying degrees. While listing many more of these examples that cause our trauma may help to identify them, it seems not to serve a useful purpose to list them here. What seems best to include here is a desire to get those experiencing any emotional trauma to seek the undying help of our Lord. So, I will deal with that also.
WHAT IS EMOTIONAL HEALING?
Emotional healing is the process of acknowledging, allowing, accepting, integrating, and processing painful life experiences and strong emotions. It may involve empathy, self-regulation, self-compassion, self-acceptance, mindfulness, and integration. Many people have a tendency to want to control the process of emotional healing by minimizing the pain and controlling their emotions, but this can actually inhibit the process of emotional healing.
Emotional healing takes the time that it takes—which may be longer or shorter than you expect or plan on—if you allow it to be fully acknowledged, felt, moved through, and processed. Emotional healing will look different for everybody, but it may include emotional regulation skills, a feeling of lightness, and stronger relationships as you are able to be more present with yourself and your loved ones. All people will need emotional healing at some point during their lives—we all experience challenges and difficult emotions that need processing.
WHAT OFTEN GETS OVERLOOKED:
Beyond physical injury caused by an event, trauma leaves an imprint on our body, not just your brain, in the form of heartbreaking and gut-wrenching physical sensations. This is the emotional state that often causes many to just give up. For real healing, to take place, your body needs to learn that the danger has passed and it’s “possible to live in the safety of the present”. This statement comes from 2022 Bottom Line’s Health Breakthrough- but it is true in your spiritual being. The means when we go to our Lord for helping us to eliminate the danger, to help us deal with the events, and gives us the peace/contentment that makes it “possible to live in the safety of the present”. This tells me that much of the latest health news and scientific discoveries in a broad spectrum of fields are right in line with spiritual assistance from our Lord.
QUESTIONS TO ASK OR TO CONSIDER
Emotional healing is not an easy process, but it can be incredibly rewarding for many people and help them find clarity and inspiration in life beyond whatever it is they are healing from. Here are some questions you might want to ask yourself as you embark on your healing journey. What are you healing from? Maybe you don’t know, but you know you’d like things to be different:
- How is not healing affecting your life?
- What do you want your life to look like after you’ve healed?
- If you woke tomorrow, how would you know you had healed?
- Are you ready to heal?
- Are you willing to sit through some discomfort in service of healing?
- What will help you on your emotional healing journey?
- How has not yet healing served you?
- What can you do to make your healing journey gentle for yourself?
GOALS OF RECOVERY
The challenge of recovering from trauma is to know what you know and feel what you feel without becoming overwhelmed, enraged, ashamed or collapsed. There are four goals to be considered. GOAL 1: Finding a way to become calm and focused. GOAL 2. Learning to maintain that calm in response to images, thoughts, sounds and physical sensations that remind you of the past. GOAL 3. Finding a way to be fully alive in the present and engaged with the people around you. GOAL 4. Not keeping secrets from yourself. Including secrets about the ways you have managed to survive from addictions or bad actions.
TIPS TO WORK ON- BEFORE SEEKING PROFESSIONAL HELP
Practice self-compassion—you’re not broken. It’s pretty hard to heal if you’re beating yourself up all the time, and one study showed that those who practice self-compassion show greater increases in well-being1 than those who didn’t.
Thank yourself. Yes, that’s right—thank yourself. Despite the emotional pain you’ve experienced that’s leading you on this emotional healing journey, you have made it this far. Whatever coping mechanisms you used worked for you at the time, even if they don’t work now, or weren’t the “healthiest” in the first place.
Don’t go it alone. Science shows2 we heal better together. Your instinct might be to go into hiding until you are “done” healing, but the reality is that your friends and family probably want to help you! Reach out to someone who feels safe.
Don’t try to “fix” it all at once. Emotional healing is not simple, and whatever happened to you likely has deeper roots in you than you realized and may be affecting you in many ways. Back to being realistic: don’t expect to fix all the ways your issue or trauma has affected you all at once.
Sit through it. This may be one of the hardest things to do. You are likely experiencing a range of deep feelings such as sadness, grief or rage. Those aren’t fun emotions and it’s tempting to want to ignore them or rush through them. It will be uncomfortable but acknowledging tough feelings is part of healing. The good news is that feelings do pass even if it doesn’t feel like they will.
Know that progress isn’t linear. You may feel like you are making the best breakthroughs, and then you have a terrible day where you feel like all of your emotional healing has been undone—or that you did something wrong. If you broke a leg, you might have a bad day where you’re in pain again despite a sustained period of healing.
BENEFITS OF EMOTIONAL HEALING
You may not like the pain that you’re in, but maybe you’re afraid to work on emotional healing because you’re afraid of what you might find in the process. This is a valid concern, but here are some of the health benefits3 that are associated with the positive emotions associated with healing.
Better cardiovascular health
Potentially longer life span
Lower cortisol (stress hormone) output
Lower heart rate
Less likely to develop respiratory infection when exposed to a common cold or flu
HOW TO FIND EMOTIONAL HEALING
If you’re trying to heal your emotional pain, here are some ways that you can embark on your journey to emotional healing.
SPIRITUAL HELP –Our God is the greatest source of help for all types of healing, joy, love, and mercy. We need to be in His Will and seek that Will for our lives. God will answer all of our prayers- not necessarily when we want or even sometimes the way we want the answer to be. When we are in God’s Will and the answer to our prayers are not what we desire, God will likely provide an even greater answer for our needs.
Therapy -Emotional healing can be incredibly rewarding but it can also be painful in the interim. You might want to consider talking to a mental health professional who is trained in working with people on emotional healing journeys every day. They can help you heal at a pace that is appropriate for you and provide the insight you might not be able to reach on your own.
Mindfulness -When we are attempting emotional healing from something, it can be very easy to get pulled back into past events or to catastrophize what the future will be like if you don’t heal. Mindfulness practices can help you be in the present moment and see that, at this moment, you are just fine. Journaling is often suggested—and for good reason. Research shows4 that journaling is an effective way to reach insights into the unconscious by helping people work through their feelings and make meaning of what has happened to them. Allow yourself to feel the fullness of your grief, anger, pain, or loss without attaching further meaning, stories, or thoughts. This can be deeply healing and helpful in processing emotions.
Research indicates the cycle of an emotion may last only 90 seconds.5 This information can help emotions feel less overwhelming. When you are overcome by an emotion, you can keep an eye on the clock to note how long it takes before the feeling dissipates—employing mindfulness skills in the meantime. Notice, allow, and describe the physical sensation of the emotion moving through your body without judging it or attempting to change it. Breathe through the sensations. You can perform exercises to ground yourself such as putting your feet on the floor, drinking a sip of water, or running cold water over your hands.
Move Your Body -As you’re experiencing difficult emotions, try to move your body to help process your feelings. Move your body in ways that it wants to move (i.e., slowly or quickly, shaking or running). Moving the body to process stress or trauma can be seen in the animal kingdom as well. In his book “Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma,” therapist Peter A. Levine notes that in the wild, an impala that escapes its predator will instinctively “shake off” the traumatic event, regaining full movement of its body.6 Therapeutic techniques like somatic experiencing (SE) and trauma release exercises (TRE) can help process and move trauma and emotions from within the body. SE involves a person becoming aware of their internal bodily sensations and bringing awareness to them.7 TRE involves a person intentionally moving their bodies to decrease stress levels.8
Get Support -Be open to receiving support from your community. Allow yourself to be seen, supported, and cared for by friends and loved ones. However, your best support will come from asking for God’s help. You need to be specific and ask for God’s Will. Your relationship to the Lord needs to be strong, consistent, loving and never failing (Faithful). This means first to become a true believer in Jesus as your Savior and ask for forgiveness of sins. Then we are promised to get our salvation and eternal life through faith in the Lord. It is a gift from God. We can do nothing (like good works) to be saved, all we need to do is to accept God.
MORE TO COME ON EMOTIONAL HEALING SOON
SOME SCIENTIFIC SOURCES AND HELP FOR EMAOTIONAL HELP
- Eye Movement Desensitization (EMDR)
- Yoga
- Neurofeedback
- Talk Therapy with Qualified Group
- Writing of All Types