Ask yourself these questions and after the right amount of time, you?ll be able to move on
Photo: Vince Fleming/Unsplash
After a difficult, traumatic, or deeply emotional experience, we?re often left with a sort of debris, an attachment to the past that follows us around.
We?re haunted by ideas of what happened, or what could have been. The fear bleeds into our present lives, and then forward into the future. We bind ourselves up and become anxious shells of the people we know we?re meant to be. That sense of failure and dissatisfaction only makes the pain worse.
Emotional healing is not like physical healing.
While physical healing requires rest, emotional healing requires work. It requires us to dive into the experience, glean wisdom, and commit to changing our lives.
If an emotional experience follows us around, it must contain a message we haven?t yet received. When we can?t let go of something, it?s because we don?t quite trust ourselves not to repeat the mistake. That means we haven?t learned, it means we haven?t grown, and the honest truth is we?re at risk of repeating history until we do.
Here?s how to actually heal emotionally:
1. Get clear on what happened
Describe the situation in the simplest words possible. Then describe how you felt, and why it was so upsetting to you. Get 100% clear on reality.
Next, go a bit deeper. Identify the root of the problem as well as your role in it. What was within your control here? Where did you fail to take action? Where did you take the wrong action? What influenced your actions?
Do not overanalyze, try to distract, or justify the facts. Get clear on the reality of the situation first.
You need to give yourself a safe time and space to experience the full, uninterrupted expression of what you feel.
2. Validate your feelings
Next, you must acknowledge, validate, and release your feelings.
This might mean allowing yourself to cry, shake, yell, or journal about the sheer pain you?re experiencing. It 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 to completely pass through you.
You need to give yourself a safe time and space to experience the full, uninterrupted expression of what you feel.
When we are scared or upset, we tend to stunt our capacity to feel so we don?t feel uncomfortable for too long. What we don?t realize is that we don?t actually stop the feeling ? we just let it linger within our bodies.
Allow yourself to completely feel your honest emotions. This is not only essential to the releasing process, it?s also important for figuring out what you must do next.
3. Determine a course correction
Last, and most importantly, you must use the information you have gathered from the previous two steps to determine how you will correct your course of action in the future.
Getting clear about what happened helps you understand how to respond differently. Allowing yourself to feel the full depth of your feelings allows you to learn what you really care about, what truly matters to you, and what you want to create for yourself.
Focus on whatever the opposite of the bad feeling is. That?s what you really want.
When you understand what you did wrong, or what you really care about experiencing in life, you?re then able to make decisions about how to behave. You are able to choose what you do and do not want to do. You are able to determine where to put conscious effort, and where to ease up.
This process is how we develop ourselves. Sometimes, we do it naturally. Other times, we need a little help.
The next time an overwhelming feeling arises, instead of trying to push it away, go through the process of asking yourself: Why are you upset, what do you really want, and how will you make it happen in the future?
