Emotional Healing
Many people tend to want to control the process of emotional healing by minimizing the pain and controlling their emotions, but this can 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 can be more present with yourself and your loved ones.
When Do You Need Emotional Healing?
All people will need emotional healing at some point during their lives—we all experience challenges and difficult emotions that need processing.
Some common life stressors after which people may seek emotional healing include:
Loss of a loved one
Divorce
Breakups
Job loss
Abuse (including emotional, physical, and sexual)
Illness
Outside of specific events, it's also possible to experience intensifying, lingering, and seemingly unshakeable anger, sadness, or anxiety that feels like it is taking over your life. These feelings may cause functional impairment in your day-to-day life. Emotional healing may look different if symptoms are becoming chronic.
No matter what the trigger for your difficult emotions, emotional healing is possible in all of these scenarios.
Questions to Ask Yourself Before Healing
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?
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 shows 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.
