Healing is a widely discussed thing at the moment – thank God. You can only profit from healing your emotional wounds, it’s a shame that not everybody is at least trying to do so. So, if you’re one of those who want to get better and want to heal, congrats. That’s the first step, and you already took it. To go further from there, it’s not always clear how you can heal. It’s not intuitive, at least it wasn’t for me. So, here are 11 things you can do to help you heal and get better and eventually turn into your best version.
1. Find the origin of your pain and your patterns
In order to be able to change something in your life, you must first know where the discomfort comes from. What hurt you? What caused those emotional wounds you have? Sometimes it’s something obvious like a traumatic event or physical abuse in childhood, bullying, a toxic relationship, loneliness, etc. But sometimes it’s deeper. Some people struggle with low self-esteem, insecure attachment styles, have insecurities, feel like they are unimportant, are people-pleasers, feel week, etc. and don’t even know where that comes from.
Try to really understand where your hurt comes from. Were you neglected as a child, did you not receive much love, did you feel like your opinion didn’t matter, or like you didn’t really matter to your parents? Dig deeper. In what situations do you get triggered? What does that trigger cause? What happened? Was it something that someone said to you that subconsciously made you feel small and important like you used to? How do you react to the triggers? Do you want to scream and defend yourself? Do you isolate? Talk down on yourself? Cry? Self-sabotage? Hurt yourself?
These are the most important things to understand. Without getting to the core of things, you wont’ be able to work through it and heal it, you know? What hurt you? When do you feel triggered? How does it make you feel? How do you react? These are the basics!
2. Let it out
Sometimes, in order to learn these things about yourself you need some assistance. Maybe you need help doing this by talking to a therapist, or your friends, or your reflection in the mirror. Try journaling. Talking to someone in hard situations can be so soothing and make you feel good, you should definitely consider that. However, do it with someone you trust or with a professional. Personally, through such conversations I discovered things that I only knew subconsciously that weren’t at first very obvious to me. And only through talking or writing they come out. Such practices really help you get to the roots of a deeper-lying problem. Here, it’s crucial to do it often, best would be to integrate it into a regular routine. Talking or journalling is not something that’s done after one time. Rather, it helps you to regularly check in on your own well being and over and over again find out what’s bothering you.
3. Go through the grief
Once you have identified what could have caused your emotional wounds – and as I said, sometimes that’s easy and sometimes you really need to dig deep and identify those original hurts – don’t ever try to suppress the hurt. If you need to cry, let it out. If you need to shout, do that. It would be detrimental to try to ignore your hurt or distract yourself or try to just forget what happened. In order to come to the healed part of you, you must go through the pain. Actually, there is no way around it. In some situations, the pain will come up again and if you want to be able to handle it you need to accept it and try to work with it. Never ever have I forbidden myself to cry! What needs to come out, must come out. Don’t fight it. Instead of trying to avoid suffering, have someone hold your hand while you go through it.
4. Learn new ways to cope and self-soothe
This is now a big step. This is where lots of action is required, it’s the stage where you need to retrain your mind to handle certain situations. Whenever you feel unimportant, you need to remind yourself that you are in fact important. You need to talk to yourself and your inner child and convince them that they are worthy, that they are loved. If you feel like someone is abandoning you, you need to be there for yourself. You need to learn to self-soothe, you need to rewire your brain to think differently that what it has learned in the past. And sometimes you have to tell yourself the same thing 57 times until you believe it, but so be it. What do you do when you feel lonely, and sad and unloved and unimportant? What if you get scared? Learn techniques that help you handle future hurt. In the best case, you have a therapist that helps you with this and gives you a few tools to handle difficult situations.
5. Change your environment
Sometimes, healing can only happen when you take yourself out of a situation that caused the emotional wound and the trauma in the first place. Move out if you need to. Move to a different city or even a different country (I know that sounds crazy but the happiest I have ever been was in Spain, where I lived, which is not my home country)! If your friends are toxic, don’t engage with them as much. If your boy- or girlfriend are toxic, break up. I know it sounds easier said than done, and it is. But sometimes, life-changing changes sometimes require radical action. And sometimes, you only recognize how good you feel in a new environment once you have arrived there, not before.
6. Forgiveness and understanding
If you’re finally in a place where you have identified your hurt and triggers, you took yourself out of a toxic environment and unhealthy situations and you tried to rewire how you react to certain situations and triggers, now forgiveness and understanding is required. Forgiving someone who has hurt you, helps you take some weight off your shoulders. And as they always say, forgiving someone doesn’t benefit them, it benefits you. Try to understand why someone hurt you as they did. Try to see the situation from their point of view. Maybe they also had a difficult childhood or were living in painful situations. Maybe what they did to you was the best they could. Try to let go of trying to change a situation. Rather accept it and try to move on. Whoever hurt you doesn’t deserve more of the space in your head. Forgive and understand, let go and let it be. And again, maybe a therapist can help you here, as forgiving isn’t an easy task that at some point is just done.
7. Find healing rituals
If you got to this point, you have already gotten further than most people, congrats. From here, you should try to focus on you and find things that make you feel good and again, help you handle difficult situations. What can you do on a daily basis that strengthens your inner balance and can already create happiness where before was just pain. Such rituals can look like
- Yoga
- Meditation
- Massages
- Journalling
- Sitting in the sun
- Having coffee with your girlfriends
- Reading
- Affirmations
- Movement
- Healthy eating
- A new hobby
These things should turn into routinely things, stuff that you do often that makes you feel good. They can function as tools to help you handle life if it tends to get harder again.
8. Try something new
Here, I’d say just try something new. Get out of your comfort zone. Find things that bring new joy and happiness into your life. Now is the time to invest into art and dance classes, trips to a museum or to a new city, cook something you have never cooked before, take a different route to work, have your morning coffee in a different café. Once you have gotten rid of the bad and hurtful things, try to fill your days with new, exciting stuff. Go meet new people. Or do new things with people you love. Go sit in a park and read a book. Spend some time with yourself. Figure out what feels good and do more of that. Try to change things up and have new things to look forward to. Make your life exciting again.
9. Fall (back) in love with yourself
Once you tried new things and looked for joy, go and apply it. The more you spend time with yourself, the more you get to know yourself. After a while you know what you love to do. So do more of that. Really get to know yourself. This is not just about your hurt and pain and trauma. You have already figured that out (I hope). Now it’s about knowing what makes you laugh, what sparks joy in you, what opinions you have, what passions, what interests. Read books. Lots of them and about many different things. They broaden your horizon so much. Once in a while, try to see yourself from an outside perspective. Try to describe yourself like and old man would lovingly talk about his wife, do you know what I mean?
Something like this: She loved to have a glass of red wine when she came home in the evening. And then, she just sat on her favorite chair and loved to talk about her day. Often, she talked about philosophy. She was just so interested in what people are like, her eyes sparkled when she described how a mother interacted with her child today when she walked past them. She loved to wear light blue and beige. Those were her favorite colors. And every night before she went to sleep, she used to read a book. Fantasy books were her favorite. And first thing in the morning she needed her cup of coffee. You couldn’t talk to her before that first cup, she would be so grumpy. But then she just loved to sit on the balcony and enjoy the sun while sipping on that coffee. And every time she was about to take a shower she danced to her favorite songs in the mirror. I could always hear her sing when she was showering. She was just such a ray of sunshine.
You know? Like that! Know these kind of things about yourself.
10. Treat yourself like a person you adore
Hand in hand with the one above goes this point. To fall back in love with yourself and not identify yourself too much through that pain, treat yourself to something nice. Remember, the goal is to fall in love with yourself, so you need to treat yourself like a person you adore. Buy yourself something, take your time while getting ready, paint your nails, take yourself out to dinner, buy yourself flowers, take a trip, go the ballet or the opera, the cinema, etc. But also listen to what you need, take yourself serious, don’t neglect yourself and your needs, take care of your health, have healthy boundaries with yourself, don’t people-please. Those times are over. Now, it’s time to prioritize your own well-being. There is no space to consider someone else’s needs before yours. It’s your time to shine now. Make it happen.
11. Spend time with quality people
One thing you should not do in the process of healing is thinking you have to isolate yourself in order to be able to heal. No. You don’t have to cut people that are good for you out of your life. You can still go have fun with your friends and spend time with people who matter to you. In fact, you should do that. We are human beings, we’re social creatures and we need connection. Keep your loved ones close and, if you can, include them in your healing journey. You don’t suddenly need to become a lone wolf to deal with all the shit in your life. You can heal your wounds with people still being in your life. Good people can bring so much value to your life, don’t neglect those relationships. And remember, sometimes they need you too! Keep that in mind.
What else you need to understand about healing
Healing is not an intuitive thing. Sometimes you can do all the things and still feel like there is no progress. Here are some things you should keep in mind when trying to heal. First of all, healing is a constant process that is never truly over. You will never reach a point where you can just let it go and never worry about it again. It will get better with time and the more time you spend with yourself and that journey, the easier it will be for you. However, there could always be set-backs. Healing is not linear! One day you can feel like you’re crushing it and the next day you lie in bed crying and don’t understand how that could happen.
But that doesn’t mean you’re failing. This is a normal trait of a healing journey, don’t get discouraged. Healing is also not and end goal but a process. So, fall in love with the journey, not the destination. Healing is also not always pretty. It will take a lot of discipline and hardship. Maybe you will have to reopen chapters you thought you closed forever. Sometimes, you have to relive the pain to get through it, even if that is the last thing you want. But it’s necessary. You will need to learn how to be able to pick yourself back up again, even if it feels like the most difficult thing in life.
Healing will never reach a perfect stage. But once you got to a point where you can handle situations that caused you immense pain a little while ago and you won’t break over it, you have gotten pretty far. And you will get there, even if it takes constant and hard effort.
I hope this blog helped you a little. Hopefully, I’ll see you next time.
Much love, Valentina <3
