Our journeys through life are marked with scars; small scars, big scars, beautiful scars, and scars we prefer to keep covered and hidden from sight. Some of these wounds and hurts that we experience may be so large that they stop us in our tracks and bring us to our knees. But others might be so subtle, a mere movement of air in our life stories that they pass by unnoticed by our conscious minds, leaving us with fears we can’t explain, or insecurities we can’t understand. Life is not a linear path and as long as we are alive we’re repeating a dance of joy, love, pain, grief, learning, and healing.
BUT IT’S THE HEALING THAT I HAVE FOUND HOLDS THE MOST OPPORTUNITY FOR TRANSFORMATION BECAUSE HEALING AND LEARNING ARE OPTIONAL. THE EMOTIONS OF LIFE ARE NOT.
What does it mean to heal? Healing does not mean to forget and move on, carrying pain and bitterness inside us. Healing does not mean that we avoid the parts of life that make us uncomfortable so that we don’t have to come face to face with our own emotions. And healing certainly does not mean that we take what is hurting us and blame it on others so that we can stay in the victim role, disempowered and disillusioned.
TO HEAL MEANS TO EMBRACE THAT WHICH NEEDS TO BE SEEN, TO UNDERSTAND THAT WHICH IS CAUSING US PAIN, TO LEARN THE LESSONS THAT ARE PRESENTING THEMSELVES, AND TO FIND THE ANSWERS AND ACCEPTANCE THAT WE SEEK WITHIN OURSELVES.
Healing is a process and one that can take years. Healing is important because it allows us to take our own emotions, reactions and hurts, and look so deeply into them that not only do we enable ourselves to move forward with our lives, but to grow and evolve.
Most of us grow up thinking that healing is something that others are responsible for. The person who betrayed us is the one that needs to reach out. The one who left us is the one who must provide us with closure. The one who made us angry is the one who should apologize and make amends. Without even realizing it we start giving our power away, often to the ones who made us feel powerless to begin with. The need to heal often begins with us feeling like victims and our first step to attempt to heal ourselves is often to make someone else responsible for that too. We think that because we feel the way we do off the back of someone else’s actions, that they must be the ones to make it right. When we give away the responsibility of our own healing we place the quality of our lives and the sanctity of our relationships with ourselves in the possession of the ones who hurt us.
No matter what the situation is, if YOU need to heal, YOU need to take responsibility for it. To take responsibility for our own healing process doesn’t mean that we necessarily take the blame or make what we’ve been through acceptable, but it does mean understanding that we alone are responsible for our emotions and so only we can do the healing that life is requiring of us. Our emotions are deeply personal and difficult for others to understand for they are directly linked to our past experiences, our old wounds and scars, our values, our perceptions, and our personalities. Only we can truly understand what we’re feeling and why. Although our emotions may be triggered by others, they are never the responsibility of another because they can ultimately not control what emotions are brought up in your life experience.
Healing can be an exhausting and messy process with many different “stages” or emotional places we might walk through. It’s not a decision we can simply make, but a journey we need to take for our own wellbeing. While you’re healing you might experience phases where you feel:
- Depressed
- Angry and resentful
- Hopeless
- Invincible
- In denial
- Regret or remorse
- Vulnerable
- Happy and at peace
Healing is a process of allowing everything that is pent up inside of you to be released without judgement. On the days where you feel like your heart is breaking, you allow the tears to come out freely. On the days you feel so angry you could scream, you validate your own anger and find healthy ways to let it out. On the days you feel regret you take the time to honour and make space for those thoughts. To heal does not mean that the pain goes away or it no longer effects you – to heal means that you commit to leaning in, doing the work to process your emotions and understand what it means for you and your life so that you can continue to grow and be unhindered by your scars.
xx