A Journey To Heal is Your Destiny

Deciding to Heal

Each day is a little better. When you injure yourself, it takes time to heal. Every day, if you pay attention, you realize it hurts a little less to do normal things like brushing your teeth or combing your hair. Step by step, your body heals. Sometimes, you re-injure yourself, or aggravate the part that’s still healing, taking a few steps back in the process. Ultimately, you reach the point where you’re strong enough to withstand the things which set you back when you weren’t quite healed.

The mind is no different. Each time you experience trauma, you have to go through a healing process. The trouble is, many people fail to allow for the cleansing and purging mental and emotional healing require. They fail to recognize healing is a journey, not a quick fix. Those quick fixes so many mistake for healing are actually coping mechanisms. The more you use coping mechanisms instead of allowing yourself to embrace the process of healing, the harder it will be to heal later.

I don’t speak of this lightly. I was the queen of coping mechanisms. Emotionally detached and abusive parents? Create a coping mechanism to muffle the pain. Cruelty and unkindness from peers? Enter another coping mechanism. Divorce…well, you get the picture. By the time I was 40 every normal, human emotion I had was buried beneath an avalanche of coping mechanisms. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I still had my father’s suicide to look forward to, 10 years after my mom left by her own hand rather than waiting for nature to take its course.

Choosing to Express and Release Buried Emotions

Still and all, the decision to stop hiding, and begin healing had to come from me. Granted, it was incited by the fear of being utterly alone when my daughter started talking about moving out, but I still had a choice. Looking back, I’m not sure I’d have chosen the path I did had I known what it entailed, but I know it was the best decision I ever made, now that I’ve survived the worst of it. In a way, I think the Universe helps us make a difficult decision by withholding the specifics until it’s too late to turn back.

In over 40 years of my current incarnation, I’d accumulated a lot of unexpressed feelings, pain, and heartache that were exacerbated by ancestral wounds, and a set of beliefs and standards which outlived their usefulness a generation or two before mine. I discovered after I’d ripped down the dam, and had a deluge rushing down the streets of my soul, dragging everything in it’s path along for the ride, there was more stuffed down inside me than I realized. Much of it had been waiting over a century for release, and grabbed the opportunity to escape the confines of a false world view my family unconsciously passed down to generation after generation.

Each of us spent our life trying to be an island in the midst of a bubbling, boiling mass of humanity. It’s a wonder everyone else managed to keep their walls intact as long as they did. Small wonder there’s a history of nervous breakdowns, alcoholism, and my parents’ suicides to show for how well we’ve held it all together.

Baptism by Fire

I’ve said many times, embarking on a healing journey isn’t for the faint of heart. One of the first beliefs you have to shatter is the one saying you have to do it alone. You have to go through a sort of baptism by fire when your closest companion is abject terror while you’re opening up a heart that’s been stuck behind barbed wire and a crocodile-filled moat all your life.

You never developed a protective, outer skin of your own because you depended on the walls and masks you erected to keep you safe from the evils you grew up believing were wielded by humanity.

The early years are given over to allowing yourself to experience things that thicken your skin, and to feeling emotions you stuffed into air-tight boxes deep in your soul. But you also get to learn those emotions are far less frightening in the light of day than your imagination made them while they were stuffed down inside, growing moldy and gathering dust.

Changing Your Own Landscape

Going back to the example of a physical injury, it’s a kind of scabbing over after re-opening the old wounds so the infection can drain and begin to heal. Instead of pus and blood, what drains is coping mechanisms, and unexpressed emotions.

In time, you remove yourself from situations where everyone around you is broken and hiding. You learn there are people who, instead of abusing you, dismissing your feelings, or laughing behind your back when you stumble, want to help you get over the tough spots, relate to what you’re feeling, and can teach you vulnerability is a blessing instead of a curse.

I only see a couple of people I used to socialize with before I started healing, and they were unique and special even then. In some ways, I think they were shining stars meant to show me I wasn’t supposed to fit in where I’d chosen to land. I wasn’t supposed to keep being hurt and broken, or to stuff everything down inside. I was allowed to choose not only who I associated with, but that I needed to start making better choices so I’d be supported when I took the first step towards healing, and my walls crashing down.

Fixing Yourself With a Little Help From Your Friends

I won’t say there aren’t times when I feel alone and adrift. Often, it’s because I’ve fallen back on old habits, and shut my friends out instead of letting them know I’m struggling. It’s too easy to go back to the old stories I used to tell myself to excuse what amounted to friends at the time from helping me over a particularly rough spot.

When the moment has passed, I realize I’ve done my friends a huge disservice by refusing them the opportunity to help me as they allow me to help them. Those imaginary conversations I have are rarely, if ever accurate either. I’ve yet to find a time when one or another is too busy, or overwhelmed to lend me an ear for a little while so I can exorcise the latest round of emotional demons to surface and be purged.

It isn’t about having someone else fix me, nor for me to fix them when they’re struggling. Often, a sympathetic ear helps clear the rubble, and allows the solution to appear. More often than not, when I’m revisiting old, outgrown habits, I find I’ve surrounded myself with dark clouds and have lost sight of the fact I can move to a brighter location.

You’ve Got This!

Yes, today may be one of your tougher days. You may be exhuming some of the more painful

parts of your past. By tomorrow, you’ll have aired them out a bit, cleared the cobwebs, and looked at them in a brighter light.

You’ll have detached from the feelings they stirred a bit so you can start untangling the emotions, and disassembling the coping mechanisms. As each day passes, the pain grows less intense, especially if you share what you’re feeling with a friend who may have had a similar experience.

So stretch the tight muscles, take it slow and easy for a bit if necessary, reach out to a friend, and above all, use the experience to make you stronger, and more resilient. The walls you built were meant to be a temporary stop on your journey, not a permanent address.

About the Author

Sheri Conaway is a Holistic Ghostwriter, and an advocate for cats and mental health. Sheri believes in the Laws of Attraction, but only if you are a participant rather than just an observer. Her mission is to Make Vulnerable Beautiful and help entrepreneurs touch the souls of their readers and clients so they can increase their impact and their income.

If you’d like to have her write for you, please visit her Hire Me page for more information. You can also find her on Facebook Sheri Levenstein-Conaway Author.

Be sure to watch this space for news of the upcoming releases of ” Rebuilding After Suicide” and “Sasha’s Journey”.