Healing 101: Terms, Getting Started & Resources
For many of us the desire to be different—to understand ourselves more deeply, have more confidence, or live a more fulfilling life—is there. Recognizing this desire is easy because it reveals itself anytime we experience pain, suffering, or general unhappiness. But knowing how to take the next steps and begin to apply the actual changes that are necessary to begin to live this more fulfilling life can be much more difficult. But no worries! I too experienced some of this resistance, and continue to, and I can assure you that once you get past it you’ll feel much better. ❤️
For some, this resistance or inability to get started can be the most paralyzing part of healing. Although you want to be better, actually doing better is completely different and requires more work.
Although there is no rule book on how to approach healing, as this process is completely personal and unique to each person, there are some steps that you can take to begin your journey to a happier and healthier life. Keep reading to see how!
1. Ask yourself why you want to heal int he first place.
Why do you want to heal? What are you hoping to heal from? Who are you hoping you’ll be once you are healed? It's important to note that healing can be a lifelong process and that how long it takes you to heal, if at all, is entirely dependent on you, your circumstances, who you are as a person, and how much time and energy you’re willing to invest in yourself. But, like with any other journey in life, it's important to know why you’re getting started. This way, when it gets hard, and it will get hard, you can remind yourself of the reasons why you got started in the first place and why you might want to keep going.
2. Take inventory of your thoughts, habits, behaviors, and relationships.
If healing was like baking a cake, taking inventory of your thoughts, habits, behaviors, and relationships would be like going to your pantry to see what ingredients you needed. For maybe the first time in your life you will have to truly sit with your emotions and observe yourself in the same way that you observe other people and situations. This might look like: breathing before reacting to something, pausing before responding to someone or something, sitting with and holding space for you, and your emotions even if it’s uncomfortable. For me this looked like reflecting on, and noticing, when I felt the most insecure, defensive, judgmental, unloved, or critical. From this point, I was able to identify areas where I wanted to heal and grow. If you’re having trouble observing your thoughts, try journaling! This has been one of the most fundamental resources in my journey with healing and self-love. You can start journaling too, using the free journaling prompts that I created for you. :)
3. Start asking yourself the hard questions.
This is where the pain ushers innnnnnnnnnnnn. I don’t want to scare you, but I also want to keep it real! At this stage in healing, once you have identified where you want to heal and grow, you will begin reviewing your life in a critical lens. By critical I don’t mean being judgmental, but rather thinking critically about your life experiences that have contributed to who you are now. Are you a people pleaser? This might mean that at some point in your life you faced rejection or abandonment and so, now you people please to maintain any form of human connection, even if it’s an unhealthy one. This is just an example of how thinking critically about your life’s experiences might lead you to some very important insights. Once you begin to ask these hard questions, its important to be gentle with yourself. You might not like the fact that you people pleased, for example. You might even feel ashamed or depressed at how you neglected yourself during these moments. But it’s important to be empathetic with yourself and realize that you were coping with the conditioning and narratives that you internalized over the years. You were trying to protect yourself from more pain, we all were and will continue to do so in the future. We’re human. But thinking of yourself negatively or being self-critical during these breakthroughs is not only counterproductive its unhealthy. You cannot heal if you don’t love yourself through the process, you’ll only end up repeating old cycles of negativity. We want to be better and treat ourselves with kindness and respect throughout this entire lifelong journey.
A Helpful Little Healing Glossary:
1. work = the research, introspection and actions that one takes in order to heal and become closer to reaching their highest self.
2. Sitting with/Holding space = providing a safe space (both physical and mental) for your thoughts and emotions and creating a relationship with yourself where you are able to sit with you own emotions and hold space for those emotions.
4. People pleasing = a condition where one might alter their behaviors in order to make others happy. Might look like an aversion to conflict or establishing boundaries.
5. Conditioning = the set of behaviors and ideas we internalize. As children, for example, we might be conditioned to be obedient or quiet.
6. Narratives = The stories that others and we (ourselves) tell one another and ourselves. For example, the idea that we think we aren’t creative or that we are unlovable, are examples of narratives one might tell themselves as a consequence of hearing it elsewhere.
7. Internalization = The process of hearing those narratives and accepting them as Truth.