Wholeness Healing Center

Feeling, Dealing, Healing: Let’s Get Started

“Gosh! This work of getting better is hard, isn’t it?”

Yes, it can be, especially if we put ourselves on hold while raising a family, developing a career, and just living life. We quite often “numbed” ourselves or avoided anything remotely looking like feelings until we felt as if we had the time, energy and courage. And now? Perhaps now is the time. Kids have graduated and moved out, work is settling down, time is more available, or maybe it is just that the old memories, the old feelings, keep creeping back in. Yes, perhaps it is time.

First, we have to allow the feelings, which we may have put on hold, pushed down, or completely ignored. Now they keep coming back up and maybe even stronger, with more strength behind them. Now, when they come up, you may be more aware and open to the message of their continued appearance. So now is the time. Now is YOUR time. Time to FEEL the feelings. Time to OWN them, time to reflect, time to sort them out and see how they truly have affected your life, how they have been a part of the patterns you have lived out. Raw. Emotional. Real. Gut-wrenching. Time-stopping. But most definitely a part of what has made you YOU. As we are more open to allowing the feelings some space in our hearts, some acknowledgment in our brains, we take the courageous step forward to DEAL with the feelings.

Dealing with feelings requires a whole new set of skills, or ones that have previously gone unused for a while. Ignoring the feelings may have been a great coping skill, but as you allow yourself to actually “feel” them, stepping into and dealing with them will summon up some courage. It is often kind of nice to “appreciate” the fact that we coped by avoiding the feelings, saying “thank you” to our younger selves, as we muster the strength to actually move into dealing with what all of the feelings were about. Abuse, trauma, abandonment, disappointment, expectations of perfection unmet, neglect, many experiences may have caused us to postpone “dealing”, but now, with a more mature perspective, it may be time to deal with those feelings. How did they help you to cope? What is different/better for you now? What do you wish to do differently? Can you accept those feelings for what they were at the time, the necessity, and now allow yourself to deal with them as an adult? How have they affected the patterns of your relationships? What are you willing now to change? To grow? How will that affect your healing? As we accept the feelings and begin to sort them, and their use, out, we deal with the part they have played in our life-path.

As we feel the feelings, as we deal with the feelings, we can then move into the healing. As we recognize the “why” and acknowledge the value of dealing with them, as our younger self and also as our more mature self, we can then appreciate the journey that got us to where we are today. So begins the healing. Acceptance of doing what I needed to do to survive, in the best way possible, with the best tools I had at the time. Appreciation for the coping skills (avoidance, numbing, ignoring, etc.) related to the feelings that I am now ready to deal with, in a much different way. Allowance then to discern what the difference is between what worked then and what works now, what I now can give/provide for myself, loving myself, thanking myself, stepping into my very best self. As we do that, we can then be okay with who I am and what got me here. Healing the younger self by my older self providing what I needed then, able to ask for what I am needing now.

Yes it can be tough. It can also be freeing, relieving us of carrying our past baggage, able to step into our future with a new knowing, a new appreciation, and a new release, giving ourselves permission to do what we need, to say what we feel, to truly inhabit our hearts, knowing that this is genuine, authentic, and really who we are. It just takes the first step of allowing the feelings to come forward, and then the walk becomes so worth it!

Tags: Dealing with feelings, feeling the feelings, Healing through therapy is work