We live in a society that is much more focused on mental health and wellness. When I was in school, we didn’t talk about mental health. If you were diagnosed with anything, you kept it quiet. We did not even discuss it with friends. We were raised by a generation that decided you just didn’t talk about things like that.
You did not want to be the depressed kid at school. People would avoid you like the plague. Take it from me. I had a friend for three years who decided in high school to write me a letter to tell me she didn’t want to be my friend anymore because I was depressed. At the time, I was crushed. Now I can look back on it and realize it is just one more brick that added to my foundation of distrust in people. Just one example to show how extreme this stigma of mental health ran; it could cost you your friends if you didn’t learn to smile and go with the flow.
Making friends was difficult because your friendships were shallow. They were based on small things you had in common rather than true connections between you and another person.
As a result, many of us grew up trying to put a smile on our faces when we weren’t happy on the inside. We learned to mask our disappointment and anger and bottle up our sadness. We never learned to communicate how we felt to anyone around us, or even accept it ourselves. We simply pushed it all down. This created a wound in us. A sense of longing for another connection as well as a desperation for the ability to express ourselves. We smothered our feelings and individuality our whole lives. Now we are all in our 30s and 40s trying to do better and most of us don’t know where to start.
What is Healing?
The healing journey means so many things, but the biggest part is unraveling yourself. Sounds scary, doesn’t it? It can be, but the reward far outweighs the discomfort. Let me explain.
From the time we are little, we all require basic things for survival. Food, water, and shelter are the basics, of course, but nurturing plays a large role, too. If you ever scraped your knee and your mommy kissed your booboo to make it better, that is an example of being taken care of. You got hurt and your parent comforted and reassured you.
Some kids never get nurturing or reassurance. Some kids experience it while they are little, but as they get older, the family dynamic changes, and they do not receive as much care or support. It could be many different things. The child could have parents who both work full time and they struggle to manage the rest of their time throughout the day. Sometimes the parents themselves have trauma they’re trying to work out while they simultaneously raise their kids (hello, most of us).
The reason for a lack of nurturing can be more distressing and lean toward purposeful neglect. The parent could be an addict whose primary focus is getting whatever it is they’re addicted to. The parent could be abusive. There are a number of purposeful ways a parent could deny nurturing from a child, but this creates an emotional wound within us that we label as trauma.
To deal with the negative emotions that come from this emotional wound, we develop coping mechanisms. The coping mechanisms could be healthy ones, like exercising or using art as an outlet. Often, though, the coping mechanisms are unhealthy ones, like excessive consumption of alcohol or getting violent. Let’s face it: nobody decides to go to therapy for excessive exercise.
Trauma tends to get stuck in us, which is what causes a lot of diagnoses we see. Borderline personality disorder, for example, is believed to be caused by trauma. We tend to layer everything afterward on top of this trauma, and it becomes embedded in our personalities. The coping mechanisms we develop become a part of our personalities. To heal, we have to become aware of all of these survival techniques we’ve adapted and pick each one apart to uncover who we truly are underneath before the trauma made us stuck.
Where Do I Start?
Much like everyone’s pain and trauma varies, the path of healing also varies. The best place to start for most people is with shadow work, which I’ve talked about in previous posts. Shadow work is when you use questions to learn about yourself. It sounds simple, but once you start, you can start on one thread, and that one thread can lead to an entire web of new ideas that have never occurred to you before.
I started a year ago, and everything makes so much sense to me now. I used to try to make myself small for the sake of other people, and with shadow work, I realized I did this because space was always made for my abuser. I learned that I had to shrink down and make myself small. Doing this for so many years became second nature to me, and it took me a little while to become comfortable with taking up space.
There are many things you can do to help you throughout your healing journey. Shadow work is just the tip of the iceberg. You can also rely on meditation, breath work, and journaling.
Many people know what meditation is. You sit quietly and allow your thoughts to come to you. You breathe deeply and allow your body to relax. Meditating is less about trying to clear your mind than about focusing your thoughts and gaining control of where your thought pattern takes you. With practice, you can stop an impulsive thought in its tracks.
Breathwork is something I have been practicing for a while, as well. You can do box breathing, which requires you to breathe in for five seconds, hold for five seconds, exhale for five seconds, and hold for five seconds. It sounds very easy, and it is, but the result is amazing. You have clearer focus, you are calmer than you were before, and you are more alert. Another good example is called the warrior’s breath. You take a sharp inhale through your nose as deep and as fast as you can. It transforms stress into positive energy by giving you an energy boost. Instead of being frustrated or angry, you become instantly calmer and more focused. Wim Hof is worth studying, too. His breathing technique is the newest one I’ve been practicing and with me doing it twice a day, it has proven to be powerful. A quick search will give you all the information you need to get started with his breathing exercises.
Ya’ll know how I feel about journaling already. It is a powerful too that allows you to gather your thoughts all in one place. I use journaling as a way to vent my frustrations and anger, but I also use it as a more positive tool to help me brainstorm and manifest. I used to only have one journal, but I found that having two helps a bit more. I use one journal for venting and getting all of my negative thoughts out. This journal I never go back and read through. There’s just something cathartic to me about writing it all down and leaving it in the past. The positivity journal, though, I use to jot my ideas down and any goals I have as well as my plans to reach them. This has been a life-changing technique to help retrain my brain to focus more on positive rather than negative.
What Does Healing Mean for Me?
Everyone’s healing journey is different. Therefore, everyone experiences different things at various times throughout their journey. I can only speak for how it has impacted me so far.
I have peace, perhaps for the first time in my entire life. I have periods in the day when my mind is quiet, which is something I’ve never dealt with before. Being borderline, I tend to lean toward the manic side most of the time. I’m used to dealing with all of the frustration that comes with racing thoughts, a huge energy boost, and a feeling of franticness that I can’t begin to explain. Now, I can sit down and concentrate. Even if I am manic, I can use breathwork and calm my thoughts enough to focus. I’ve learned to listen to my body and pay attention to what it needs. It has made all the difference in the world.
I have become a better mom. Rather than saying things like, “Because I said so,” I take the time to explain why rules are the way they are, or why I say no. Children are people, and parenting them like they don’t deserve an explanation for things or they can’t show their feelings is a toxic trend we need to work together to break. We don’t want our children growing up and going through the same things. I don’t want my kids to have to heal because of me. I am teaching them to become better communicators because they need to be able to speak clearly about things they want or how they feel. Communication is the first building block in any relationship our child will ever have. It’s crucial they know how to speak to other people. I can empathize with them whereas I wasn’t great about it before, and I am definitely more patient than I ever have been.
Everyone has boundaries, and if you’ve read any of my posts, you know how passionate I am about them. I was never taught them, and it is likely our parents were never taught them. That makes teaching them to our future generations even more important. They need to know that their feelings matter. They need to know they are in control of their bodies. They are the boss of their personal space. Healing has totally changed how I set boundaries with people. I now set firm boundaries without apologies. This is huge for me, because I used to set boundaries but they were flexible for certain people. I felt like I needed to apologize for those boundaries, or to explain myself. I don’t do that anymore. I also speak out loudly for my kids. If they are in an uncomfortable situation and they communicate that to me, I’m getting them out of that situation come hell or high water, and they won’t be forced back into it again.
I am not afraid to take up space! I was always quick to quiet down or shy away when someone else would enter a room I was in. I would not introduce myself to people. I did not speak out. I learned through shadow work that I shrink myself down to fit other personalities. I would dilute my true self and mask all of the traits I was worried someone wouldn’t like about me. I was used to stepping on eggshells around my abuser in fear of setting him into rage, and that made me monitor what I said in fear of causing conflict. Now, everyone knows when I walk in. I embrace my true self, loudness and all. I don’t mind people knowing things about me. For example, I never shared with anyone about me being bisexual, not since I came out as a teenager, because of how I was treated by everyone around me. I steered clear of any conversation where it could be brought up and I let that part of me go quiet. Now, I don’t mind who it makes uncomfortable. That’s quite literally their own problem and has nothing to do with me.
Healing is scary. It is going to challenge you in ways you’ve never been challenged before. I had days where I had flashbacks. I would break down and cry over what seemed like the smallest of things when, in reality, it was all of the emotional turmoil being set free. I thought about quitting because I was worried about everything that would come up. I’m still healing, too. Setting firm boundaries have unearthed some old wounds of mine, and I’m going to be spending some time dealing with the baggage. Have a strong support system. Show yourself some grace and forgiveness. The results are well worth the battle.
Invoke the wonder, command the power.