Healing Emotional Wounds Requires TLC

Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash

I used to think that healing was this nebulous thing. An unknown and unattainable concept that other people understood, but not me. I mean, how do you know when you’ve healed something emotional? It’s not like you can take off the band-aid and see the physical proof! 

So when someone asks me, “How do I let this go?” or “How do I heal this situation?” the first step is very simple. You have to stop beating yourself up. 

When I hear my clients talk about themselves, and hell, when I listen to the way I talk to myself sometimes, it can be pretty harsh. The shame, guilt, embarrassment, stupidity and blame that we put on ourselves for the things that we have done and even for the things that have been done to us, is tremendous! 

You can’t heal a wound if you keep reopening it with your self-criticism and loathing. Think about it like this; if you were to literally be beaten it would cause literal wounds in our flesh and body, right? Well it’s the same thing with our emotions. If you keep beating yourself up emotionally with your own negative self-talk and self-destructive behavior, then you’re not allowing yourself to heal. 

To take this metaphor a little further, let’s take a look at the different stages that are necessary for a wound to heal. 

Physical Wound 

Emotional Wound

1 Acknowledge there is a wound that needs healing.

1 Acknowledge there is an emotional wound that needs healing.

2 Clean out the wound.

2 Bring the event to surface and feel the wide variety of emotions that come with that wound.

3 Cover the wound.

3 Tenderly and compassionately care for yourself during this time. Understand that whatever the event was, it does not define you. However you acted probably made perfect sense at the time given your past, conditioned experiences. 

4 Let time heal without further disruption to the wound.

4 Let time heal without further emotional beating to yourself about the incident.

It’s important that we give ourselves the same compassion and care that we would if we broke our leg or had a cut on our hand. They both require empathy, compassion, and tenderness. Without those things, there is a chance the wound could get worse overtime. 

Being gentle to ourselves, especially about mistakes or mis-steps in the past, is the biggest form of self-care and self-love that we can give ourselves. When we are good to ourselves, that is when true healing can take place.