The truth about healing

“I should be over this by now.”
“Why do I still feel like this?”
“I should be doing better.”
“I’m going to feel this way forever.”
“I’m not doing good enough.”

Do these phrases sound familiar? Phrases like these get the best of us. And unfortunately we all experience them at some point or another. When we notice these types of thoughts popping into our heads, the knee-jerk reaction is to feed into them. These thoughts tend to spiral out of control and not only bring us to a dark place, but keeps us there. We feel stagnant, helpless, and hopeless. Especially when we’ve already recognized progress over time. A lot of the time we expect ourselves to not feel triggered or not have moments of “weakness” or regression because we’ve “moved past it.” So we tend to forget that we’ve come so far or we disregard it as if it’s “not enough.” And then we harp over the fact we are feeling down again. A recipe for disaster!

The truth is, emotional healing is a lifelong process. Our life experiences are not things that you just “get over.” They become parts of us. They are parts of our story and they help us develop our character and learn about who we are. We learn to adapt to the experiences life has thrown at us, and continue our lives in a different way because of what we’ve been through. Therefore, our healing will always be with us and will continue to evolve as life goes on. It doesn’t mean that we won’t stumble at times or find some days harder than others. It just means we are human.

With the ebbs and flows of life, we begin to tackle our stressors better, and although we cannot eliminate our triggers, we can learn how to work through them. Each experience in your life you need to heal from will give you opportunities to apply new skills and resources to adjust. We then learn how to defend against the unrealistic expectations we set upon ourselves and the thoughts that arise because of them. Go easy yourselves, my friends. Just because it may not always feel like you’re healing, doesn’t mean you’re not!