INTO THE HEART OF YOUR HEALING
Joan Levy, LCSW
Emotional Injuries Hide In Our Unconscious

Throughout our lifetime, most of us have in some significant way been wounded. The physical wounds we can see. Their solutions, if available to us, are fairly straightforward. But those that take place in our minds and in our hearts are not so easy to see and are often stored out of touch, deep within our unconscious. Those we do remember, we often avoid because it just hurts us too much. Our culture supports this avoidance in the name of "denial".

Even though we would like to learn, to grow and to heal, most often we end up feeling powerless and unable to break the patterns which repeatedly lead us to dissatisfaction and pain. The more we try to run away from our pain, the faster our pain seems to catch up to us.


Pain Is A Warning Signal
Healing, in reality, asks us to address our pain rather than avoid it. Pain is a warning signal. As we give our pain our attention, exploring what we can learn from our situation, our interactions, our thoughts and our feelings, we can begin to see the pain as a part of a dysfunctional pattern that has been repeating itself over and over in our lives.


What We Lack
We do not lack the desire, the worthiness, or the ability to change these painful, dysfunctional patterns. Rather, we are lacking the ability to understand the history and purpose of the pattern as well as the tools and the sensitivities of how to bring those changes about.


The Source Of The Problem
The pattern is most often a consequence of some way that we, as children, learned to fit into, cope with, understand or survive vulnerable situations from our family interactions. Things we learned to expect, ways we learned to feel about ourselves, other people, and our environment, which we misunderstood, were false, or which are now outmoded. We grow up believing these falsehoods or generalizing what once seemed true in our families to our experiences outside of our families where they don't really belong.


Psychic Survival Glasses Misrepresent How We See
And Cause Us To Recreate The Past
It's as if when we were very young, we got a prescription for a pair of "psychic glasses" that fit the way we were seen by our family and the way we, at the time, saw ourselves and the tiny world we lived in. We grew up and went out into world of new possibilities, experiences and relationships but we kept the same old glasses. These glasses force us to look at our present experience through the eyes of what happened to us in the past.

These misperceptions, combined with the ways our thoughts and emotions are stored and upheld in our bodies (through defensive armoring and cellular memory), cause us to keep recreating our past, unconsciously interfering with our sincere yet fruitless efforts to change and grow.


What We Need
We need a way in the present to work with our misunderstandings from the past. So we recreate the "scene of the crime", where we re-experience the same kinds of feelings we originally felt, even though the names and faces and even the look of the situation may now be different. This allows the present to serve as a vibrational tuning fork resonating at the very same emotional frequency as the original injury. We can then locate the receptor sites in our bodymind that maintain the old belief structures and transform them with a present-time consciousness that now has resources far beyond those we had access to when we were children.


Addressing the Mind, Heart, Body & Spirit
We are mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual beings, and our healing needs reflect these different aspects of ourselves. We can address our mental healing by developing our consciousness. First we feel the pain. Then, we find the pattern and its original intent and defensive development. We identify the false and outmoded beliefs, attitudes and perceptions and we decide and commit to learn and to live the truth about ourselves.

Emotionally, we have learned to deny and hide the truth of our feelings. Eventually keeping the secret even from ourselves. Our physical bodies help us to hold in and disguise these feelings through muscular, organ, and soft tissue contraction. Without emotional honesty and the physical release of held in emotions, it is very difficult, indeed, to update our thinking and experience ourselves as we truly are. It is very difficult to leave the past behind us. Therefore our healing process also needs us to address our emotional and physical release.

Experience As Fertilizer For Our Psychospiritual Growth
Spiritually, our healing asks us to view the psychological and physical conditioning of our experience as the fertilizer in the garden of our spiritual growth. Lack and pain, being the great motivators they are, get our attention. We can then identify with, react to, defend against and keep our lack and pain. Or we can focus our attention on what the lack and pain can teach us and we can heal.

For instance, if your psychological issues are unworthiness and rejection, you can probably remember some very real and painful life experiences when you felt completely rejected. You can take on a rejected identity from your experiences and can spend the rest of your life isolating yourself, controlling relationships, hating yourself and/or others, settling for less and resenting the lousy garden you were born into. Or you can explore the purpose within your experience and learn to give yourself the sense of worthiness and acceptance you have been desperately seeking from others. Of course, as you fulfill your purpose, claiming your worthiness and accepting yourself, your experience with others will also change. But this is something you first need to learn to do for yourself and your spiritual development. 

 
As you become aware of the psychospiritual purpose within your pain you become empowered rather than victimized or martyred. Combine this awareness with new mental and emotional clarity, and emotional and physical release, and you will bring yourself right into the heart of your healing.