How Do We Heal?

Do you have a pain or trauma that you just can’t seem to heal?

How Do We Really Heal?

By Mary Cook, M.A., R.A.S.

When we only treat symptoms, whether behavioral, emotional or mental, symptoms recur that may not heal. Symptoms are present to alert us to examine ourselves in order to determine what is not working effectively. Chronic lack of joy, humor, and serenity, or excessive anger, anxiety, and fear create emotional illness. Persistent blaming, catastrophizing, deceiving, judging and worrying causes mental disorders. Habitual behaviors of abuse, aggression, over-controlling, and manipulation lead to conduct disorders. Abstaining from specific actions and from expressing certain feelings or thoughts helps us immensely in early recovery.

When there are powerful dynamics at the root of illness, however, failure to decipher the message in the symptom means we will not heal and will manifest new symptoms. Chronic negative thinking impacts our relationship with self, others, and life experiences. It diminishes motivation, effort, full involvement in tasks, and discourages us from obtaining needed assistance. We are then more vulnerable to fail or fall well below our potential in whatever we do. When our feelings typically lack positive energy or contain a preponderance of negative energy, our natural vigor for life is significantly diminished. We then rely on energy from anger, anxiety or fear to fuel us.

This energy does not help us learn and mature. Anger energy is an attempt to experience power in response to feeling powerless. It is forceful and punishing. It attempts to prevent harm or retaliate in response to harm, through aggression, intimidation or threat. The false belief that reinforces aggressive energy is the idea that singularly expressing thoughts, feelings or actions originating from anger releases us from past, current or potential future anger or harm. In truth, this response attracts more anger and harm into our life.

Anxiety energy keeps us compulsively busy and obsessively thinking. It is a scheme to keep the body so busy and the mind so bogged down in details, that we don’t sense the larger perspective of our personal life issues. Anxiety generates a belief that we are making progress and being productive. This progress, however, is rarely in sync with our primary goals.

Fear energy primarily goes into protecting, guarding, planning counter-attack and reinforcing outer strength. Unless there is imminent, definable or observable danger from something we can avoid through our own efforts, fear energy is not productive or positive. However, we typically believe that mental or behavioral fortresses will allow us a peaceful existence within them. On the contrary, they engender greater conflict.

Overall, operating from anger, anxiety or fear adds to the negative energy of the problem. This narrows our thinking and perspective, heightens our stress and opposes healthy solutions. When we desire positive change and healing, we must experience the problem and our conditioned responses to it, without defensiveness, decision making or actions. This allows us to become aware of a part of us that is detached from problems and pain. We can learn how to identify problems and responses without making them who we are. We can view them as visitors with a message rather than lifetime attachments or appendages.  In this way, we can heal.

Problems indicate that we are being given opportunities to learn and grow. Symptoms are a sign that we are not learning, but rather resisting our lessons. Pain is a call for healing. Yet for healing to occur, we must make space for it, prepare for it and welcome it. Most of us sadly, never do this. Instead, we fill ourselves to overflowing with anger, blame, hate, judgment, and vindictiveness, or with despair, self-pity, shame, and victimization.

Harm comes from misunderstanding. Abandonment comes from fear. What sets us free from fear and harm is understanding and faith. To be set free then, we must engage in an ongoing process of surrender. Like answers to our prayers, what opposes the goal of our prayers is made abundantly clear to us so that we know what to surrender. When we pray for love; hate, jealousy, and fear of rejection typically show up. When we pray for peace; chaos, conflict, and crisis commonly occur. These are the answers to our prayers. We are shown exactly what prevents us from our goals and therefore what to relinquish. When we examine within us what we wish to relinquish, we see how these responses originated, how we attached to them, and how we actively recreate them through our beliefs. This process of understanding them prepares us to let them go.

Our Higher Power is greater than all problems and pain. Therefore our connection to our Higher Power is the place where healing occurs. This is where we can view internal and external experiences as visitors to teach us higher truths. We can realize the attachments that we must surrender in order to grow. And we are comforted knowing that the most important part of us; this place of divine connection, can be forgotten and closed off from conscious awareness, but cannot be damaged, diminished or destroyed.

You will also enjoy Honoring the Darkness on the Healer’s Journey

About the Author

Mary Cook is the author of “Grace Lost and Found: From Addictions and Compulsions to Satisfaction and Serenity”, available from Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, etc. She has 36 years of clinical practice and 29 years of university teaching experience. She is a national speaker and has a private practice in San Pedro, CA. Mary is available for telephone and office counseling, guided meditation, speaking engagements and in-service training. Contact her at MaryCookMA@att.net and see website for further information. WWW.MARYCOOKMA.COM