Emotional wholeness

How to achieve emotional wholeness

                  Jimmy Henderson

‘Throughout my life it felt as if I was walking barefoot on a path of sharp stones. Yet as I now look back, I see that the stones were actually precious gems, providing lessons of great value with each moment of pain.’

                                              J. Henderson

   Many pass along through life with their self-worth crippled by traumatic events from the past. However, just the day to day struggle with the realities of everyday life, such as broken relationships, loneliness and fear, can also cause pain and leave deep emotional scars. Emotional pain can take on many forms which may affect your thoughts, colour your attitudes, perceptions and views of people and situations and make the world seem an unbearable place. If you really wish to achieve emotional wholeness, you will need to learn to deal with these painful memories and unpleasant feelings and reclaim your energy and focus.

    ‘Letting go of anger towards others is the first step to unconditional loving’.

   Unfortunately, in order to effectively process issues from your past, you will have to face up to the events which originally gave rise to the trauma. I understand that this requires courage. And that many of you are apprehensive of having to relive the pain and fear associated with these incidents over again. Fortunately, I am able to offer you up-to-date therapeutic processes which will allow you to remain in control. I assure you are not alone in this endeavour. All the benevolent powers of the universe will be directed towards helping you heal, should you so wish it.

   The first therapeutic tool you should use is a personal journal. You may choose either a hardcover book, a small notebook or a computer notepad. There are specific guidelines to follow when writing up this journal. On the first page or the inside cover, you begin by personalising it, writing down your name, short descriptions of  yourself, for instance, ‘I am a father’, ‘I am a caring person’, and some of your growth goals for the future, such as  ‘I wish to find myself’ ,‘I wish to achieve wholeness’ and so on. The journal will be used for exercises, as well to record your progress, thoughts, feelings, insights and concerns as you engage the different processes involved in achieving this wholeness. 

Exercise 1.

   Exercise number one involves presenting your own personal history in the form of a life-line. This is a simple method for remembering your past and present issues or events which are still playing a significant part in your life and could be holding you back in your self-development. To begin, draw a horizontal line across the second page. This will act as a baseline. A few centimetres above this line, draw a second line running from left to right. This line (called the time-line), should represent the sequence of your life experiences, beginning in early childhood, moving through adolescence and early adulthood, to present day. The time-line should be continuous and take the form of a graph, rising in the form of peaks above the baseline, to represent the events which you experienced as positive and uplifting, such as meeting your partner or the birth of your children. And it should also reflect the other situations which you feel were traumatic or extremely unpleasant. In these cases, the line should curve or drop downwards and indicate  these incidents as a series of dips below the baseline. Examples of such negative experiences would be childhood abuse, divorce, or the loss of a parent or a significant person in your life. All peaks and dips should be named (or labelled)  and dated in more or less the correct time sequence in which they occurred, relative to other events. The height of the peaks or the size of the dips should also suggest their intensity. In other words, you should show a very stressful event as a large drop below the line. And you can indicate a less painful one by a smaller dip. Although both types of experiences should be shown, I am more concerned with those you found to be particularly traumatic. In other words, the largest peaks below the line. It is most likely that these are the issues which are still unresolved in your mind and are disempowering you or affecting your self-esteem. After you have completed this exercise, relax for awhile and congratulate yourself on having gone this far.

Exercise 2.

   There will always be intense memories, emotions and thoughts associated with a traumatic event. Fear can be a crippling emotion and can lead to unhelpful behavior such as avoiding people, social events and life’s normal challenges. Having drawn your time-line, you can now continue with your process of emotional and psychological ‘stocktaking’.

   At this point, you have already identified and listed a number of important (and painful) events on your time-line. You now need to begin with a brief review of each, identifying, naming and listing the emotions and thoughts you experienced at the time. As promised, I am not asking you to re-live the incidents, but only to review them in your mind as if you were watching a video or DVD in your living room (1). And merely list the feelings and words that come to mind, alongside the date of each event in your journal. This may not be easy, as some of these incidents may have happened many years ago and your conscious memory of the words may have faded. One way of remembering them is to use self-questioning. For example, ‘what did I tell myself when I saw this or that happen?’’, or ‘what was the first thought that came into my mind?’

   A second method is to take on the role of a reporter or observer and merely report on what you saw and heard. For instance, ‘I saw little Mary, she was extremely afraid and was thinking that she is going to die.’    

These techniques should help you to remain reasonably detached and at ease.                                                                                                                

Although you do not have to re-live the incidents, it is important to acknowledge that these unpleasant emotions and negative mind-statements do still exist, as this is your first step in dealing effectively with them. Living in a state of denial, in which it seems just too painful to ever face up to these memories, will not help you heal.  Let me use an analogy to explain this better. If you have a cut or gash which has turned septic, it will not heal by just covering it up. In order for healing to really take place, the old dirty bandage will need to be unwrapped and the wound cleaned and treated. Similarly, a wounded soul will also not heal unless the trauma is finally acknowledged, exposed for what it is, and cleansed of emotional poison. There is no need to rush this particular exercise. It would be fine to take a number of days or even a few weeks. And if you feel vulnerable, it may be a good idea to ask a friend or even a counsellor to assist you.

   Many people read books on personal growth in order to try to overcome their past. Although this is commendable, reading alone is not always the most effective solution. Deeper processes are usually required to uproot those locked-in emotions and unhelpful thoughts. It may sound strange, but emotional distress is often our mind’s cry for attention, asking for these issues to be resolved, pretty much in the same way that physical discomfort or pain is our bodies attempt to warn us of an injury or infection. It all begins and ends within our own minds. For all its limitations, our mind is still the most powerful instrument we have to change our attitudes and perceptions and ultimately, the way we live our lives.

   To return to the journal, the emotions and thoughts recalled with each incident should be identified, named and labelled. As a working example, I will use the case of a messy divorce, as this appears to be a more frequent and common source of emotional distress. The kind of emotions one could list alongside ‘divorce’, might include ‘anger’, ‘bitterness’ and ‘resentment’. However, divorce can also bring about feelings of loneliness, failure or low self-esteem, depending on one’s personality and interpretation of the event. These feelings are usually activated during the traumatic event by some or other action, image, thought or words that were said. And when the full impact of what has happened sets in, it can be quite a shock to the system. This shock can set off an intense emotional reaction and subsequent negative thinking.

   If you examine what you have written down relating to each event, you may find that some of the thoughts are linked to one another and may even be getting progressively worse as you go down the list. For example, in the case of divorce, this may include the following, ‘He/she  is gone’, ‘I am alone’, ‘I will always be alone’. These could also be viewed as self-destructive ‘beliefs’.

Exercise three

   Although you cannot alter what happened in the past, you can challenge these painful emotions and negative beliefs and may even be able to arrive at some new perspective on the events that have been causing you such distress over the years.

   You can begin with the thoughts, as often these are holding the unpleasant emotions in place. One method of collapsing a ‘chain’ of negative beliefs, is to challenge their truthfulness or validity. A little insight into how and why they were formed, will help you in this regard. You need to understand that they were formed at a time when you were either very young, vulnerable, unable to think clearly, hurt, confused, very miserable or angry as a result of what had taken place. Now, months or even years later, you have the benefit of hindsight, objectivity, more experience and understanding and a better all-round perspective.                                                                         

   By this time you should be able to see that most of these negative beliefs either no longer apply, never applied at all or are simply not true. For instance, that you were never really alone during the crisis, having had the support of your family and friends all along. This new information should empower you to be able to symbolically draw a line through the negative beliefs written in your journal alongside the event, and to replace them with more accurate and positive statements, such as, ‘I am not alone’, ‘I never was alone’, ‘I had the support of my friends and family all along’. You will need to do this with each and every negative thought or belief listed alongside each event in your journal.

   These old thoughts belong to the past, to moments in time which are now gone. You can no longer allow them to control you, nor should you allow it. Make a new conscious commitment. After all, you are reading this article for a reason. And that is because you desire a new life of power and self-unfoldment.

Exercise 4.

   There is a method in dealing directly with painful emotions. However, this requires a degree of commitment and will-power, as you have to be willing and able to do the opposite of what you have been doing up to now. For example, if you are still hanging onto pain associated with a past event, this is the time you will need to consciously decide to release it. Second, feelings of worthlessness must be exchanged for a sense of self-worth. Anger and resentment should be replaced by acceptance and forgiveness, and so on. Following the event, the painful feelings were natural and part of the process of healing. But now their usefulness has past and you need to recognise and acknowledge that they have become self-defeating and are denying you the joy of happiness and freedom in your life. As I said, you are reading this article for a reason. And that is to prepare yourself for a better life, one free of self-imposed pain, fear-based behaviour and limitation. In other words, you have already decided that you want to move forward with your life, and are now only looking for the tools with which to do so.

   To help you make this decision, let us look at possible reasons why you may be unknowingly hanging onto these destructive thoughts, emotions or actions. Take the time to reflect on how your life has changed over the past few years or months. In the beginning, the feelings of anger and thoughts of resentment may have brought you some comfort, believing that some day you will have your revenge. However, have you ever really considered the costs of such thinking? Over time, such  thoughts and feelings can ferment and poison your emotional system and even become obsessive, making it almost impossible to think of anything else, or to ever love and trust anyone else again. They can also make you a thoroughly unpleasant person to be with, which can drastically affect your social life or career. Is this the price you are prepared to pay for the small comfort of some vague notion of future revenge? Your decision is actually whether you are prepared to carry on messing up  your thinking and social life, or are you willing to cut your losses, let go of the anger and resentment and move on?

   The same can apply to depressing feelings such as low self-esteem. You may have initially found some comfort in believing (or even knowing) that you are the victim in this situation. And this may very well be true. However, what has happened over the last few years?  After the event, you may have enjoyed the comfort and support of many friends and family members, and there is certainly nothing wrong with that. Secondly, you may also have had a measure of control returned to your life by initially being able to withdraw from (unwanted) social activities. Everyone knew that you had been hurt and understood that you needed time to heal. However, after a while, even good wine can become soured and you may end up with feelings of self-pity, self-righteousness and worst of all, a victim-consciousness. Second, if this non-involvement persists over a long period of time, there is cause for concern. For example, a situation such as a painful divorce can drastically affect anyone’s behavior, causing one to shy away, withdraw from relationships or become totally lacking in self-confidence. Once again, this is also not good for anyone’s social life or career advancement. Having to let go of these insecurities and re-enter a social circle as a divorced person can be scary. However, once one has come to the realisation that the costs of this behavior far outweighs any benefits or comfort that it may bring, it can help your decision to change.

   This is not easy. And your degree of success will be based on your conviction that releasing or changing this feeling is now absolutely essential to your own health or happiness, not because the other person or people involved has suddenly become righteous again. You are not changing your original view or opinion of what actually happened. What you are changing is only your reaction to the event. The person who hurt you is not suddenly made righteous because you are letting go. It is not a case of him or her winning and you losing. You are consciously choosing to release the anger, resentment or self-pity because you want to. And because it is in your own best interests to do so. This conscious decision to forgive, let go and to move on, actually returns you to the moral high ground.

   A last word must be said on this self-cleansing process. Holistic therapists tell us that the body itself stores memories on a cellular level. And even if you are successful in consciously releasing pain and fear from your heart and mind, you may still require some additional help in cleaning out the residue from your physiological systems. My personal experience is that alternative healing therapies or treatments certainly do speed up the process of removing toxins and can counter the long-term effects of emotional stress in the body. I therefore encourage you to seek out and make use of some of these de-toxification and holistic therapies in addition to your own inner work. 

Jimmy Henderson is a trained trauma and Lifeline counsellor. He is a regular radio talk show guest, dealing with teenage problems and parenting skills and is the author of a number of articles and books on self-development. His books ‘Multi-Dimensional Thinking” and Multi-Dimensional Perception are available at Exclusive Books, Amazon.com , Kalahari.com or on his website www.jimmyhendersonbooks.com