Dear readers,
If my blog has been so quiet in recent months, it is not for lack of love for you, but because my own recovery from emergency brain surgery 16 months ago has taken a lot of my energy.
The world these days offers us no shortage of violence and loss, and in the past months there have been many situations where I had to stop and follow my own advice, including the self-soothing exercises I offer you in the videos at the end of this post.
Healing Dispatch # 5: Emotional injury is a lot like physical injury
Imagine you accidentally cut your hand while cooking. What do you do?
If you ignore the cut and don’t clean and bandage it, it might become infected. If it becomes infected it will swell and cause pain, not only to the hand, but radiating out to other parts of the body. At worst, an unattended cut can cause fever or worse complications.
So you clean the cut with soap and water, maybe apply an antibiotic ointment, and bandage it so it's protected from getting dirty.
Do you have to tell your cells how to repair the tissue? No. Your body knows how to heal. You can trust it to do so. But first you have to remove obstacles to healing and create the ideal conditions for your body to heal itself.
It’s no different when it comes to psychological trauma. Your body knows how to heal it too, if you let it. Unfortunately, too often we suffer an emotional injury and bear it alone. Or worse, we tell somebody what happened to us and they stab us right back in the wound (I'll return to this in a later dispatch).
But when we feel like we cannot tell anyone about this terrible thing that happened to us, it's like ignoring the wound. It demands attention because it hurts, but we carry on working and doing what’s expected of us, and doing whatever we can to ignore the pain. This is where many compulsive behaviors develop: we may self-medicate or distract ourselves so we don't have to face our pain, but the pain only grows.
When we are avoiding dealing with our emotional pain, a portion of our life energy is spent in suppressing it. It's natural to want to avoid pain, but it always COSTS us something. And coping is not the same thing as healing. Coping allows us to survive and get by, but healing frees up our energy again.
So do you prefer the pain of attending to the wound and creating the conditions for healing, or the accumulating pain of shoving it aside and having it grow larger and zapping your life energy?
When it comes to emotional injury, cleaning the wound means making space to acknowledge what happened. Believing that it was not your fault and that you deserve to heal and be cared for.
Disinfecting and bandaging the wound means that you strengthen your boundaries and try not to expose yourself to the hurtful conditions again while you heal. I realize this puts too much burden on the injured person. We cannot control what others do to us, and certainly acts of violence are squarely the fault of the perpetrator, but we must try to be self-protective if we want our body to heal.
The marathon runner doesn't run on a broken ankle. In the same way, it is a mistake to push ourselves to “function”, to carry on as if nothing had changed, when we have been emotionally hurt.
Healing dispatch # 6: Resources for self-soothing
I created these videos in collaboration with my friend Melissa Manning and the projects she created to help our community after the pandemic and the devastating CZU fire that destroyed many homes here in the Santa Cruz mountains. It is never a bad time to acquire some coping skills to add to your repertoire, so here are some of my best, the same ones I use when I am triggered or stressed. I hope you find them helpful.
If you'd like to learn more about my services and how I came to do this work, you can read my recent interview on Mystic Mag.
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