We all want to heal. This is a Universal drive within humanity. To feel free from past trauma or negative memories, or even to have the capacity to let go of some of our own unhealthy coping methods.
If you’re anything like me, you might find yourself getting overwhelmed by the vast collection of different ideas about healing, and it can all feel so complicated, confusing, and overwhelming. One week you’re trying out meditation, journalling, getting in a mental health walk, staying connected to your social supports, and overall aiming to show up as your best self, and the next week you might find yourself exhausted, burnt out on the couch, and reaching for your coping method of choice (drugs and alcohol, binge watching TV to dissociate from pain, or doom scrolling).
So the cycle continues. This can feel incredibly discouraging, or like a lingering trapped feeling that says "this is just the nature of life, to carry pain and not know how to release it."
At Sacred Spaces Counselling Centre, we pride ourselves on delivering a clear, concrete plan for how to dig yourself out of this hole, and feel confident about how to move forward in your life. Since each person is unique, this plan for healing won’t take shape until after our first session, when we get a sense for who you are, what your strengths and gifts might be, and what you’d like to be different about your lived experience.
So let's get to the point. How does healing happen? To sum it up in one sentence, we believe that healing happens when you develop the capacity to stop fighting yourself, and start caring for yourself. Any system that’s dealing with pain will naturally involve some repression of one aspect of your psyche, while another aspect of your psyche will take on a protective role to keep this pain under control. Fighting this natural process of the brain to move away from pain or discomfort will not be fruitful, and keep you stuck in a maddening loop. I have lived this myself, and seen it countless times in others.
What’s needed is to stop fighting yourself, and start caring for yourself. Let’s use the classic example of addiction, a common protective mechanism. The root of addiction is pain, across the board (Mate, 2018). The part of your psyche that is hurting will be repressed (exiled) to make sure you can still function, and when the pain becomes too much to manage internally, millions of people around the globe will turn to alcohol, drugs, or even things like sex, obsessive workloads, or intense exercise to distract themselves from their pain.
With the guidance of our trained IFS therapists, we will map out how your protective parts are trying to hold down or repress your pain, and create some space to get to know them. Once we are able to honour and befriend our protectors (such as an alcoholic part, or an anxious part that keeps you in an avoidant cycle), we begin to bring the Core Self online along with the protectors. Once the Self is able to witness and validate the efforts of the protectors, we can ask them to show us which parts have been protected. These repressed parts that tend to carry our most painful experiences are called exiles, and they are the source of your healing and offer the greatest potential for transformation.
Parts can’t heal other parts (Schwartz, 2023). The mind can manage, control, suppress, distract, move away from pain, seek pleasure, think, plan, rationalize, escape into fantasy, but the mind cannot heal itself on a fundamental level. This is why healing doesn’t occur when we criticize, repress, distract, or shame ourselves into doing better.
The crucial element in healing is getting in touch with your own Core Self. Shifting from criticizing yourself for drinking too much (again) to being aware that you have this tendency to rely on something external from you to manage pain, and seeing if you can become curious about this tendency, is how healing happens. Taking time to understand its roots, what it might be wanting to avoid, or wanting to feel, is a doorway to bring some Self energy into the system. This Core Self is accessed through awareness and presence, not from the logical, thinking mind. It can be quite subtle at first, but once you get a sense for what it feels like, it can become a valuable internal resource, a safe, secure home base to navigate life from.
Not only can this work facilitate true, long-term healing and brain change, allowing you to let go of decades of trauma responses and unhealthy coping mechanisms, it can also shift your identity, unburden negative beliefs about yourself, and de-sensitize you to childhood triggers and emotional reactivity. In a parellel process, parts work also helps you get you back in touch with who you truly are (before the trauma changed things) and increase your creativity, confidence, compassion for yourself and others, connection to Self and others, and bring some much needed calmness into the chaos of life on Earth. Now that sounds like a recipe for healing!
Bonus practice:
Don’t be afraid to tag in your inner teammate, the sub-conscious mind. You know, that thing inside that’s operating all the time, and is supposedly 95x more powerful than your conscious mind (Pierson, 2022). The same intelligence in your body that knows how to heal a cut or fight off an illness, knows what to do with grief, fear, and all flavours of emotional pain also. You simply need to sit with it, and shift out of the tendency to logically problem solve, manage, or fix your pain. Just gently notice it, shining your spotlight of awareness onto any sensations or feelings inside. Even 10-15 minutes of this can be a catalyst for new insight, new perspectives, and allow you to approach life with a renewed sense of Self.
References:
Mate, D. G. (2018). In the realm of hungry ghosts. Vermilion.
Pierson, J. (2022). The Power of the Subconscious Mind. Delaware. Schwartz, R.C. (2023). You are the one you’ve been waiting for: Bringing courageous love to intimate relationships. Louisville, CO: Sounds True. (Original work published 2008).
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