Your Capacity for Healing Is Inside You
When life breaks you into a million pieces or your mind takes you to the brink of inexplicable anguish, you only have one option: to rebuild yourself. It’s important to remember that you have a great capacity for healing inside you. It can fix each broken string of your self-esteem. In your heart, there’s a lighthouse that will guide you back to balance.
When we talk about “healing,” many different definitions come to mind. However, when it comes to mental and emotional health, it seems to get even more complicated. Let’s give an example. When someone breaks an arm, has the flu, or is recovering from surgery, no one has a problem saying “Cheer up” or “Get well soon”.
But what happens when you have depression or anxiety? The term “heal” is “the act or process of recuperating one’s health after an illness or injury”. But what happens to those who aren’t suffering from a virus, an infection, or a broken bone?
Suffering from mental health problems is complicated. This is because people who suffer from them don’t have visible wounds. They don’t use crutches, and it’s rare for them to ask for time off from work as a result.
Furthermore, many times they don’t even start a healing process because they don’t dare ask for help. Alternatively, they might not even be aware that a psychological illness is actually hiding behind their discomfort.
As the World Health Organization (WHO) points out, almost 50% of people with emotional and mental health problems never receive treatment.
Your capacity for healing is inside you
The capacity for healing is inside you, but you might not have discovered it yet. This is because, sometimes, life hurts too much and leaves you cornered without any resources, besides your own fear and the feeling of being lost.
In these moments, you require expert help. You need help to understand what’s happening to you and learn strategies that can help you overcome your struggles.
The first thing you must understand is that every healing process begins by scratching the surface and introducing changes that stop your inertia. You must go beyond those limits or comfort and attachment, those things that pull you into a vicious cycle of anxiety and unhappiness.
Donald Woods Winnicott, the celebrated British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, used to say that the path to emotional healing is reclaiming one’s human dignity in order to reconnect with “the real you”. Sometimes, people let themselves get carried away by inappropriately configured internal dynamics that lead to a “false you”.
Psychologist Carl Rogers’ thesis is related to this as well. In his books, he states that people must reinvent themselves constantly. According to him, you must leave your beliefs and hurtful or exhausting attitudes behind in order to awaken your potential.
The keys to the healing process
Every path to healing needs support. It’s clear that counting on professional help is important. You know experts recommend having people beside you who can understand you and give you space, affection, and comprehension. Thus, you should cut out of your life people who judge or hurt you with their words.
It’s also necessary that you understand something crucial: besides having an expert facilitator, the healing process only depends on you.
Here are the keys to the path to healing:
- Find hope and motivation. People start a therapeutic process because they hope, in some way, that it’ll help them improve.
- Understand what’s happening. As a preventative step, before beginning any kind of intervention, the smartest thing would be to dedicate your resources to knowing what you’re facing (for example, depression, anxiety, or a lack of social abilities). If you don’t “know your enemy”, it’ll be hard to get a smart plan in place.
- Make a plan. All healing processes need a plan that you can trace with conviction, and they need to include a certain margin of flexibility while you adapt.
- Reconnect to life in a new way. Healthy habits will always help you confront any difficulty. Thus, start new habits, meet new people, and leave old routines behind.
- Face each day as the best version of yourself. As you start feeling better, it’ll be easier for you to value your abilities. Discover how strong you can be!
Just remember one thing: this path – this journey to healing – takes time. You’ll experience difficulties, but each step that you take will impulse you to continue moving forward. Healing, above all, is a journey of great learning and self-knowledge.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
- M. Hall, Carrie (2006) Ejercicio terapéutico y recuperación. Barcelona: Paidotribo