Written by Joan Levy, LCSW

Click here to contact Joan and/or see her GoodTherapy.org Profile

Emotional Injuries Hide In Our Unconscious

Throughout our lifetime, most of us have in some significant way been wounded.  The physical wounds we can see.  Their solutions, if available to us, are fairly straightforward.  But those that take place in our minds and in our hearts are not so easy to see and are often stored out of touch, deep within our unconscious.  Those we do remember, we often avoid because it just hurts us too much.  Our culture supports this avoidance in the name of “denial”.
Even though we would like to learn, to grow and to heal, most often we end up feeling powerless, unable to break the patterns which repeatedly lead us to dissatisfaction and pain.  The more we try to run away from our pain, the faster our pain seems to catch up to us.

Pain Is A Warning Signal

Healing asks us to address our pain rather than avoid it.  Pain is a warning signal.–– A call for our attention.  We need to give our pain our attention.  As we explore what there is to learn from our situation and our interactions and as we investigate our thoughts and our feelings, we can begin to see the pain as a part of a dysfunctional pattern that has been repeating itself throughout our lives.

What We Lack

We do not lack the desire, the worthiness, or the ability to change these painful, dysfunctional patterns.  Rather, we are lacking the ability to understand the history and purpose of the pattern as well as the tools and the sensitivities required for effective change.

The Source Of The Problem

The pattern is most often a consequence of some way that we, as children, learned to fit into, cope with, understand or survive vulnerable situations from our family interactions.  Our experience taught us to have expectations and feelings about ourselves, other people, and our environment which were not necessarily accurate.  We grow up believing these falsehoods or generalizing what once seemed true in our families to our experiences outside of our families where they don’t really belong.

Psychic Survival Glasses Misrepresent How We See And Cause Us To Recreate The Past

It’s as if when we were very young, we got a prescription for a pair of “psychic glasses” that fit the way we were seen by our family and the way we, at the time, saw ourselves and the tiny world we lived in.  We grew up and went out into world of new possibilities, experiences and relationships but we kept the same old glasses.  These glasses force us to look at our present experience through the eyes of what happened to us in the past.

These misperceptions, combined with the ways our thoughts and emotions are stored and upheld in our bodies (through defensive armoring and cellular memory), cause us to keep recreating our past, unconsciously interfering with our sincere yet fruitless efforts to change and grow.

What We Need

We need a way in the present to work with our misunderstandings from the past.  So we recreate the “scene of the crime”, where we re-experience the same kinds of feelings we originally felt, even though the names and faces and even the look of the situation may now be different.  This allows the present to serve as a vibrational tuning fork resonating at the very same emotional frequency as the original injury.  We can then locate the conditioned receptor sites in our bodymind that maintain the old belief structures and transform them with a present-time consciousness that now has resources far beyond those we had access to when we were children.

Addressing the Mind, Heart, Body & Spirit

We are mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual beings, and our healing needs reflect these different aspects of ourselves.  We can address our mental healing by developing our consciousness.  First we feel the pain.  Then, we find the pattern and its original intent and defensive development.  We identify the false and outmoded beliefs, attitudes and perceptions and we decide and commit to learn and to live the truth about ourselves.

Denial  Lives In Our Bodies

Emotionally, we have learned to deny and hide the truth of our feelings.  Eventually keeping the secret even from ourselves.  Our physical bodies help us to hold in and disguise these feelings through muscular, organ, and soft tissue contraction.  Without emotional honesty and the physical release of held-in emotions it is very difficult, indeed, to update our thinking and experience ourselves as we truly are.  It is very difficult to leave the past behind us.  Therefore healing  also requires us to address emotional and physical release.

TRANSFORMATIONAL PSYCHOSPIRITUAL THERAPY AND BREATHWORK RELEASE DIRECTLY ASSISTS PEOPLE TO ACTUALIZE THESE GOALS.

Experience As Fertilizer For Our Psycho-Spiritual Growth

Spiritually our healing asks us to view the psychological and physical conditioning of our experience as the fertilizer in the garden of our spiritual growth.  Lack and pain, being the great motivators they are, first get our attention.  We can then identify with, react to, defend against and keep our lack and pain.  Or we can focus our attention on what the lack and pain are here to teach us and we can heal.

For instance, if your psychological issues are unworthiness and rejection, you can probably remember some very real and painful life experiences when you felt completely rejected.  You can take on a rejected identity from those experiences and spend the rest of your life isolating yourself, controlling relationships, hating yourself and/or others, settling for less and resenting the lousy garden you were born into.  Or you can explore the purpose within your experience and learn to give yourself the sense of worthiness and acceptance you have been desperately seeking from others. Of course, as you fulfill your purpose, claim your worthiness and accept yourself, your experience with others will also change.  The change starts first within.

Awareness Of Psycho-Spiritual Purpose Is Empowering!

As we become aware of the psycho-spiritual purpose within our pain we become empowered rather than victimized or martyred.  Combine this awareness with new mental and emotional clarity, and emotional and physical release, and we enter the very heart of our healing.

©Copyright 1999 Joan Levy, LCSW All Rights Reserved. Permission to publish granted to GoodTherapy.org. Questions or concerns about the article can be directed to the author or posted as a comment to this blog entry. The article was solely written and edited by the author named above. The views and opinions expressed are not necessarily shared by GoodTherapy.org. Click here to contact Joan and/or see his GoodTherapy.org Profile