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A Modest Proposal Uncommon thinking
about common experiences February 11, 2004 Why am I the way I am? – A three part series Part 2 – How to Heal Emotional Wounds Emotional healing is undoubtedly one of the most difficult undertakings in life. It is the gateway to evolving a life that is harmonious and fulfilling. It is the antidote to fear. With such a wonderful payoff, why did I wait so long to start it, and why do so many people never start at all? In Part 1 of this series, How Emotional Wounding Happens, I used conventional learning theory to describe how emotional wounding takes place. In short, stimulus response reflexes, or conditioned responses, were created as I attempted to learn how to earn love in the face of discovering that I would not always be treated lovingly. Love of self, God, and the Universe is the most important need of humanity, exceeding by far the physical and material desires which we find ourselves chasing. The importance of the reflexes or responses born of not being loved is that every one of us has them in the form of emotional wounds. They are an inevitable consequence of being born and maturing into the times that humanity has experienced for millions of years. This is what I have discovered, and it is what I believe with every cell of my being. I did not begin to heal my emotional wounds until after I was fifty. First, I did not know that I was emotionally wounded, and after I discovered that I was, I did not know HOW to heal. It took me several years to learn how. Second, even after I learned a process for healing, the prospect of having to use the process to heal was not inviting. It required revisiting and reliving events in my life that I did not wish to re-experience. Third, it was, and continues to be, difficult to determine what I need to heal – to remember those events that actually led to the reflexes and responses so that I could release the cause of the wounds and heal them. Wounding happens. Why then do the wounds simply not heal as a matter of time as do wounds to my physical body? If you have had a wound that got infected, even a small scratch, you know that it will not heal until it is treated. Another example is a scab that gets “picked” until it comes off to reveal the raw flesh underneath. I realize that these are not pleasant images, and neither are emotional wounds. It is just that emotional wounds are not visible. I only know the consequences of them remaining unhealed, the “symptoms” of the wounds, such as anger, fear, hate, depression, sadness, unhappiness, dissatisfaction, helplessness – the list is quite long. As I am fond of saying, emotional healing is simple; it just isn’t easy for most folks including me. An emotional wound stays raw and unhealed until I choose to undertake the healing process. There are many such processes; I do not know the “best” one, and in fact, am not sure there is a best one for different processes appeal to different people. I describe one in my book, A Tao Of God. One chapter summarizes the process, and it appears at the end of this commentary. So if you are interested, take a look, but before you do, I would like to talk about the principles involved in healing emotional wounds. “Healing,” in my experience, is a word that is too broadly applied. The context in which I use healing is relieving symptoms. Healing may also cure an emotional wound, and it may not, for curing is the elimination of the causes of symptoms, not just their relief. For example, if I have a headache (symptom), and I take an analgesic, then the headache’s pain will be masked. That is healing, and the pain may become evident again, or the causes for the headache may be eliminated by my body, and I am cured. If the pain returns, then I should try to determine the cause of the pain so that I may cure it. It may be that the prescription for my glasses is no longer correct, and I need new glasses to eliminate the strain on my eyes that is causing headaches. That would most definitely be a cure. Treating the symptoms alone may result in temporary healing while masking a serious cause. I once had an acute tooth pain, and my dentist told me to take several aspirin daily until it went away. I did as he suggested and ended up with a duodenal ulcer from taking too many aspirin. So when I reference “healing,” I am really referring to treating symptoms so that the deeper work of curing can be done. Just like in the Emergency Room of a hospital, the symptoms of trauma are treated first, and then the underlying causes are addressed once the patient is “stable.” Emotional healing can relieve my emotional pain so that I can begin the work of curing my emotional wound. Part 3 of this series deals with scars left by emotional healing that enable me to eventually affect a cure. Let’s take a look at the basic principals of emotional healing. 1.
Locate the wound. Sounds like treating a physical wound, doesn’t it? Well, the principles are the same. I believe that any process for healing an emotional wound follows these three steps in one fashion or another. How do I identify that I have a wound? If I am open and aware, it is easy to simply identify my greatest judgments of myself and others for they are all rooted in emotional wounds. Scratch a judgment, find an emotional wound. I describe the judgment, for example, “people do not listen to what I say.” I know this is a judgment because I have heavy emotions around it: I may feel angry at the “non-listeners,” I may think I have nothing of merit to say, I may feel ignored and shut out, or I may think the “non-listeners” are too stupid to understand me. There are lots of choices. Locating the wound is about understanding how the wound originated. The absolute best way is to be able to remember the precise origin of the wound. How old was I? Where was I? Who else was there? What happened to initiate a conditioned reflex designed to protect me and/or to earn me love? Not everyone can initially remember this time, the “primal abandonment” – the moment when we learn that love must be earned which created the potential that we may not be able to earn it. This is the origin of fear: when I realized that I may not be loved. Even if someone cannot remember the moment of primal abandonment, if he goes back in his memory to the earliest recollection of experiencing the judgment, that is a great start. Healing that moment may clear the way to remember further back, closer to the primal abandonment events. The crucial thing is to start, where I start is secondary. This is locating the wound. For example, let’s take a “stimulus-response reflex” (see part 1 of this series) that resulted in an emotional wound. It manifests as my reluctance to speak my truth or perhaps to not speak at all. I have something to say but the fear of not being accepted/loved because of speaking up keeps me mute or relegates me to agreeing with what others say even though I do not concur. When I trace this reflex back to its origin, I find that my parents practiced the principle of “children should be seen, not heard,” and punished me whenever I did speak up. It did not take long for the reflex “to not speak up” to become one of my emotional wounds that still exists as an adult. Cleaning the wound is next. When I clean a physical wound, I remove any dirt or foreign material that is in the wound and apply an antiseptic to kill harmful bacteria. When I clean an emotional wound, I must remove the effects of the event that created the wound. How does this work? The debris in an emotional wound is the emotion that I experienced when I got wounded. The emotion could be frustration, shock, anger, disappointment, shame – there are many, and they all have their basis in fear. To remove these emotions, I must return in my mind to the moment when the wound was created. I must relive the emotion, not just remember it – I must relive it. This time I vent the emotion as I fully experienced it. When I was young, I could not vent the emotion unless I was willing to receive more emotional and possibly physical pain. “Big boys don’t cry. Don’t be a sissy, or I will really give you something to cry about!” Now I cry (even though I am a big boy), I yell, I scream – maybe I punch a pillow or hit my fists against something soft like a bed – I release the energy of the emotion. Releasing or venting an emotion is a very personal thing, but released it must be for healing to take place. The energies from the initial wounding and all of the subsequent reinforcements of it are retained in my emotional body. It is not enough to “understand” what happened; it must be “felt” as well, and then I can release those feelings. How you do so is how you do so. The point is that you must release the emotions, not simply intellectualize the memory. “Oh yes, I remember when my mother spanked me for breaking a dish – ho hum,” does not contribute to healing. When I treated my physical wound, I applied an antiseptic after removing the debris. I also apply an antiseptic to my emotional wounds. It is called love and light. Releasing the emotion left a void that I fill with love and light. I simply ask light to flow into the place where my emotion kept the wound from healing for so long – in my case for decades. I apply love to the event that created the wound in the form of forgiveness for what happened and acceptance that what did happen was an important opportunity for me to learn how necessary love is to living a harmonious and fulfilled life. Now for the bandage – when I finish treating my physical wound, I apply a bandage that keeps the wound safe from contamination and further damage. My emotional wound needs protection while it heals as well. The bandage that I place on my emotional wound is compassion for me and whoever was involved in creating the wound. Compassion is simply the recognition that what happened was a necessary part of the human experience, and when I was wounded, the wounding was NOT because of me, but was about whoever wounded me. The person who wounded me was in the midst of his or her own lessons, and I got caught in the crossfire between them and what they were confronting. It is often difficult to accept that, but when I really thought about it, I could see and understand the clarity in what actually happened. The tape that holds the bandage on is the last step. It is honoring and thanking the person who initiated the wound. That may seem difficult to do; however, remember that the person was doing the best he or she could at the time, and after all, healing this wound strengthened me, for now I am immune to this old “stimulus-response reflex.” This is one way to heal emotional wounds. It is as basic as I can make it. I think that, one way or the other, all wounds that are healed mirror what is described above. I respect that some of you may not find this description applicable. If you are discerning from your heart, then I honor whatever works for you. The important thing is as long as the method or process works for you, then it is valid. My modest proposal to you is to heal that which you have not. I will benefit, you will benefit, and humanity will benefit. Remember the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, “That which does not destroy us can only make us stronger.” Next month, this series concludes with Part 3 - Curing the Scars of Emotional Wounds. May you discern with compassion… Ron
McCray ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Chapter 25 – Healing process Healing the wounds of primal abandonment, the fear that I cannot be loved for who I am, is my primary focus, for I know that without doing so I will not experience the fulfillment and harmony that come with fully loving myself. I learned a “process,” a method for healing. I also learned that only I can heal myself. Alas, no one could do it for me. A process is any procedure or method that is performed over and over. It can be refined along the way; however, its purpose remains to ultimately achieve the same outcome. My healing process is threaded throughout A Tao of God. The goal here is to simply summarize my process in one place so it can easily be read from beginning to end. I must emphasize that it is my healing process, and I willingly share it with the caveat that your discernment is needed to determine its applicability to you. What you can use, I gladly give. 1.
My starting point occurs whenever I am aware that
I am judging how life should be other than what it
is. (Chapters 11-13) No
one can heal me except me, and my process is the means by which I
become healed.
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