Return to Home Page Return to Articles & Documents
Over the last 18 months I have done a lot of my own healing, and had the opportunity to support a number of others on their healing journey, and I have learnt so much. I have seen a number of similarities in my own healing path, and those of others who are working with long term issues as I have been, and this article contains reflections on some of the most important things I’ve discovered.
Life is relationships and as I’ve done my own healing, and sat with others as they heal, I have started to realise that communication is the oil that keeps relationships flowing harmoniously. As the foremost relationship we have is the one we have with ourself, I’ve come to see healing as a process of discovering how it is that we are currently communicating with ourself, and how we can improve that communication. I have come to believe that the majority of our symptoms, whether they are physical or mental, are simply a matter of our mind and body communicating those things for us that we are unable to communicate or hear for ourselves.
I recently had an experience that taught me a lot. While in the past I was chronically ill for nearly 20 years, these days, thanks in large part to the methods I write about, I am very well and have very few health challenges at all. A few days ago I was reading an article, and unexpectedly read about a case with severe abuse that really shocked me. About ½ hour later, after eating dinner, I suddenly became very sad and upset, and started going on about the state of the environment and how terrible everything was to my partner. I had a headache and felt terrible. I went to bed feeling sorry for myself, and unsure what was going on. The next morning I woke up feeling even worse. A lot of the symptoms I had were familiar from the long gone days of chronic fatigue syndrome – terrible headache, upset bowels, nerve pain in my teeth and face, tight jaw, aching legs and arms. I took the dogs for a walk and felt incredibly lethargic. When I finally got home, I realised that I needed to sit down and do some Focusing to find out what was going on. What came up as I Focused was some very deep sadness, and as I heard the story inside me that needed to unfold, and realised that the story I had read in the article had triggered this sadness, one by one the symptoms I had woken up with eased, then disappeared.
This reminded me of something that happened several years ago. I was relatively well, although still having regular health challenges, and all of a sudden became ill, and ended up in hospital with a serious case of pneumonia. Looking back it is now clear to me what happened, although at the time, lacking the tools I now have, it was impossible for me to see. I had had a guest staying, who was very doom and gloom and shared a lot of depressing information with me about the state of the environment. It had unknowingly triggered some deep feelings of not being safe inside me, and resulted in me really worrying about what was going on and what I could do to prevent it. Anything to do with the lungs is likely to involve grief and deep sadness, and looking back I can see that the pneumonia was my body’s way of trying to communicate those feelings to me, by way of symptoms.
Reflecting on these experiences later that day, I realised that when we have deep pain trapped inside us, it’s like a story waiting to try to be told, whenever the opportunity arises. When we come across something that resonates with that pain, our issues are triggered, and our body does everything it can to get our attention. The pain and lethargy was screaming to me to go inside and listen, to allow the communication within myself to unfold.
I’ve been supporting several people lately with chronic physical illnesses, and reflecting on their journeys, along with my own, I have realised that our bodies are incredible – they communicate for us when we are unable to do so. Symptoms, both of depression and physical symptoms, are our body’s way of crying out for us to pay some attention to what is going on inside ourselves. People with auto-immune challenges are often well and symptom free for several days or weeks, then all of a sudden something triggers them and the symptoms are all set off. It is often the same for people who suffer from depression. I now believe that this is the same process in action that happened with me – a deep sadness or pain inside of us, which has been triggered and is calling for our attention. Often, like I couldn’t initially, it’s impossible to see what has triggered the symptoms. Fortunately with tools like EFT and Focusing we are able to go inside and hear the story, and therefore we no longer need the symptoms to communicate the pain to us.
Something else I’ve observed is that one of the main triggers of pain in our lives is often a simple remark from a parent or loved one, which can cause thoughts to spiral in on us, making us feel bad about ourselves. Other common triggers are events that cause us to question our self worth or whether we are lovable. So few of us are taught the communication skills that we need, most of us are taught to suppress rather than really feel our feelings, and even if we do know how we are feeling, our culture doesn’t really encourage us to express it. I believe another aspect of our symptoms is our body trying to communicate to us that there are things we need to communicate to others, and if we don’t, they stay stuck in our bodies as physical symptoms or depressive thoughts and anxiety.
So these days I’m seeing healing as a matter of learning how to communicate, inside all of our relationships, both with ourselves and with others. To do this, I believe there are three elements that are vital:
1. Clearing past traumas, because unresolved pain inside us sits there like a time bomb, waiting for something to trigger it. The tools such as EFT and Focusing are all great for clearing past traumas. When we are really low, either mentally or physically, it can be very helpful to work with a good practitioner, who can help us to stay focused and keep working until the traumas and all their resulting limiting beliefs have been cleared. I believe this step has to come first, because otherwise the other steps are derailed by our issues constantly being triggered. I include in the classification trauma anything that when we think about now still causes us any form of emotional pain, including anything that causes us to feel guilty. Many people think of trauma as only the big Traumas, and don’t realise that small traumas, unresolved and adding up over time, are often far more insidious than the big events we commonly consider to be trauma.
2. Learn how to hear what is going on inside of us, how to truly feel our feelings and let our emotions move and resolve (emotion = energy in motion). The best tools I’ve found for this are Focusing and empathy. Focusing teaches us how to be with our feelings with empathy, and empathy is crucial to successful communication, both with ourselves and with others.
3. Learn skills to assist us to communicate better with others. If we don’t also learn these skills, even if we clear the traumas and listen to ourselves, our difficulties expressing ourselves to others can cause us to take on our old patterns again, including depression, anxiety and physical symptoms, in order to protect us from having to deal with frustrating and hurtful communication. A book I’ve recently discovered that is very helpful in learning these skills is Marshall B. Rosenberg’s “Nonviolent Communication – A Language of Life.” While the ideas expressed in the book can appear overly simplistic at first glance, I’m finding them to nonetheless be very powerful. I also feel that it’s important to clear the traumas and learn Focusing or some other way of listening to the untold stories inside of us, in order to clear all the issues that can trigger us when working to improve our communication with others.
Doing all this can seem like a huge commitment of time. A metaphor that can help here is to consider the lengths you would be willing to go to in order to heal any rifts in a relationship with a loved one, which was severely strained. In this case, if you are serious about healing the relationship, you are unlikely to just tap or see a practitioner once a week. You are far more likely to pull out all the stops and heal what you need to, and learn to improve your communication to pave the way for a better relationship. As you will never have a relationship with anyone else that is more important than the one you have with yourself, there really is no more important way you can choose to spend your time than healing your issues and learning to communicate with yourself and those around you. And this needn’t stop when our physical symptoms have gone, for me it’s become a daily practice of listening before my body has to cry out for attention in the form of symptoms.
Something that I’ve noticed can happen when we’ve been doing a lot of healing, is we reach a place where we are feeling much better, then all of a sudden we find all this anger or sadness bubbling up from inside of us, disturbing our newly found peace of mind. The best way I’ve found to see this is to realise that when we spend 20 or 30 or 40 years repressing feelings, as so many of us have been taught to do, they don’t go to some magical place in the universe where they are automatically transformed for us. Those feelings that we have consistently repressed over the years instead have been shoved into our body. Our body really is incredible, constantly taking life affirming actions, whenever it has the opportunity. When we regain some balance after doing healing, it often seems as if it’s saying “Well all seems to be calm now, let’s try to get rid of some of these feelings we’ve got shoved in here, while all is well, so that we can move toward greater joy.” Our training over the years tends to make us want to sit on the newly opened lid, and shove those “bad” feelings of anger or guilt or sadness etc straight back down again, but if we can recognise that they are coming up to be healed, so that they are no longer sitting as time bombs inside of us waiting to be triggered, it can be easier to cope with the surge of feeling.
If you consider the path of healing to be rebuilding your relationship with yourself, you may find you are able to have a new perspective on what you can do to support yourself as you heal. Any of the tools that help you to learn to hear and feel your feelings and let them transform and release, are well worth learning. If you haven’t yet learned Focusing, and want to find out more about it, check out the Focusing pages on this website. Someone recently asked me whether Focusing is just about establishing a relationship with yourself, or whether it helps you to truly heal. My answer was an emphatic YES - I've done such deep healing with Focusing over the last few months, and I believe that had I known Focusing at the time I did the major healing I did for my lifelong patterns with EFT, I could have equally healed the issues simply using Focusing.