This Is What Healing Looks Like
And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
- Anais Nin
I remember when I first started doing deep emotional processing with professional guidance. The floodgates opened, and as painful as some of it was, I loved being able to finally let go after walling it all off for decades.
But it wasn’t the linear healing I assumed I’d experience. I definitely felt lighter, more spacious, calmer, and freer inside as I continued to do the work. But I also felt more raw, tender, easily moved to tears, more sensitive. I felt my anxiety more strongly but it would pass more quickly. I felt more sure of who I was and what my personal growth looked like, but I felt less sure of my emotional stability.
But I kept coming back, week after week. I noticed that as I healed and discovered more inside, I would continue to feel new anxieties, new sensitivities, and new challenges. But they would pass more quickly and I felt even more capable to hold and process them.
My emotional healing journey looks like the graphic above. You could draw a straight line through it, but it would mask the ups and downs that come with doing deep inner work.
Now as an emotional health coach, I see the same process in clients (and in parents through MaxLove Project coaching). When people commit to doing this work, they experience all the good stuff that comes along with it: spaciousness, more presence, more joy, clarity, deeper connections. But they also find themselves experiencing more challenging feelings, more tears, more uncertainty.
Inevitably, if they stick with it, they’ll be able to draw that straight upward line through all the ups and downs.
Why does it have to be like this? Why can’t emotional healing just be a straight upward line without all the dips and rises?
In my experience, the reason is avoidance. Most of us have spent our entire lives avoiding the emotional pain inside. This is not because we’re weak, lazy, or cowardly. It’s because we’re smart.
We grew up in families, friend groups, schools, and communities that signaled to us that some emotions are unacceptable, too big, too messy. If we expressed our emotional pain we’d be punished by our family, shunned by our friends, make trouble in school, and be ostracized in our community.
So we learned early on how to shove the pain down and away. And then we learned how to keep it down.
So, why does this avoidance of pain lead to such a crooked path of healing? At least three processes happen when we start doing the inner work of emotional healing:
We stop avoiding the old pain. As the Robert Frost poem reminds us, there’s no way out but through. What we’ve pushed away, numbed, and avoided for decades must eventually be felt and witnessed. There’s truly no other way. And when we open those doors, the exiled pain doesn’t only come out in our coaching sessions. It can come out in the middle of the night or in between meetings or at the dinner table. The good news is that you’ll now have new tools to hold space for this pain and let it be processed. It won’t last forever, but in the early days of intense inner work, there will be bumps in the road.
We start opening up to current emotional pain. As your awareness grows, you will start to feel new sadness, anger, helplessness, and fear. This is not because you’re going crazy; it’s because you now have the capacity to open up to your life, to your loved ones, to what’s happening around you. But you now have the emotional resilience and groundedness to be withrather than in these painful feelings, and let them move through you rather than ignoring, resisting, and avoiding them.
As we grow, we feel called to take on new growth challenges which bring new pain. As Anais Nin suggested, when we grow we realize that the risk to remain tight in a bud becomes more painful than the risk it takes to blossom. As you heal and grow, you are called into your own blossoming and this carries risks. Perhaps it’s a new career, a new city, a new relationship, or a new project. As your capacity grows you will begin lean in to these challenges but they inevitably will produce moments of failure, injury, setbacks, and confusion. And now that you’ve learned how to open your heart to life, you will feel it all.
If you’ve started this intense inner work and are feeling the bumps in the road, please reach out and tell me how you’re doing. We’re in this together . . .