#Quotes, #Inspirational, #2024, #Mental Health, #Emotional Healing
A colleague during a supervision group meeting held last week brought the group to a halt, with a quote she had heard recently. I paraphrase it here for you to consider…
You best heal your emotional wounds, lest you risk bleeding on those who have not hurt you.
The impact on the group was remarkable. We sat for some moments taking in the wisdom and insight compressed into a single sentence. Perhaps the impact is due to our role as therapists in that we see this every single day of our work. People who come to therapy to look at their problems in living often start from a position of the victim of their life experiences or circumstances. They have been hurt and wounded in a variety of ways. There is however a difference between been being a victim and playing a victim. The latter often arises when we don’t fully heal our emotional wounds following adverse childhood or other experiences. We can become cynical, angry, withdrawn, critical of ourselves and others learning that they and the world are untrustworthy and unsafe. At these times we can project our early wounds onto those who did not inflict the original hurt. We emotionally bleed all over them in the form of the responses above. This damages those relationships and keeps us stuck in victim positions because when those others we’ve impacted with our projections withdraw or themselves become defensive or critical of us, we can use these experiences as further evidence of our right to victimhood. We begin an almost endless cycle of ongoing misery.
To break this cycle we enter therapy to help heal our emotional wounds. Unlike physical wounds which we see scar over and maybe even disappear over time, our emotional wounds need to be managed rather than disappeared. For some of us we can release ourselves from our misery stories and transcend the narratives we have rehearsed about the world. This liberation means that we no longer need to prosecute the past in the present, we find better ways to live with less suffering and misery. For others of us, we need to learn to manage our emotional wounds as a life-long condition. We learn to withdraw our projected suffering from the world and learn to care for ourselves much more. In this way, we become more open to the world (and its people) and all of the possibilities (friendship, love, etc.) in new ways. We give up the our victim identity for better ways of living.
Therapy is an exceptionally helpful way to learn to suffer less and explore new options and choices for enhanced living.