The world isn’t cruel; You were just hurt.
Everyone has been, at one point or another.
That doesn’t mean you need to stay in your hurt. It also doesn’t have to color every experience you have from that point forward.
No matter how bad it was.
It really doesn’t matter what happened or even how long ago. What matters is not letting it live with you. Once you start carrying that pain around with you, it’s natural to be weighed down by it.
But healing and moving on can be tricky.
Most of the time, emotional scars are harder to see than physical injuries. Not just for you, but others as well.
Healing from emotional pain requires first seeing the pain and acknowledging it in yourself.
Healing From Emotional Scars
Once you know those scars are there, you’ll want to do your best to trace them back as far as you can. Ideally, you’ll find the root cause after enough digging.
Maybe it was something somebody said or did. It may have happened when you were a kid, or just a few months ago. At this stage, whatever happened caused you to feel intense emotion —possibly many emotions.
What were those emotions?
Was it anger?
Frustration?
Sadness?
A combination of these?
It’s essential to recognize that your reaction at that particular time acted as a survival mechanism. That was the best reaction you could conjure in the moment, and it was simply meant to preserve and protect you.
But it was only meant to be a temporary fix.
It wasn’t meant to act as a reference point for every similar situation moving forward.
Unfortunately for us, we’re not as logical as we like to think. If you look at the average person, even the “smartest” of us act based on our emotions. Then we rationalize and justify what we did and claim it was the right thing to do.
How To Begin Emotional Healing
First, we need to consciously accept that we’ve been using an outdated coping mechanism to deal with emotional pain. It served us for a time but is no longer useful.
What do we do with outdated things?
Replace it with a more modern, updated model.
For example, if your significant other cheated on you consistently in your past relationship, your default may be to hold back trust in your next relationship.
The problem with that kind of thinking is it paints people you’ve never even met with a brush that doesn’t give you or them the slimmest chance of actually getting to know each other.
What may be more useful is not necessarily forgetting what happened in the past but using it as a learning opportunity for future relationships.
Maybe there were specific ways your loved one spoke when they were lying or trying to hide something. Uncovering this, you can observe to see if your current or potential partner is acting similarly.
Then you have the opportunity to address the problem and possibly reach a solution that works for both of you, where you may have swept it under the rug in a past relationship.
Whenever you notice those old patterns, it’s critical to take a moment and find a healthier, more productive way forward. Developing awareness around your patterns and behavior allows you to develop the skill of consistently changing your perspective, opening up entirely new worlds.
We All Need Connection
The last ingredient in healing emotional pain is this:
Connection.
All of us need connection, whether we admit it or not.
Ideally, these will be people who support and care for you, but also know when to encourage your growth.
These people are out there if you know where to look.
This is called finding your “tribe,” and its importance cannot be understated.
Having a supportive community can expand your mind to dare for even greater goals than you’d previously considered. There’s so much magic in surrounding yourself with people who can support your growth.
You Can Heal Your Emotional Wounds
The world has no inherent nature other than what we attribute to it. If you think it’s cruel, then it will be.
If you believe we live in a kind and generous world, that’s exactly what you’ll find.
Knowing this, why would we ever choose to paint everything in such a poor light? Having a choice, don’t we want to see the world and its inhabitants as allies in achieving our best life?
Now I challenge you to notice where you’re taking a cynical worldview and take time to see how you can shift it, even just a little bit. The more you do this, the easier it gets.
You’ll also start to recognize areas of your life where you’re selling yourself short.
So, go ahead and let the world be a beautiful place.
You deserve it.