Do you feel mentally, emotionally, and spiritually healthy? If you don’t know the answer, then read on to find out the signs you need emotional healing.
Emotional Healing Is Necessary
All of us have experienced varying levels of emotional pain in the form of childhood trauma, abusive relationships, and difficult experiences in life. All these traumatizing events can often make us avoid our emotions and we eventually become wounded souls. We try to live our lives the best we can, yet all these experiences and suppressed emotions lead to certain emotional and mental health issues.
Today, over 43.8 million (1) adults suffer from mental health problems annually. Moreover, 1 in 5 American adults suffer from a mental illness and around 10 million Americans live with major mental health conditions.
So if you have experienced trauma in the past, it is likely that you need emotional healing as you may be unaware of how your suppressed emotions are affecting you. When left unhealed, your past trauma can not only affect your mental and physical health, it can shatter your sense of being severely impacting your life.
Emotional healing can enable you to align your mind, body, and spirit, face difficult emotions from the past and accomplish overall well-being. However, you can start the healing process only when you are aware of your psychological, emotional, and spiritual issues that require healing.
Related: The Reason Emotional Trauma Doesn’t Heal and How to Overcome It
Signs You Need Emotional Healing
If you are still unsure whether you need emotional healing or not, here are a few signs that will help you find out:
1. You think negatively
You have a habit of thinking negatively most of the time. You feel like you are trapped in a loop of pessimism and negativity where your mind always focuses on the worst-case scenario first. You find it difficult to be optimistic and fail to believe those good things can happen to you.
It’s true that life experiences and daily stressors have shaped you the way you are, but you need to take steps to build the life you want for yourself. Building a positive mindset can enable you to enjoy the little things in life, be happier and begin your journey of self-healing.
2. You’re not intuitive anymore
Our instincts and intuition often guide us and shows us the right way when we find it difficult to navigate through the challenges of life. It is our gut feeling which allows us to predict and perceive outcomes beforehand. However, past emotional pain and trauma can often block our intuitive abilities from guiding us. Emotional healing can help us reconnect with our intuition and rebuild our bond with our gut feelings.
3. You lack trust, compassion and empathy
Do you feel that you cannot trust other people any longer? Do you find it hard to be empathic and compassionate? Difficult experiences and encounters can often alter our thoughts, beliefs, and perceptions. But when you allow your emotions to control your life, you will lose control over yourself. You need to be assertive and take charge of yourself. You need to trust your loved ones as they can guide you and break you out of this cycle of negativity.
When we don’t let negative emotions dominate us, we can develop a compassionate and empathetic mindset that enables us to build better connections in life.
4. You overthink a lot
When you need emotional healing, your mind tends to overwork all the time. You begin to overthink every single issue as you desperately try to distract yourself from thinking about what’s actually bothering you. As you avoid facing difficult thoughts and emotions, your mind begins to overwork and you feel stressed and anxious unnecessarily. It can then affect your work performance, your relationships, and your personal life.
Overthinking can consume you if you allow it. It is a trap that you need to be aware of and avoid for your own mental and emotional well-being. Often addressed as the ‘monkey mind’, we need to control our own thought process and tame it with awareness.
5. You react, you don’t respond
Do you feel that you are more anxious, moody, irritated, and angry than usual? Then it’s a sign that you need emotional healing. When you are coping with emotional and psychological trauma, you will have difficulty controlling your emotions. You will become more agitated and angry and incapable of calming yourself down. You react aggressively at the slightest ‘provocation’ without even considering how your reactions may hurt others.
Negative experiences can often provoke certain undesirable reactions from us, but when we choose to respond rather than to react, we empower ourselves.
Related: Healing Your Emotional Triggers: 5 Ways to Be Less Reactive
6. You have difficulty in letting go
You tend to hold on to thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and memories that don’t serve you any longer. Instead of letting go of negative thoughts and emotions, you desperately hold on to them even when you’re aware that they are becoming destructive.
However, it is only by letting go of emotions like fear, jealousy, and anger, you can finally start to control your feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. Instead of avoiding your difficult emotions, acknowledge and accept as a part of yourself. This will help you start the process of letting go.
We can only gain new perspectives and appreciate life differently if we step out of our comfort zone. Learning to let go can help you grow as a human being.
7. You feel depressed
True emotional healing will begin only when you become aware of the problems and acknowledge that you are wounded inside. When you feel overly anxious, stressed, and depressed most of the time, it means you need to actively start healing yourself. The more wounded we are, the more depression can start crippling us.
Depression not only affects our mental health, it also impairs our ability to function normally in daily life and keeps us from being happy. Depression thrives on stress, anxiety, fear, and sadness. It is only by facing these emotions can we ensure that our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors will not be controlled by them. Healing yourself requires that you heal all ailments that affect your mind and that can be done by seeking medical help & self-reflection.
Related: 10 Signs You’re Emotionally Wounded That No One Notices
Here are some other signs you need emotional healing that you must watch out for:
- Certain things like words, songs, places often act as emotional triggers and open old wounds.
- You tend to overreact most of the time as you feel it’s about a deeper problem.
- You have difficulty in forgiving others and tend to hold grudges longer than you should.
- Certain memories from the past keep replaying in your mind constantly.
- You feel insecure which affects your self esteem and self confidence.
- You tend to suffer from certain cognitive dissonance.
- You have difficulty in maintaining your relationships with your family and romantic partner.
- You feel trapped in the same monotonous routine every single day.
- You feel anxious and overwhelmed all the time.
- You have an inner feeling that something has to change in you and your life.
- You are afraid of living your life fully as you feel things will get worse when you do.
Give Yourself The Permission To Heal
And you can do that only when you acknowledge your true emotions and thoughts. Do whatever you need to and start over. If that means changing your job, city, or leaving an abusive relationship, then take charge and allow yourself to start the healing process.
Emotional healing can only begin when you step out of the past and become who you are meant to be. Heal your mind, body, and spirit and start creating the life you want. Take responsibility for yourself. Learn to let go and practice self-healing and self-care.
Reference: 1. https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/NSDUHmhfr2013/NSDUHmhfr2013.pdf
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