5 Emotional Self Healing Techniques
Emotional self-healing is about maintaining emotional health and handling stress, hurt and our vulnerabilities effectively which can prevent us from being balanced, grounded and emotionally mature.
Having an emotional self healing routine is essential to maintaining our emotional health and well-being. The following list of emotional healing techniques can be used as the foundation of building positive habits that will improve your overall emotional health and help you to deal with any obstacles that might throw your well-being out of balance.
1. Kindness and Compassion
Emotional self healing starts with kindness and compassion towards your own vulnerabilities and needs.
The world wants you to rush, stay busy, and push yourself to achieve no matter what. We might often believe that we need to sacrifice our own needs and well-being in order to catch up to others and be successful. This attitude, however, creates more problems than it solves because it disconnects us from our bodies and makes listening to our physical and emotional needs difficult.
Approaching your well-being with kindness and compassion means that you prioritise your emotional health over success and proving something to others. In essence, it's about taking time to understand yourself and what you can do in order to feel healthier.
2. Stop self criticism
What would happen if you stopped criticising yourself for every little mistake?
It's easy to think that if you stopped self criticism, you wouldn't know when you make a mistake or there wouldn't be anything that could motivate you to take positive actions in your life. This logical fallacy only leads us to feel stressed, anxious or demotivated – especially if we criticise ourselves for our vulnerabilities or needs.
Knowing when we've made a mistake or whether something in our behaviour needs improvement is based on witnessing the actual outcomes of your actions. You perform A which then leads to B. You then proceed to analysing this chain of events and you end up drawing conclusions on what you've done right and what wrong. Technically, that's where the process should stop, but we often end up going a step forward and judge ourselves for doing or not doing something. We evaluate ourselves, rather than our actions. What emotions and feeling does this judgement create?
3. Embrace Solitude
Although positive relationships can aid us in emotional healing, essentially it is up to us to create space in our lives for self-care where we can spend time to listen to our needs. You can't listen to others and to yourself simultaneously.
Overly relying on others to guide us or to cater to our needs without balancing it with self-care creates dependence and can disconnect us further from ourselves.
It is in solitude where we learn how to distinguish the voice of our body from the voices of others which is a key to learning how to engage in emotional self healing.
4. Needs vs Desires
It's easy to confuse needs with desires – both might drive us to take a particular action. However, needs are an expression of our body needing something essential, whereas desires are often a representation of our compulsions, stress, insecurities, or simply habits.
Although fulfilling our desires feels pretty good, the feeling is illusionary as it is short-lived. Especially unmoderated desires can lead us to take compulsive actions which yield nothing but a short-term gratification and long-term negative consequences.
In contrast, needs leads us to feeling satisfied and fulfilled. Compare eating a healthy meal that provides your body with the nutrition your body needs versus eating a few pieces of cake only because it's pleasant and feels good.
Similarly, we have emotional needs and emotional desires. Fulfilling our emotional needs leads to satisfaction and health (long-term benefits), whereas catering to emotional desires leads to further cravings and only temporary well-being.
The source of emotional needs and emotional desires is different. Needs originate from our body – meeting these needs contributes to the overall well-being. In contrast, emotional desires come purely from our mental state – we desire to feel something for the sake of feeling good which might or might not contribute to the well-being of our body.
5. Self-honesty
Lastly, emotional self healing needs to be fundamentally based on being honest with ourselves. This includes understanding what we are feeling and why.
Judging our emotions for being good or bad pushes us towards mental space which might cause us to disconnect from our emotions and confuse our thoughts and evaluations with our feelings. Therefore, an important element of self-honesty is accepting all emotions we experience.
Feelings don't lie – it's important to understand that all your feelings and emotions are valid because they exist and can be experienced. They are true. The only time they might be not be true is when we invalidate them through our judgements, dismissal, denial or avoidance.
Self-honesty is essential to emotional self-healing not only because it helps us to stay connected with our emotional side, but also because it can help us to be more authentic and whole.