In the past year and a half now that I have been blogging, I have not missed a month, until now. While I could shame myself for not holding true to what I said that I would do for my business, that is against everything that I teach you all to do. So, I ask for grace.

Taking care of my physical health lately has been a task. My body has been attacking me. Between fibroids and my IBS, life has been difficult to manage. Here is the good news though. I have honored every emotion, and worked at tracing it back to my body sensations. I haven’t delved deep enough in meditation to discover what emotion is driving the fibroid flare-up, but I know that is a part of the process. Healing from trauma is truly a journey. I have called it a marathon in my bio, and I had to really think through that analogy recently. Why think of it as a race at all? I’m not competing against anyone. There isn’t a finish line. In my retrospection of this idea, I realized that I called it a marathon because I am healing one part of my self at a time. Passing a baton to the next part of me that needs to un-learn and heal once one part of me is at least managable. I guess in that analogy, it is more like a relay race without the need to be fast. So many people see healing as something that they have to attain and once they attain it there is no more work to be done. Sorry to tell you folx, that just isn’t true. I remember starting this journey and feeling like I had to get all of the information quickly on how to do the work to heal so that I could get to healing quickly. While I was getting the healing I was seeking, I was doing myself a dis-service by trying to go through it all so fast. I learned a lot about myself in a quick way, one of those things being that when I meditate and not fear what I see during meditation, I can use the tools I have gained and learn something else about myself that I previously didn’t know. I guess if I meditated daily, I would be way further along in my healing because of that too. Here’s the thing though. I am no longer trying to rush the process. I realized that in rushing the process, I am essentially opening more wounds at one time than I truly wish to deal with at one time. I have learned that I have more traumatic experiences that have sat with me than I ever realized before, and I can’t continue to open wound after wound after wound, and still function as I need to in every day life. Matter of fact, my body won’t let me do that. Healing is really management of your reaction to your emotions. This is not to say that healing means you will be poised and perfect in the management of your emotions. That is the farthest from the truth. The management of emotions is going to look and be different for everyone. Why? Because how we experience and react to emotion is different for everyone. Let me give you an example: Let’s use two sisters that were raised in the same single parent household. One sister resents the mother for everything, especially for not having her father in her life, and holds anger toward the mother. The other sister is held to high standards for everything, especially having great grades in school, and feels overwhelmed by the standards. Both feel a type of resentment toward the mother; however, the one sister holds anger, while the other sister’s resentment isn’t anger but a frustration with the high standards. While these are subtle differences in definition, they are expressed differently. One sister has the reactions of throwing things and yelling because of her anger. The other sister sits with her frustration and doesn’t outwardly express it, but suppresses it. In the work of healing, the sister that is angry, needs to work on managing her reaction to the anger in order to not be so violent. She can be angry, but how she is expressing her anger isn’t beneficial for her or anyone around her. The other sister on the other hand, needs to work on allowing herself to feel, and finding constructive ways to release those feelings so that she doesn’t keep them within her body. This sister needs to learn how to set boundaries, and the other sister needs to notice how she has attached these negative reactions to the emotion of anger and find better ways to release and/or manage her anger reactions.

This relay of healing is truly a process. We all react differently to different emotions. Some cry tears of joy, while others cry tears in pain. Some of us feel a weight on our chest whenever we feel any strong emotion that seems to “bother” us, while others don’t feel like emotions phase them at all. From what I have realized, how we react and feel emotions will evolve over time as long as we allow that evolution. Placing judgement on ourselves during this process adds to the shame. Take the shame out of it. Affirm your feelings, notice your feelings, notice your body, and decide how management of that emotion will look like for you. The journey is easier to work through when you have someone to regulate emotions with. Use a trusted partner or a Trauma Recovery Coach. Ask me more about it today!