Key Takeaways
- Emotional healing helps you process and integrate painful experiences and strong emotions.
- Practicing self-compassion and being kind to yourself are essential for emotional healing.
- Mindfulness and moving your body can help with processing difficult emotions.
Emotional healing happens when you can acknowledge, accept, and process difficult emotions or experiences. This process looks different for everyone, but it is possible as long as you are open to releasing expectations about what the experience will be like or what it will lead to.
The reality is that you will never be the same person you were before whatever happened that you are healing from. That can feel scary, but that can also feel incredibly freeing as you attempt to find yourself and experience post-traumatic growth.
What Is Emotional Healing?
Emotional healing is the process of acknowledging, allowing, accepting, integrating, and processing painful life experiences and strong emotions. It may involve empathy, self-regulation, self-compassion, self-acceptance, mindfulness, and integration.
Many people have a tendency to want to control the process of emotional healing by minimizing the pain and controlling their emotions. However, this can actually inhibit the process of emotional healing.
Emotional healing takes the time that it takes—which may be longer or shorter than you expect or plan on—if you allow it to be fully acknowledged, felt, moved through, and processed.
Emotional healing will look different for everybody, but it may include emotional regulation skills, a feeling of lightness, and stronger relationships as you can be more present with yourself and your loved ones.
When Do You Need Emotional Healing?
All people will need emotional healing at some point during their lives—we all experience challenges and difficult emotions that need processing.
Some common life stressors after which people may seek emotional healing include:
- Loss of a loved one
- Divorce
- Breakups
- Job loss
- Abuse (including emotional, physical, and sexual)
- Illness
Outside of specific events, it’s also possible to experience intensifying, lingering, and seemingly unshakeable anger, sadness, or anxiety that feels like it is taking over your life. These feelings may cause a functional impairment in your day-to-day life. Emotional healing may look different if symptoms are becoming chronic.
No matter what the trigger for your difficult emotions, emotional healing is possible in all of these scenarios.
Questions to Ask Yourself Before Healing
We won’t sugarcoat it—emotional healing is not an easy process, but it can be incredibly rewarding for many people and help them find clarity and inspiration in life beyond whatever it is they are healing from. Here are some questions you might want to ask yourself as you embark on your healing journey.
What are you healing from? Maybe you don’t know, but you know you’d like things to be different:
- How is not healing affecting your life?
- What do you want your life to look like after you’ve healed?
- If you woke tomorrow, how would you know you had healed?
- Are you ready to heal?
- Are you willing to sit through some discomfort in service of healing?
- What will help you on your emotional healing journey?
- How has not yet healing served you?
- What can you do to make your healing journey gentle for yourself?
Tips for You As You Heal
As you work through the healing process, here are some tips that can help:
Practice Self-Compassion
You’re not broken. It’s pretty hard to heal if you’re beating yourself up all the time. That’s why showing yourself kindness and compassion can be key to your emotional healing.
Research has shown that people who practice self-compassion show more significant increases in well-being than those who don’t.
Thank Yourself
Thank yourself. Yes, that’s right—thank yourself. Despite the emotional pain you’ve experienced that’s leading you on this emotional healing journey, you have made it this far. Whatever coping mechanisms you used worked for you at the time, even if they don’t work now, or weren’t the “healthiest” in the first place.
While past coping mechanisms might not serve you now, you’ve made it this far. You’ve shown you have the strength and resolve to find new strategies that will move your forward toward healing.
Don’t Go it Alone
Science shows we heal better together. Your instinct might be to go into hiding until you are “done” healing, but the reality is that your friends and family probably want to help you! Reach out to someone who feels safe.
Don’t Try to “Fix” it All at Once
Emotional healing is not simple, and whatever happened to you likely has deeper roots in you than you realized and may be affecting you in many ways. Back to being realistic: don’t expect to fix all the ways your issue or trauma has affected you all at once.
Sit Through It
This may be one of the hardest things to do. You are likely experiencing a range of deep feelings such as sadness, grief or rage. Those aren’t fun emotions and it’s tempting to want to ignore them or rush through them. It will be uncomfortable, but acknowledging tough feelings is part of healing. The good news is that feelings do pass even if it doesn’t feel like they will.
Know That Progress Isn’t Linear
You may feel like you are making the best breakthroughs, and then you have a terrible day where you feel like all of your emotional healing has been undone—or that you did something wrong. If you broke a leg, you might have a bad day where you’re in pain again despite a sustained period of healing.
Benefits of Emotional Healing
You may not like the pain that you’re in, but maybe you’re afraid to work on emotional healing because you’re afraid of what you might find in the process. This is a valid concern, but here are some of the health benefits that are associated with the positive emotions associated with healing.
- Better cardiovascular health
- Potentially longer lifespan
- Lower cortisol (stress hormone) output
- Lower heart rate
- Less likely to develop upper respiratory infection when exposed to a common cold or flu
How to Find Emotional Healing
If you’re trying to heal your emotional pain, here are some ways that you can embark on your journey to emotional healing.
Therapy
Emotional healing can be incredibly rewarding but it can also be painful in the interim. You might want to consider talking to a mental health professional who is trained in working with people on emotional healing journeys every day.
They can help you heal at a pace that is appropriate for you and provide the insight you might not be able to reach on your own.
Get Help Now
We’ve tried, tested, and written unbiased reviews of the best online therapy programs including Talkspace, BetterHelp, and ReGain. Find out which option is the best for you.
Mindfulness
When we are attempting emotional healing from something, it can be very easy to get pulled back into past events or to catastrophize what the future will be like if you don’t heal. Mindfulness practices can help you be in the present moment and see that, at this moment, you are just fine.
Journaling is often suggested—and for good reason. Research has shown that journaling may be an effective tool for building greater emotional resilience.
Allow yourself to feel the fullness of your grief, anger, pain, or loss without attaching further meaning, stories, or thoughts. This can be deeply healing and helpful in processing emotions.
Research suggests that many emotions tend to be fairly short-lived. Some last longer than others. Challenging emotions like shame, fear, disgust, boredom, and irritability tend to fade the fastest.
This information can help emotions feel less overwhelming. When an emotion overcomes you, you can keep an eye on the clock to note how long it takes before the feeling dissipates—employing mindfulness skills in the meantime.
Notice, allow, and describe the physical sensation of the emotion moving through your body without judging it or attempting to change it. Breathe through the sensations.
You can perform exercises to ground yourself such as putting your feet on the floor, drinking a sip of water, or running cold water over your hands.
Move Your Body
As you’re experiencing difficult emotions, try to move your body to help process your feelings. Move your body as it wants to move (i.e., slowly or quickly, shaking or running).
Moving the body to process stress or trauma can be seen in the animal kingdom as well. In his book “Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma,” therapist Peter A. Levine notes that in the wild, an impala that escapes its predator will instinctively “shake off” the traumatic event, regaining full movement of its body.
Helpful Therapeutic Techniques
Therapeutic techniques like somatic experiencing (SE) and trauma release exercises (TRE) can help process and move trauma and emotions from within the body. SE involves becoming aware of their internal bodily sensations and bringing awareness to them. TRE consists of a person intentionally moving their body to decrease stress levels.
Get Support
Social support can also play a vital role in emotional healing. Be open to receiving support from your community. Allow yourself to be seen, supported, and cared for by friends and loved ones.
How Do I Know If I Am Healing?
There is no finish line to cross that signifies you are fully healed! Emotional healing can sometimes be so gradual you may not even realize how much you’ve healed, and others may notice it before you.
Signs of emotional healing include being able to look back at a situation without being overcome by emotion, getting better at bouncing back in the face of adversity, or simply feeling a greater sense of peace.
There may be deeper and deeper levels of emotional healing to be discovered. Do your best to live in a way that honors and supports your continued journey of emotional healing. This will allow you to experience ever-expanding emotional healing that can improve your physical, emotional, and mental health, well-being, satisfaction in life, and connection to yourself and others.
Press Play for Advice On Healing From Trauma
Hosted by therapist Amy Morin, LCSW, this episode of The Verywell Mind Podcast, featuring Holocaust survivor Dr. Edith Eger & daughter Dr. Marianne Engle shares how to heal from trauma and build resilience. Click below to listen now.
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