The Energy to Heal—or Not

It takes a lot of energy to heal, I’m discovering.

It also takes a lot of energy to suppress healing.

Which is what we often do when we’ve had trauma of any kind, whether the “big T” type that’s obviously a trauma (parents’ divorce, car accident, abuse, etc.), or the seemingly smaller traumas like emotional neglect or simply not being supported at key times in your life. Either type of trauma has the same effect: our experience of the incident at the time overwhelmed our nervous system, and that trauma and stress got locked into our bodies.

That then locks us into old patterns of being triggered into overwhelm, and learning how to avoid those triggers (as best we could), or self-medicating them away.

As the famous Adverse Childhood Events Study (ACES) showed, such suppressed trauma often emerges decades later in chronic illness and diseases.

So, pick your energy suck. Lean into the energy commitment and releasing that healing requires, or hold back and let suppression steal your vitality.

For me, the recent surgery slowed me down enough to let suppressed traumas and patterns emerge to be healed. The healing work I’ve done for the past 13 years has given me enough capacity to face some pretty big traumas I’d buried.

I’m choosing to put my energy into actually healing, using some wonderful tools that are speeding results, rather than pushing down difficult emotions and painful experiences any longer.

It’s not been easy. I just wrote up a “hard truths I’ve not been willing to face before” document, to help me in this. I wrote out the truths I’d been ignoring, the lies and fantasies I told myself, and am praying about the path forward.

This kind of deep healing takes a willingness to give up what is familiar, to face all those “prison guards” who convince us we can’t break out and be free to face life as it really is, for us right now.

Photo by Hasan Almasi on Unsplash

It takes commitment to allow the difficult emotions to surface and pass through.

It takes the courage to do whatever it takes to live in reality, what’s true for us, and what we truly desire. And to trust God that those things are actually in line with our divine design, rather than things God will deny us because it’s somehow better for us to suffer.

Which takes us to our view of God, and why he allowed certain things to happen. Healing can bring on an existential and spiritual crisis. But for me, I’ve built a strong enough foundation in experiencing God’s true character, that I am trusting he’s thoroughly in this process, guiding, upholding, comforting, and strengthening me.

If you resonate with any of this and feel ready to lean into the energy of healing at the deepest level (it’s always a journey, not a destination), then visit Align with Your Divine Design and get on the waiting list for when that program is available.