The Healing Identity The most important element in overcoming emotional pain is a healing identity, which is a clear focus on your resilience, strengths, and desire to improve your life, along with a steadfast refusal to indulge in thoughts of damage, blame, victimhood, or anything else that inhibits natural healing. Painful memories come equipped with a built-in healing mechanism, as long as our efforts to keep safe do not violate deeper values. For instance, pain that results from death of a loved one runs a natural healing course, unless we try to protect ourselves from loss by withholding love from others. The violation of you deeper value of connection to others keeps the memory of loss painful. But once we allow ourselves to invest value in other areas of life, the memories of the lost loved one become pleasant reminders of enriched life experience. In other words, over time painful memories activate the powerful human capacity to heal, improve, and create value. When we disrupt the natural healing process by focus on damage, unfairness, moodiness, blame, or victim identity, painful memories often cause depression, obsessions, resentment, anger, addictions, abuse, or violence. That is why it is so crucial to identify with your deepest longing to heal, improve, and create value. Once you develop a healing identity, healing becomes a matter of reconditioning the emotional system to speed-up the natural healing process. |