Are you wanting to start your healing journey and not sure where to start? Have you started noticing you have triggers and pain coming up but don’t know what to do with it? Are you wanting help but not sure where to get it?

Friend, you are not alone. I’ve been there and I’ve walked the journey of healing, and let me tell you, it is so much easier when you have help from others who have walked what you are walking through. If you’ve been trying to get help but just haven’t been able to find it, let me tell you, you have found it.

These tools I’m talking about today were the foundations that I started on when I first starting walking my healing journey and they are tools I still use today.

The First Step To Healing

The first step to healing the pain inside, is getting familiar with what you are actually feeling! We so often bypass this step. We recognize we are feeling frustrated but then don’t know how to actually change what we’re feeling or understand how we got to that emotional state. No one likes feeling angry or taking out their anger on someone else. And if we do, we often struggle with guilt and shame or self-hatred over ourselves because a part of us knows that is not who we are or who we want to be.

Getting familiar with your feelings isn’t just identifying one emotion and then trying to move on from it or stuff it or “just get over it.” You actually have sit with the emotions and figure out what they are trying to tell you.

Emotions always have a story to tell. Sometimes that story is true, and sometimes it’s not. Either way, you are feeling what you are feeling and your feeling is valid, even if it’s not true. Why? Because emotions and pain cannot leave until they are seen, heard, and validated. So if we are telling ourselves, “you’re feeling sad but your feeling is not valid so why are feeling it?”, we are actually invalidating ourselves and creating more distance rather than closeness and trust.

You want to build trust and closeness with yourself so that you can not be at odds with yourself and you can in turn, feel safe inside yourself. If we don’t feel safe inside ourselves, we will constantly be searching outside ourselves for safety and validation, which is only setting ourselves up to be disappointed when someone or something cannot validate and see and hear us the way we so desperately need.

How Do You Identify What You’re Feeling?

The first step is to get familiar with a list of feelings. I have one you can grab here. You don’t have to understand them all right away, but getting familiar with what emotions you recognize you feel often will help you do identify them in the moments where you are actually feeling them.

This feeling list I have here is what I’ve used for years. I would look at the list when I noticed I was feeling a lot of big emotions and I would pick three emotions from the list, under three different bolded categories.

An example of this would be, I’m feeling restless (anxious category), apprehensive (overwhelmed category), and low energy.

Then I will get curious about one of those emotions. I’ll ask myself, why are you feeling low energy? And then I wait for an answer. The first thing I sense or hear is usually what I’m experiencing on the inside. My answer, “I’m feeling low energy because I’ve been doing so much with other people and I haven’t had time to just be with myself much this week.”

Once I know the story behind the emotion, I can identify what I need to do to help myself. I’ve been feeling low energy this week because I’ve done a lot with others and haven’t had much time for myself. So I’ll then ask myself, “What do you need from me?” My answer to this came with tears in my eyes. I felt small, maybe 7. I heard this “I need you to stop doing so much and just be with me instead of doing so many things with others.

Knowing The Story Helps Us To Feel Compassion For Ourselves

I recognized I felt really small, which means I’m most likely in a triggered state. I’m operating out of an old pattern in my brain and body. Which makes sense why this overwhelm and low energy has felt so big in my body the last few days. My brain and body are operating like a seven year old trying to do all these adult things, like creating content and building a business. Things a seven year old would not know how to navigate.

Bringing in compassion looks like saying something like “I see you’re feeling overwhelmed. Like you have to do all these big tasks that you don’t know how to do. That would feel really overwhelming and maybe a little scary too. I’m so sorry you’re feeling overwhelmed and stuck. I want to help, how can I help you?”

Instantly I felt relief in my body and took a deep breathe. The overwhelm lifted. I saw my body relax and still feeling little, I heard her say “Ummm, this is helpful actually.” I said, “Yeah? Do you feel seen? And maybe heard too?” She nodded yes. I say, “Is there anything else you need from me?” She said “yes.” I said “Okay, what else do you need from me?” She said “ummm, I need a big hug” with a big smile on her face.

Encountering Your Little Self:

Now with this I understand it might feel awkward or impossible to give yourself a hug. The way I do this is using my imagination to see in my minds eye what my little self looks like. As I ask her about how she’s feelings, what’s happening, and what she needs from me, I am seeing her in a picture in my mind. So when she asked for a hug, I was able to, as my adult self, give her a big hug and spend time just being with her.

Encounters with my little self is something that I have cultivated over the past several years. It’s not something that felt easy at first, but over time I was able to see her more easily. The more I’ve spent time getting to know my little self, the more I see her more clearly in my mind. I talk more about this in my other posts, What Is Reparenting, How To Practice Self Love, and My Younger Self Doesn’t Trust Me.

Thanks For Reading Friend

Was this helpful for you? Leave a comment and tell me what intrigued you the most!

Also, If you’re looking for resources, I have a basic step-by-step guide here on how to unpack a trigger and connect with your heart.

If you are wanting to learn how to process pain and want to start a healing process for yourself, I am offering one-on-one coaching sessions. These sessions will help in learning how to process pain in a healthy way that actually brings lasting change and self-confidence.

I’m also creating a course that goes into the depths of all this as well. The course will take you step-by-step in how to walk through a healing journey. You will get live group coaching calls, a community of support, and one-on-one coaching with me. Also, subscribe to my email list to get updates for when the course is launched! If you have questions about anything, please reach out! I would love to chat with you via email.

You can email me at co*****@dy************.com with any questions you might have.