Hello, Beautiful Souls.
One of the things that can trip us up when we’re on a healing journey the fact that healing isn’t linear.
It doesn’t happen as a constant upward trend.
One day things are great, and the next things are not.
This can be especially disconcerting at the beginning, when we’re making great strides and suddenly the bottom drops out… Everything was rosy, and out of no where, all hell breaks loose. Everything we’ve been working so hard on, all of our fresh and shiny wins, everything we’ve just achieved, all comes crashing down.
In those moments, we can have a double crisis on our hands.
First, we’re having to deal with the pain of what we were healing: that anger we thought we were releasing, that horrible sense of abandonment, those crushing addictions, those debilitating fears of not being enough…. Noooooooo! I don’t want to feel like this!
And second, we feel doubly miserable, because we’re back where we started – as if nothing had been achieved, and all that time and effort a waste. And, now, we’re confused:
“I was just kidding myself? Was all of this for naught?
Should I be doing something different? Will anything ever work?
Am I just broken and unfixable?!”
Crisis!!
I see this sudden crash, this dip in progress, on our healing journeys a lot.
Most of the time they’re minor. But when they’re not… Yikes! It can be very challenging.
It’s one of the things that I often tell clients after the first few sessions; to simply be aware that everyday may not be perfect…
The wonderful results their glowing about? Excellent! Yes! Keep going!
And, if they wake up tomorrow and everything has fallen down around their ears? Life has not ended.
The process is still working.
They’re still on track and doing an excellent job.
Bad days are a normal part of the journey, and there might be a few in there…
Why?
We cycle. We have ups and downs.
Often, we heal something to a point and we experience relief(!). Perfect.
…and then a deeper layer of it surfaces, and we feel horrible. Argh.
The good news is, now we can heal that layer, too.
This isn’t a setback. This is progress.
Another way to think about this is that we aren’t machines. You can’t just press the gas pedal and expect a continuous increase in speed.
Instead, we’re beautifully complex, multifaceted beings.
And of all of the things that we are, linear is not one of them.
If you want to give healing a shape, go for cyclical.
Linear will disappoint you every time.
As soon as you realize this, that your healing will go in cycles, then we don’t get bowled over with every wave. In fact, once we understand this, those bad days don’t seem so bad. We still have to deal with feeling like crud, but we don’t have to doubt ourselves or the process anymore. Shew!
And, of course, these huge dips don’t always happen!
It’s just good to know that they can, so we stay confident within them.
Ok, that’s good to know, but how do we know if we’re actually improving?
How do we know if we’re really healing?
(and not just kidding ourselves)
The thing to keep in mind on a healing journey is, in general are you getting better?
On average are you improving?
Is the overall trend going up?
If you could plot your improvement on a graph, would it be a sloping up on average?
Let’s say I’m working on abandonment, and I’m noticing that when my friends don’t call me, I don’t feel as abandoned as I used to. I notice that when my boss ignores me I also don’t feel as upset. In general things are getting better. Then one day, when a coworker leaves me out of a work party, I feel really terrible. It’s one of the worst episodes of abandonment I’ve ever had! In that moment, it feels like a huge dip in progress.
But if I keep going, doing the practices I was doing to heal: doing the healing practices, working with a healer, whatever it was, am I able to recover from that drop? And once I recover, am I’m actually better now, or at least as good as I was before it happened… and do I continue improving overtime?
If the general trend is good, as the healing process goes on, in my experience, those huge setbacks aren’t so huge anymore. Lots of little ones can happen, but the big ones are often not so bad. If I’m honest, sometimes they only feel so big because what was happening before felt so good – and compared to that goodness this feels TERRIBLE!
The little ones, which are much more recurrent, I like to call them local lows. Minor dips in the general upward trend.
So, if you’re seeing improvements, if in general that part of you is getting better, then keep going. Especially in the beginning, when it feels like you’ve reverted back to zero – you’ve bottomed out of the chart, don’t lose faith in yourself, in the process, in your progress. You’re likely experiencing a local low (a big one) and it will get better.
If you’re not seeing overall improvements, and certainly when you plateau for a while, that’s when you want to switch to something else (if you want to keep working). You’ve exhausted the benefits that you can get out of whatever you’re doing and it’s time to take another tack.
Or take a break. Rest and enjoy all of the gains you’ve made. Enjoy the benefits of your hard work: your increased sense of comfort, calm, groundedness and self-connection.
Until then, until the upward movement stops, keep going, my friend.
Take the ups and downs as part of the ride.
It’s perfect. You’re perfect.
That crash is just part of the process.
Don’t give up on yourself, the work you’ve done and the gains you’re making.
You’re still improving.
You’ve just hit a local low.
This low shall pass.
And you’ll be in a better place in no time.
Most likely, even better than before.
Enjoy the Waves,
Eléna