A Balanced Healing Approach

What does balanced healing mean?

It means we don't just focus solely on how we feel. We focus on behavior and mental clarity as well so that we don't have to get stuck in emotions that never seem to end.

What does that look like in practice?

Pick some pain that you're aware of right now and use that to follow me along on this journey. I'm going to show you how to approach this in a way that isn't so painful or difficult to do.

The first step is understanding the pain, not feeling the pain. We need mental clarity.

Where did it come from? Is it part of your core wound or the original trauma that started all the pain for you? What is happening in your experience that's triggering it right now?

This is important - if you're stuck in cycles or stories of blame, shame, guilt, and victimization then that's where you need to start mentally working on this. You need to free yourself from these first. You free yourself from them mentally, not emotionally. Rationalize yourself out of the story. Let all the people including yourself off the hook. The experience just is. It's gone. Let it be there without arguing with it. This is a mental process, not an emotional one.

If emotions come up and chances are that they will, allow them. Do not dig in them. Do not go swimming in them. Do not question them. Just let them be there. They will flow through and leave. Let them do that.

Once they stop, go back to mental clarity. Remember, anybody can look at a sad picture and cry. Your memories are triggering your emotions and that's okay. We're not trying to desensitize ourselves. The emotions are a clue, they aren't the main show, they are just pointing to other things. What we have to learn to do is understand that the emotions are being triggered by the brain and not allow that to distract us. Let the brain trigger the emotion and don't do anything about it. Don't get sucked in. Don't get distracted. Just let the emotion flow and go.

You need to understand what in your experience is triggering the pain. Once you have that you can look at your behavior. How are you responding or reacting to the external trigger? Is your behavior based on pain?

The pain makes us create coping mechanisms and survival skills. Those aren't helpful. That's what keeps us connected to the pain. Our job is to look for that. Is my behavior based on some old coping mechanism I don't need anymore? What is it? How do I change it?

Somewhere in any or all of these steps fear is going to show up. Your ego is going to tell you how it doesn't know who it is without all the stuff. The question you want to ask is the same one I used to ask myself:

Who am I without all the pain?

This is why we focus on behavior because it allows us to answer the question. The pain is being reflected in your behavior whether you're conscious of that right now or not. As you start shifting your behavior, you become who you are without the pain.

This process is slower. The behaviors aren't always that easy to find. I've proven that to you myself through sharing my own journey. It can take a while to finally see it in a way that allows you to recognize the behavior. That's okay. Every time the pain gets triggered via your external experience, you'll be able to shift another behavior because you're not going to get sucked into the emotions anymore.

The truth is you may never gain full clarity around who you are without all the pain because you may never fully heal in this lifetime. Chances are good I won't fully heal and neither will you. So really the question is who can you be without this specific pain?

When we focus on trying to drop all the pain that's overwhelming. But if we just focus on dropping this specific pain that's come up, it's far less overwhelming and mind boggling. It's much easier to manage. It doesn't bring up all the fear of having a massive paradigm shift in the next 10 minutes either.

We keep our healing journey relatively self-contained. We don't allow scope creep. So it's not about healing all the pain, it's just about healing this specific pain. That scope is important because it keeps it manageable. It makes it possible and puts it back in reach.

You can't heal it all in one sitting anyway. You're not going to get it all done today or tomorrow and that's okay. It doesn't need to be done today or tomorrow. It's okay to allow a slower process that's less overwhelming. You take it in manageable chunks and you don't worry about some imagined outcome or some crazy destination you have.

I get it. I see the struggle because I feel it myself. There are lots of things in my life that haven't shifted yet that I really want to see shift, and it creates impatience. Up until just a few days ago, I was starting to lose hope that it was even possible. I was caught in a behavior cycle around expectations that I wasn't aware of. That was creating pain for me. It was creating hopelessness. The minute I got clarity I was unable to unhook myself from it and shift my behavior, but that's not an instant fix. It gave me clarity yes, it didn't shift my external reality.

Now I get the fun of figuring it all out, but I have a choice to make as I do that. I can choose to be impatient and hopeless or I can choose to enjoy the adventure and find hope in that. Believe me when I say that I have to fight with my focus sometimes so that I don't go down the rabbit hole. I put effort into rationalizing myself out of these crazy stories. Sometimes it means that I make choices to do things so that I can stop telling myself the story.

This time what I chose to do was create an open ended goal for the next 6 weeks. From now until March 31st, my only goal is to see how far I can get from where I am now. I wrote down how many Patreon subscribers I have, how many people are subscribed to my email, and I included my advice column that I just started. If I create anything new then I will add that as well. The idea is to see if I can make those numbers go up. I didn't set some goal or random number to get frustrated by or upset with. I left it open-ended. How far can I get?

I asked one other question too - Who do I need to be to build my audience this way?

Now that I've unhooked myself from the story of expectations and guilt, I have the opportunity to see what it means to be in my power more fully. Instead of focusing on stories of how things aren't happening, I'm focusing on creating a story of how I can use my power to help make things happen without the struggle and burden that often gets added to these types of goals. Making things happen still requires me to stay in my lane and keep my focus within its human limits. I can't take over the job of the Universe. It's important to find those boundaries so that you don't try to take on too much.

I know I have the power to create some change in my life. I'm asking the Universe to show me what that looks like. I'm not digging in emotional pain, because the emotions only come from my mind and the crazy stories my brain wants to tell. I can re-focus my brain that's totally fine, but to keep that fight to a dull roar, it's easier to take some action to go in the direction that I want to go in. It gives my mind something else to do that isn't telling stories that cause pain.

What I'm doing for myself is finding balance. I'm balancing out the brain that wants to make stuff up with action that gives my brain something to do that's more constructive. I'm not digging into the emotional pain because there's nothing there to do. The emotions are being triggered by the stories of the mind, nothing else.

But that doesn't mean I can't use the emotions as clues to what else may be going on. I don't need to dig into the emotions but I can question why the emotions are there and see if there is anything useful. The usefulness will come from the thoughts and behaviors that created the emotions, not the emotions themselves. The usefulness is in catching thought patterns and stuck behaviors because those are things I can shift and heal. I can't get rid of emotion, it just is. So I accept it and I work around it and use it as a clue that might point to other things that I can change or heal.

When we make the emotions the main show we get stuck. We end up drowning in the emotion and we never really get anywhere. The emotion is not the main show. The emotion is a response to some experience or thought. The emotion offers a clue as to what else might be going on. It's pointing you in the right direction. You just get distracted by all the drama so you miss what it's pointing at.

I pay attention to emotion only long enough to figure out what's it pointing at. The remainder of the process is entirely logical and behavioral. Right now I'm even using action to balance the mind. I got too far down the rabbit hole of hopelessness and expectations. To find my way back out of that I need to actually take action towards what I want. No ridiculous goals. No crazy expectations. Just hope for improvement from where I am now. That's it. That's enough balance for the mind to feel like its going somewhere and that something is happening. It stops the stories.

So what if nothing happens?

It can be tough to tell your brain that clarity is a good outcome, but that will be the conversation I'll be having with myself if I don't see external improvement. Clarity and internal improvement are just as good as anything else. That can be a hard pill to swallow, but it's true. As humans we're very externally focused and so it can be challenging to accept the internal shift as being enough. As I've learned though, that is part of the deal. There have been many times on my journey where I've accepted internal clarity as a valid outcome and I will do so again if need be.

The processes I offer make the whole healing thing less intense. It doesn't make it a straight line though. It doesn't suddenly offer you a throughway. It just makes it more likely that you'll jump the hurdles when you run into them because you won't be so scared of them.

There is way forward if you're willing to try what I'm offering.

Love to all.

Della