Over a period of time, all of us knowingly or unknowingly experience emotional distress in all sorts of ways like underperformance in profession, your work or effort not getting recognized or acknowledged, situation is not in your favour, unwanted compulsions that result in sadness, anxiety, addictions, physical ailments, boredom, and/ or all sorts of angry, bleak, and agitated moods.
According to Counsellor Shivani Misri Sadhoo, when a person suffers from unhealthy emotional condition for a prolonged period of time and never addresses the concern directly, instead uses means to hide it from self or from others, then the person risks himself/herself to go into depression, addiction, starts having anger management issues and puts their life into a vicious cycle, where ill emotional & psychological condition results in worsening of relationships and profession and that further deteriorates the problem.
So what helps to relieve this distress? What helps a person to heal emotionally? Can it be done regularly? Yes, says Counsellor Shivani Misri Sadhoo. She says there are 5 easy but very effective ways to heal emotionally and to save himself /herself from mental health and psychological issues. They are:-
1. Put efforts to understand yourselves:
To start emotional healing, the first step is to start putting efforts to understand yourself. Most of us tell ourselves and to others about what is the right way to act and behave, BUT we fail to act appropriately as per our own set standards when the challenging situation surface in life.
For example, a father tells himself and promises his family that he will not ever get angry on his wife and kids once he is back home from the office. He followed his promise for 2 weeks or for a month and one day suddenly he explodes over a trivial issue having no control over himself.
It’s a story for many among us, we tell ourselves, “I know how I should behave, but I cannot do it. I know what is right, and I still do something repeatedly. I am simply unable to change.” The point is that it is in itself not sufficient to know how to behave properly. Knowledge and real comprehension are two different things. For a real change, thorough comprehension is required.
We need to understand that in the background of our apparently unchangeable patterns of behavior, there are our mental wounds, acquired from the past. These mental wounds have by now sunk into the unconscious. Unlike the physical wounds on our body, these mental wounds rarely heal. The patterns of the behavior is fuelled by our mental wounds, which are self-sustaining. For instance, we are apprehensive about our boss because (s)he talks in a disrespectful way in front of our colleagues. Then, after a while, the apprehension fades away, and we believe that our anger is gone. But our anger has not really vanished; for a while, it had been conscious, but then it sunk into the unconscious, into the depths of our soul. That is where it is waiting for its turn, to emerge to the surface again. It may not have to wait long, as when we return home from work, the behavior of our wife or children might trigger the re-appearance of the suppressed anger. We supply new strength, new intensity to our wrath, sustain it, and it keeps resurfacing time and again.
2. Take Responsibility for our Act
When we become angry about something or with someone, we believe that the anger belongs to us, it is a part of our Ego. We then try to find excuses for our behavior. Our most common explanation is that our anger was caused by the other person and in this way, we reject responsibility, blame it on the other person or situation, we try to find a scapegoat to blame for our behavior, which is unacceptable even for ourselves. In the first step, we must realize that anger is caused by our mental injuries; the environment only provides a framework for that anger to charge itself with energy and get express through various ways – scream, abusive, negatively sarcastic etc.
We shall only be able to achieve a real change in that respect if we realize that our grief, unhappiness, jealousy or anger, and our behavior related to these emotions, are almost always the consequences of some internal wounds. We must, therefore, cease trying to find excuses for our behavior all the time. We must take responsibility for our anger or unhappiness, and be aware that these are the products of our mental injuries.
3. Experience and practice self-empathy
So as to be able to heal our internal wounds, we must become alert and we must recognize the patterns of behavior that are rooted to the internal wound, and we must shoulder the responsibility for that behavior.
When sadness, unhappiness, jealousy or anger crops up again in your lives, don't turn your attention to your surroundings, people, situations etc, don't just identify them as the reason for your extreme emotion, rather, concentrate on your specific emotion itself. For example, if you feel anger, let experience that to the fullest. Let completely see and experience what that emotion is like.
4. Try to explore your past
Once we have experienced the emotions of sorrow, unhappiness, jealousy or anger, let us try to return to the past and find the root cause of those emotions, the original internal wound that fueled that particular emotion. We might find a number of small wounds, but do not stop at the first one, try to dig deep and reveal the first wound. Examine how and under what circumstances that particular internal wound was made. We will be able to accomplish that, since our past is there with us, it exists in there, only unconsciously. We now intentionally bring those wounds to the light of Conscience.
5. Consult an Expert
The above steps can be fruitful depending on the intensity of your issue. If situations are bad and damaging your relationship and life and it's beyond your control, then focusing on past wounds alone is not advisable. Rather it should be done under the monitoring and guidance of an expert like a mental health professional.
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