As you might have guessed from many of my past posts, I think there is much to be desired from common approaches to healing. Not only do so many attempts to heal fail to bring peace, some of them actually seem to make the pain worse. I have some ideas as to why this happens and what can be done to solve those problems. I’ll explore a few of them in this post.
Humans heal when they feel safe. More specifically, when they feel safe enough to relax and let their sympathetic nervous systems switch off while their parasympathetic nervous systems switch on. If there are several humans around whom someone feels safe enough to show any and all emotions they’re feeling, then they can heal in the company of those good folks. If they don’t have such safe humans in their lives, then their best bet is to heal alone (or with any animal friends around whom they feel safe). Even those who do know lots of safe humans still benefit from getting time alone to rest, cry, yell, feel, and heal without anyone else around.
Emotions are the primary drivers of human experience and human behavior. Since the emotional centers of our brains develop before the logical centers in the womb and the logical centers don’t even finish developing until almost three decades after birth, emotions call the shots. That’s why attempts to heal purely through reason, changing perspectives, focusing on the intellect, and otherwise ignoring the emotions all fail.
Further, emotions create thoughts. It’s often thought to be the other way around, but a dedicated mindfulness practice will reveal otherwise. Anyone who has felt overwhelmed with emotion around a particular situation knows how many anxious thoughts come about as a result. If they succeeded in releasing those emotions and felt the peace that arose afterward, then they have also experienced how all the different thoughts about that situation went away after the emotions passed. Some confuse cause and effect, believing that a change of thoughts brought about a change of emotions. However, since it’s entirely possible to understand intellectually that one is in a safe situation while still feeling afraid of that situation, the thoughts can’t be controlling the emotions.
All the fights in which multiple perspectives are shared and everyone involved walks away still believing what they believed before the fight (and usually believing it even more strongly afterward) further prove that trying to change thoughts doesn’t change emotions. Even one strong emotion can generate a huge number of thoughts, and releasing that emotion also releases all the thoughts that came along with it. As David Hawkins said in Letting Go, “Philosophers have sometimes made hay out of this negativistic, pessimistic approach and developed whole systems of nihilism. These philosophers, some of whom have become celebrated over the years, are obviously mere victims of painful emotions that they did not handle and which triggered endless intellectualization and elaboration. Some spent their entire lifetime constructing sophisticated intellectual systems to justify what is glaringly obvious as a simple suppressed emotion.”
When emotions run hot, they can prevent someone from correctly understanding what’s happening around them. This explains why misunderstandings and hostile reactions are so common in fights: A feels angry, B makes an innocuous comment, A thinks B is attacking A, and A then flies into a rage rather than getting clarification on what B actually said. When that happens, even while B might repeatedly attempt to clear up the misunderstanding, A is not receptive to it and will continue believing the misunderstanding until after the anger passes. That can also explain why B might say something and A responds with something completely irrelevant but does so as if the two different comments are somehow related. As long as that hot emotional wall is still in place, nothing can get through except what the person behind the wall wants to see, hear, say, and believe.
There seems to be an excessive fixation on talking through pain, as if that will bring healing and solve everything. The notion that talking is essential for healing has likely prevented much healing. More often than not, this results in talking about the same things repeatedly, intellectualizing everything, ignoring the emotions, hoping that talking it all out will make the pain go away, doing this over and over while hoping that it’ll someday work despite constantly failing to provide actual healing. I experienced this firsthand with an incredibly painful situation a few years ago that caused sleeping trouble, stomach issues, huge anxiety, tons of anger, and more. The pain from that situation never went away or even got better through talking about it to roughly a dozen people. Fortunately, it totally went away fairly quickly after I stopped thinking and talking so much about it and surrendered all the emotions around it. Similarly, talking about my dog Sawyer’s death didn’t take away the pain, although I have done a lot of that and still do because I’ve always enjoyed talking about him and sharing stories of him with those who want to hear about him. Working through the emotions has taken away most of the pain around his death. If it works for the most painful experience of my life, I’m convinced that it can work for anything.
An area in which talking with at least one other person about a difficult situation might be crucial is relationships. If talking through an issue is essential for the health and life of a relationship, then it’s important to talk about that issue with the other person. Fear of talking to the person in question often results in talking at length about the issue to someone outside the relationship, which doesn’t resolve the issue as that outside person can’t do anything to mend the situation, and it prevents the important conversations between the two people who are actually having the issue. Unfortunately, so many relationships fail because the conversations that could save them are had with the wrong people.
I’ve written previously about alternative approaches to healing and communicating, whether it’s related to fighting or comforting someone who is struggling. These approaches still seem to be incredibly rare, with the ineffective approaches getting the lion’s share of attention. Why is that? One reason that comes to mind is that they are contrary to how most humans are raised. Even as some things have gotten better with regard to how parents treat their kids, many parents still hit their kids, yell at them, threaten them, and punish them in many other ways. That sort of upbringing predisposes those who grow up that way to use hostile communication and, in some cases, violence throughout their lives to get what they want. That’s why so many adults believe that abuse and love can coexist and, sadly, get trapped in abusive relationships. Unlearning all of that negative programming after decades of practicing it and learning healthy ways of living is extremely difficult. It’s a wonder anyone manages to do it.
Additionally, there is the difficulty of actually using the effective communication and healthy emotional management approaches, even after learning how to use them. Being able to pause in the heat of the moment, take some deep breaths, and interact with others from a place of peace rather than a place of stress is a huge undertaking. It can be hard to do even when talking with safe humans who are receptive to working together through difficult conversations; it’s almost impossible with humans who immediately jump to rage or even violence the moment they hear something they dislike. That could be why even those who are familiar with the healthy approaches think that they’ll never learn how to use them or that they won’t work in difficult situations. Thus, even with all the resources available to learn and practice healthy communication and emotional management, real-world examples of such approaches are the exception while the unhealthy approaches remain the norm.
Those who’ve found healing through friendship with one or more animals knows that talking isn’t required. Animals don’t give advice, try to change anyone’s perspective, tell them they’re wrong, mock them, threaten them, etc. Sometimes humans tell animals how they’re feeling and what they’re struggling with, but other times they just enjoy quiet quality time together. I’ve healed almost exclusively by myself and with the comfort of some beloved animal friends since Sawyer’s death. Most of this healing has been accomplished through lots of crying, yelling, and sighing; I feel comfortable doing all of those (except yelling) around animals, but I only sigh on occasion around humans. This is partly due to a lack of feeling safe with most humans and also from wanting to preserve my privacy.
I don’t know what the future holds for general human emotional and mental health. Sometimes it seems like the whole world will heal together, and other times it seems like humans will destroy each other and everything else in sight. All I know is that healing from incredibly deep pain and effective communication are both possible on the individual level. As much as I’ve improved at both of those, I want to keep focusing on the most difficult areas so that any relationships I have will be healthy, especially my relationship with myself. That might inspire others to look into this stuff. Even if that doesn’t happen, I’ll keep working on what I can control and doing my best to make that as good as possible.