Healing the Wounds That Bind You

PRIMARY CONCEPTS

• People desire to let go of previous hurts, but they often cling to them in order to demonstrate that they care about themselves.
• You have the option of allowing your wounded younger self to mature and become a part of who you are.
• Life is full with painful experiences that can be incorporated into a strong sense of self.

Do you have that feeling inside again? The wound that you just can’t seem to shake? The memory that plays across the screen of your mind as you lie awake at night or that is forever present in the back of your mind? You might experience it as nagging anxiety or a depressive undertone that gently, and sometimes not so gently, taps on your shoulder to let you know it is still there.

Most people will be pulled back to that betrayal by a best friend, the heartache of the last relationship, that unrequited love, or the loss of the first romantic partner in high school. Some of us go back even farther into childhood memories of being alone, unseen, unprotected, or even abused.

What is unmistakable is that the themes seem to repeat in our lives, and we continue to feel them. They permeate our experiences and our stories. And, so, the big question is: Do we want to get rid of them? If the answer is a resounding “yes,” then why don’t we?

Resolving most social/emotional wounds is similar to how we treat trauma.

1. Learn to discriminate feelings from the past from emotions that you are feeling in the present.
2. Trace back and connect the feeling to the original memory that spawned it.
3. Try exposure to the memory along with its associated emotions while staying relaxed in a supportive environment with people who care about you.
4. Learn to undertake inner child work, in which your adult self acts as a caring adult who guides and protects your younger self as she goes through the memory.
5. Accept the experience as something that happened to you and shaped you... and then let it go.

Healing can be a little more involved, but these are the fundamentals. Many solid materials are available in published books and internet references, and a qualified clinical psychologist can guide you through the process. (Use Psychology Today's Therapy Directory to find a therapist near you.)

If it's so straightforward, why do so many of us continue to be impacted by previous wounds? If you examine your wounds, you'll notice that a recurrent theme is a lack of support and care when you needed it. No one was there to support you in the way that you required. You felt alone, unheld, and unnoticed, whether it was based on reality or not.

This notion may make you furious and hurt, so you decide (consciously or unconsciously) that you will not allow that person, that former version of yourself, be forgotten. They deserved to be noticed, cared for, and safeguarded. And as long as you keep recreating their tale and feeling their agony, you will ensure that they are noticed and remembered.

What would happen if you didn't do that? What if you didn't remember your younger self or their experience? Would the sands of time swallow them up and make them invisible, leaving them alone and forgotten? We keep the painful memory and loss alive by believing this (which is existential anxiety).

A 50-year-old parent who has lost a young adult child to a drug overdose is in a similar situation. They tend to have prolonged mourning experiences, believing that allowing oneself to recover and stop feeling the agony would imply that their deceased loved one was unimportant to them, and thus they keep the sadness alive.

Similarly, I just spoke with a friend who is having difficulty quitting a love partner. My friend believes that if he departs, his partner will forget about him and he will cease to exist in that person's mind. So, even in the middle of dysfunction and agony, my friend holds on to prevent the grief of being forgotten (unseen, invisible).

The most important takeaways

The truth is, those social/emotional wounds are designed to hurt, and they should and do define who you are and how you see the world. The emotional anguish and recollection, on the other hand, do not need to be compartmentalised and kept separate from the rest of your life's experiences and memories. Because it became you, that part of you cannot be forgotten. It's supposed to become a natural part of your personality.

Being a therapist has the interesting side effect of allowing me to apply what I'm talking about with my clients to my own life. Many of my clients have recently begun to retrieve lost aspects of their childhoods and earlier lives. And despite doing my own healing and inner-child work for more than 30 years, I kept being drawn to a memory of myself at age 7, alone in my bedroom with only my stuffed animals, grief-stricken and thinking, "If I die here in this place, will anyone know that I ever existed?" I was drawn to a memory of myself at age 7, in a foreign country without my father and older siblings, alone in my bedroom with only my stuffed animals, grief-stricken and thinking, "Will I understand why, 51 years later, he still refuses to leave that room when I think on that still vivid recollection. He is terrified that he will vanish and cease to exist.

But the truth is that he did matter, that his experiences shaped who I am now, and that he enabled me to grow up and live a happy and healthy life. He morphed into me.

Our younger selves are intended to mature and become fully incorporated into our identities. It is time to let them.