We all, are always struggling and looking to learn how to heal emotionally, especially from painful experiences. My name is Amar, and I want you to be happy and that is the reason I write this blog. My entire life’s work is dedicated to try and make people happy. I am also a stand-up comedian, where I try to make people happy during a show. However, I call that fleeting happiness since it doesn’t last beyond the show.

Therefore, I write books, and this blog on how to be happy inside. Read through this blog, while you are here. You will find something that will resonate with you, and may be, hopefully, leave you a little peaceful, and happier. I hope, it does, for I will not stop trying till I live.

I realize that there is so much pain embedded in human life that healing has to be a constant and continuous process. This post, hereby, is dedicated to the process of healing emotionally from life. We will delve into some of the following questions, or variations of these:

How to heal from painful experiences?

What is the process of emotional healing?

Why are we not talking about physical healing here?

Physical wounds heal extraneously. And once they heal, we are done with them. We don’t keep thinking about forever. They heal, and they are the past. If you have a sprain in your shoulder, you can visit a physiotherapist, and do some exercises over a period of time, and the pain heals over time. We can depend on a medical practitioner who will help us with the physical pain, and the process of healing.

Without delving much into it, physical wounds are temporary, and do not linger into the future, unless they are permanent requiring medical attention.

Emotional wounds, on the other hand last, in some cases, permanently.

Why is it so hard to heal emotionally?

Emotional wounds leave a scar on our soul. When we experience emotional pain, it takes us a lot of mental effort to carry on with life, because the burden of the emotional hurt keeps weighing on us, wherever we go. We must learn to heal, because we cannot operate otherwise.

Pain is a part of life, and we as adult human beings, need to learn how to heal, or we will be stuck in a dark room, and wouldn’t know how to live, and how to carry on with life.

What is emotional healing?

Emotional healing is making peace with pain, and painful emotions. It is the process of finding peace in life from emotions like loss of loved ones from death or from break-ups like divorce, or from negative emotions like regret and guilt.

Unless we find a place in our minds where we feel we have healed from negative emotional baggage, it is quite hard to be happy, which is essentially the purpose of human life. Therefore, in order to be happy, we will look ways to heal emotionally, and try to be happy again. For happiness, we must seek, and find, or else life has no meaning.

In order to learn how to heal emotionally, we must look at identifying the exact emotion we are trying to heal from, and then focus on the process of emotional healing. Let us look at the process of emotional healing step by step.

1. Identifying the source of emotional pain

You may be feeling sad or distressed or even depressed from multiple sources. Life becomes overwhelming at times when we are facing problems at multiple fronts. Unless we break down our problems, and try to understand what is bothering us emotionally, we cannot work on the process of healing. Healing begins when the source or the sources of emotional pain have been identified.

How to identify sources of emotional pain

Take a break, and allow yourself some solitude. You need time with yourself to think and understand what’s exactly happening. In our culture, solitude isn’t considered a great thing, and people who spend time with themselves are seen as loners. That’s okay. One of the things you need to do in life to become mentally strong is to learn how to spend time in your own company.

Only when you have time to think and identify what’s bothering you, you can start working on how to heal yourself emotionally. So, make the time to think. You may ask yourself questions like the below:

What exactly is bothering me?

What am I hurt about?

Do I feel regretful about a decision I made, and if yes, why?

Do I feel guilty about hurting someone?

What part of my life is causing me pain?

Now, as you can see, these are hard questions. They need time to think, and to reflect. So, please make the time to think about what exactly is bothering you, and what parts of your life need healing.

2. Be brutally honest with yourself to heal emotionally

Let us be honest. All of us lie to ourselves, at different points. Those lies add up. Every time we lie to ourselves, we become a little weaker. So, it is important that we are honest with ourselves, and others to stay mentally strong, since honesty gives us a clean heart. We know we have not been hiding anything from ourselves.

However, life is hard and sometimes, we do end up making mistakes. In order to heal emotionally, we will have to face the fact that we may have made terrible mistakes and hurt ourselves and others in the process.

So, be prepared to be brutally honest. If you are talking to a therapist, they would also demand that you are completely honest with them, so that they can help you see things you cannot see yourself, and find healing.

You can’t heal without honesty. With honesty, you would be able to identify, what exactly you need to heal from. It would, in most likelihood, be a negative emotion, or a negative situation. In the following points, we would look at some of those emotions that cause hurt, and we need to heal emotionally from as human beings.

3. How to heal emotionally from loneliness

Now, loneliness is a major problem facing us today. As we spend more and more time on social media, people have forgotten how to have a real conversation, and that leads to feelings of loneliness.

We need to learn how to deal with loneliness, and how to fight loneliness, to heal from it. The solution is fighting the problem, and taking steps to ensure that we don’t feel lonely.

How to deal with loneliness in life:

Opening up to others you trust

This is easier said than done since finding people we can trust is quite hard. However, we cannot solve the loneliness problem, unless we make an effort and try to find people, we can have real conversations with. The world can’t be all shallow. There are people who would be interested in you and who would listen, if you have the courage to open up, and share how you feel.

Be genuinely interested in other people

Sometimes, we are the problem. We are lonely because we have no interest in other people, and all we want to talk about is ourselves. That repulses people, if all you have to talk about is you. If you are not willing to listen to others and their problems and their life stories, you will find yourself lonely, and will have no one but yourself to blame.

Reach out

Why always wait for others to start a conversation? If everyone waited for the other person to start a conversation, no one would ever talk to each other. If you think you are feeling lonely, why don’t you make the effort to start a conversation with someone you find interesting? Sure, you may make an error in judgement, but if you tell yourself that you will learn on the way, you are likely to end up making some friends. So, please reach out to others to deal with your loneliness.

Go deep in conversations

One of the reasons people feel lonely in spite of having people around, is because conversations have become shallow and meaningless. People just say, ‘what’s up,’ ‘how are you,’ and move on, without even waiting for the answer. If you want to overcome loneliness, seek depth in conversations and your relationships. Ask meaningful questions, and wait for the answer.

Listen deeply

This is something I have been personally working on. In order to fight loneliness, learn to be a good listener. Put the cell phone down, while listening to someone and give them your full attention.

Learn to enjoy solitude

I earnestly feel that we cannot be good company for others, unless we are good company for ourselves. Learn to enjoy your own company and to be happy while you are by yourself. If you are happy with yourself, others are likely to be happy being with you as well.

To deal with loneliness post a break-up or loss of a loved ones, get busy

Make work your solace. It will help to get over the feelings of loneliness, since when we are working, we are in a different mental state, than when we are in personal relationships. Time heals a lot of wounds that we can’t heal ourselves. Once you feel better, try and reach out to your friends, and to the world in general.

4. How to heal emotionally from regret

One of the challenges we all have is learning how to deal with regret. Regret is one of the most painful emotions we experience as human beings.

What is regret?

Regret is the feeling that we could have done differently.

However, think about it. At any point, you take a decision, you assimilate all the information available and make a decision. You do believe that that particular decision would lead to happiness or joy, or success. But then, things don’t work out in the direction of your expectations and things lead to pain, than joy and you have a feeling of making a mistake, which leads to regret.

There is actually no need to feel regret in this situation since you actually could not have done differently. The problem is we end up comparing ourselves to how others decide, and that leads to regret. However, our journey is not others’ journey. We are all built differently, and hence we make decisions differently. At any point, try and make the best decision you can, and then be ready to face the consequences. This would eliminate regret.

Also, there are 2 kinds of regret:

Regrets of commission: Regrets of commission are where you took an action, and didn’t get the desired outcome. The context described above, is to deal with regrets of commission.

Regrets of omission: Regrets of omission are where you didn’t take any action.

Now, when you are presented with a situation where you may or may not take an action, unless hazardous to life, you should take an action. This will help to avoid regrets of omission.

Regret is far more traumatizing than fear-unknown

The reason people don’t take action is because of the fear of failure. Take an action. If it doesn’t go your way, take another action. If you don’t take an action where you could, you always leave the thought in your mind, about what might have been. That leads to regret. Avoid regrets of omissions by taking action.

5. How to heal emotionally from toxic relationships

There is a short and a long answer to learning how to deal with toxic relationships. The short answer is don’t have toxic relationships. Throw away everyone who is toxic out of your life.

Toxicity is peak negativity.

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Unfortunately, some people are wired that way. No matter how much they have, they can always find ways to feel negative and pessimistic about life. They always have reasons to cry, no matter what’s going on. You talk to them, and you feel life sucks, and there are no possibilities.

The long answer is that we need to manage toxic relationships. If you can’t get rid of toxicity, which is a possibility, then you need to work our lives around those. Reduce your exposure to toxicity, and use that time to read, do something you like, and spend time with positive, life-giving people. That’s how you feel better, and heal.

6. How to heal emotionally from financial distress

Now, you could be going through a severe financial problem right now, or have gone through one, and the scars have remained. Lack of money affects every area of our lives. Although money is not quite the purpose of life, but it definitely is fuel for life, that is we can’t do anything without money.

Therefore, learn to respect money so that you spend it carefully and wisely. If you are going through a tough financial situation, seek help from people you trust, and if need ask for money that you can pay back, when your financial situation becomes better.

If you have recovered from a difficult financial situation, work hard, and save money so that should a difficult financial situation surface again, you don’t have to scramble and ask people for money.

The lack of money spoils lives, and relationships. Work hard to make money, and while you spend to enjoy life, ensure you save and invest where you can. This will ensure that you have money for times you are not working. These could be reasons like retirement, or even a sabbatical.

7. How to heal emotionally from depression

I have written about depression and my story of depression previously on this blog, so I am not going to repeat that.

What is depression?

Clinical Depression is an avalanche of negative thinking that can’t be stopped without medical attention anymore.

That is clinical depression – when the patient has gone to a stage where he or she has absolutely no control left over their thinking. Then, there is medical assistance needed. However, we don’t reach there quickly. It is a journey of negativity which leads to the point where one becomes depressed. Many of the causes of depression can be attributed to either the personal life, or professional life. If we keep bearing pain for a long period of time in our personal relationships, or work life, it is likely to head towards depression.

It’s simple- you haven’t had any joy in a long while. Depression become a possibility.

So, work on the fundamentals of life to avoid depression.

To heal emotionally from depression, seek out joy, and take medical help.

Medical help will not work if your circumstances don’t change. I mean, if you are in an abusive relationship and your spouse beats you up, taking sedatives won’t cure depression.

You need to get the hell out of that relationship and give your life another chance. Familiarity with pain, may make it less severe, but doesn’t eliminate the future possibility.

Step into the other side of life, and seek joy. The opposite of pain is happiness. The opposite of depression is bliss.

8. How to heal emotionally from meaninglessness

A lot of people struggle with life, in spite of having a lot. They seek out money and success, make a lot of it to satiate themselves, and then feel empty and meaningless. That’s because money and success are not the purpose of life.

The purpose of life is to actualize, as Maslow rightly put it. To actualize, there needs to be a balance between who you are, and what your life looks like. You need to have a life purpose, so you feel congruent and aligned.

In order to find your life purpose, you need self-awareness, and then work on creating a life basis that self-awareness. Only a life that’s created basis awareness, would have purpose, because must originate out of who you are.

There isn’t a lot of space within this context, but the point I am making is that until and unless you find your true purpose, you would not feel aligned, congruent and happy. So, find a life purpose, and align your life around it.

9. To heal emotionally, seek out positive emotions like love and joy

We need to understand that when we are working on healing emotionally, we are trying to heal from negative emotions like the ones mentioned in this article- guilt, regret, loneliness etc.

The opposite of synonym is antonym, and the opposite of pain is joy. So, we need to find hope to heal well. To find hope, we would need to experience some positivity and positive emotions. Give yourself hope by finding joy. If there is no joy in your life, you need to take some bold steps to get out of your painful situation. Maybe you need to find a new job because your current job is quite painful. Perhaps, you need to get a divorce, because you have not been able to solve your marriage after years of trying.

You deserve joy and you deserve love. Give yourself another chance.

In Conclusion-

Healing is a continuous, not a once in a point in time process. Life badgers us every day, and we need to review how we feel, and if we don’t feel well, we need to heal. Think of your car, which need regular oiling, fuel and repairing. We need to also heal emotionally on a consistent basis, and I hope when you are working on emotional healing, this article helps you get started.

Why do I write the happiness blog?

The purpose of this blog is to help you find your happiness. Please read the other posts on the blog, and follow so that you get updates when new posts are published. Please share the post with your friends so that they can also find their happiness. If you have any feedback for me, please leave it in the comments and I would be happy to work on it. If you would like to support my writing and this blog, you may please send a donation through PayPal here.

I appreciate the time you spent in reading the blog and wish you happiness.

Love,

Amarvani

If you want some real tips on building a healthy mind, please read any of the below posts:

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