Empower Your Emotional Well-being

Why Emotional Healing?

We all have protective emotional systems that develop unconsciously when we are young.   Do you ever feel stuck, or defensive, or self-critical?  These feelings come from parts of your inner protective system.   These systems try to protect us from being hurt again.  Sometimes if  they can’t protect us from hurt they just distract us so we don’t remember to feel upset (until the distraction has worn off, that is!).  

These inner protectors  can cramp our inner style.  .  Sometimes we can’t make changes in our lives, we can’t speak up for ourselves, or  we can’t trust people, for fear of being hurt as we were in the past.  Other times we distract ourselves with food, or tv,  or work, or substance abuse so we don’t pay attention to triggered inner parts.    All of these factors can cause difficulties at work, in relationships, and even difficulties with health issues.  

For example, I’ve been avoiding working on my website for a several weeks.  Even after I thought I was ready,  I had to painfully turn off the tv to start writing on this website.  There are several issues involved for me.  For one thing, I have  parts that are scared that the website has to be perfect or I’m not going to be ok!  I also have parts that are worried I will sound ditzy or even crazy if I start telling people about my inner confusion. 

I had to take time to listen to those concerns and reassure those parts that perfection is impossible, and I won’t sound crazy.  To reassure them, I  am going to write things now and publish later so I can evaluate better what I want to do.  And I will publish data that shows these concepts aren’t just my ravings, but are actually a part of an evidence-based intervention approved by the American Psychological Association.  

These are strategies that help my inner system feel calm and reassured.   I learned these strategies in Inner Family Systems (IFS) training over the last 10 years.  Briefly, IFS is a way of understanding how our inner defense system works, and then healing the hurt parts  within that system.  You can find out more about IFS at the Center for Self Leadership site here.

 I encourage you to think about what things trigger your protective system, and how you can reassure those parts that you are being a good inner manager.