Healing the Hurt Begins with Healing the Heart
Are you coming at your relationship from a place of healing or a space of hurting? Are peace and acceptance the umbrella under which your relationship flourishes? Or do anger, resentment, and judgment undermine its success?
Sean Stephenson said, “The hurt, hurt and the healed, heal.” When we are hurting inside, we spread hurt to those around us. We may overreact, lash out or shut our partner out. We may say hurtful things or say nothing at all.
It may feel like our partner has hurt us, but there may be wounds inside of us that makes us more vulnerable to that hurt. Few of us grow up without discovering that the world is not as safe as we thought. We may have developed beliefs and expectations about ourselves and the world that affect how we see ourselves, our partners and our relationships. The way we deal with past hurts determines whether we keep repeating history or grow to create what we want in our life.
Ask yourself: Are you whole and happy within yourself? Do you accept and love yourself? One of the biggest challenges in therapy is to help clients reach that point of inner peace and acceptance.
Creating space for self-reflection, learning, and experimentation can help us move past hurts toward a stronger relationship. Growth requires effort, a willingness to be introspective, and the courage to be vulnerable and explore a different way of being.
If you want healed relationships, first heal yourself. To move toward healing, practice becoming your own best friend. What makes a best friend great? They are:
Always there to support you;
Tell you the truth, not just what you want to hear;
Treat you with respect and encourage you;
See you, not through rose-coloured glasses, but in a glass 1/2 full kind of way;
They know your faults, but they love you anyway.
To heal yourself and nourish your relationship:
Be kind to yourself. Respect your needs as you would respect the needs of others. Trust your intuition and stand up for yourself.
Watch your self-talk. Would you talk to anyone else the way you speak to yourself? Pay attention to the story you are telling yourself about what is happening. Your self-talk will set the tone for your interactions with your partner.
Feel your feelings. Your feelings are giving you important information. When you sit with your feelings, breathe deep, and listen, you can get the message they are trying to convey.
Stay present for difficult conversations. Learning to face challenges rather than run, hide or avoid can help you stay connected with your partner. Together as a team, you can listen to, respect each other, and find creative solutions.
Allow yourself to be vulnerable. Vulnerability is strength, not weakness. You may have learned that it was not safe to show your fears or insecurities in your past. It might feel risky to open up, but hopefully, you have chosen a loving partner. Plus, you are no longer as powerless as you once might have been.
Hang onto yourself. Be aware of your habitual ways of responding and be intentional about holding yourself back from overreacting or speak up more, depending on your typical response type.
As you work toward healing, remember that it will take time and may feel awkward at times. An awareness of the ‘why’ behind wanting to heal may help. As we heal, our relationships become stronger. Wounded and hurting people tend to lash out at others, mistrust, and seek to even the score. Those who are healed understand that although self-worth may be affected by what we do, how we look, what we have or many other factors, our actual worth is infinite and can never be increased or decreased.