Emotional wounds from the past: the best tips to heal them – Online Psychologists

Often our team of online psychologists receives messages from people who want Healing the emotional wounds of the pastIt is one of the most frequently asked questions, since most people have some traumatic experience in their past that they have not been able to resolve.

Remembering these experiences is both painful and inevitable. We often try to escape from the things that hurt us in the past, we avoid dealing with them and, as a result, their pain stays with us forever.

Running away from the past may seem like a good idea when the pain is still fresh and facing it is too difficult, but in the long run it only brings problems. The more time you let pass, the more difficult it will be to manage those problems without professional help. traumatic moments that marked your life.

Even when you finally decide to heal the pain that has been with you for years, the prospect of facing it is scary. However, you must keep in mind that it is a very brave decision. Healing these wounds is not easy, but it is necessary.

When you do, you'll realize how beneficial it has been for you. You'll find that you're stronger than before and that you're more yourself than you used to be. You'll be able to reclaim aspects of your life that you thought were lost. You'll have the ability to create more resilient and healthier relationships. You'll stand up for yourself if someone disrespects you, because you'll realize your worth.

The process of healing past traumas It is never easy, but you must keep in mind that living with pain will always be more difficult. To live the present fully, you must first look at the past head on and analyze the origin of your emotional wounds from the past.

He origin of emotional woundsIt is a traumatic experience that was lived in the past and was not managed correctly at the time.

There are as many causes of these ailments as there are people in the world. They can arise, for example, from having suffered abuse in childhood. Or from having absent parents. Following the death of a family member. Because of a break-up.

The possibilities are endless.

However, the problem is not so much the situation that causes the pain as management of the same. Two people can go through the same situation and develop or not an emotional wound depending on the way they deal with the situation.

When a parent dies, for example, one of the children may handle it correctly, going through each of the stages of grief and accepting their pain and then letting it go; and the other may develop avoidance behaviors to escape the harm caused by the death, without knowing that, by not fully experiencing that pain when it is their turn, it will stay with them for much longer.

When it comes to emotions, running away is rarely the best option.When you obsess over running away from harm, you end up avoiding situations that could be positive out of fear.

There are people who, in order to avoid going through a breakup again, close their hearts to love. Others, with the intention of not suffering another death, distance themselves from their loved ones and build an emotional barrier around themselves.

At first it seems like a smart move, but in reality you're just putting a band-aid on it. Pain is part of life and you have to accept it and live with it so that it can end up passing. If you activate the flight mode in the face of difficulties you risk living a half-life, where pain is a constant and happiness, a rare bird.

Sometimes when pain comes, you just don't have the mental strength to deal with it alone. Sometimes life hits so hard that it's impossible to stop the blows without help.

Luckily, the psychological therapy can help you cope with traumatic experiences and manage pain in a healthy way. A psychologist will give you the tools you need to move forward despite unpleasant experiences.

Anyone can go through a traumatic situation that leads to the formation of an emotional wound.

Nevertheless, There are some factors that can favor this process:

When you are little you need others to surviver. Children form a strong emotional bond with their parents: attachment. Attachment determines the way in which children relate to the outside world and to others, both during childhood and later in adulthood.

If your parents were always attentive and aware of your needs, you most likely developed a secure attachment. However, children who experience loneliness and abuse from a young age often carry emotional trauma throughout their lives.

And the younger you were when the trauma occurred, the greater the emotional wound.

This is because, when you are a childyou do not have the capacity to reasonably manage what has happened. In childhood, the reasons for abuse are not understood, so it is impossible to properly manage the pain, which often remains etched in your memory for years.

We have already explained that emotional wounds from the past can have very diverse origins. Trauma can arise from something as common as a breakup or from something as shocking as a plane crash.

However, the chances of suffering an emotional wound increase as the the duration and intensity of the experience.

Let's take the death of a family member as an example. Of course, grief is always present when a loved one dies. However, coping with the sudden death of an elderly person is not the same as coping with the death of someone who has spent years suffering from cancer. Nor is the pain caused by a natural death the same as that which can arise when death occurs due to a very serious accident.

The chances of an emotional wound remaining open may increase if the sufferer has been accumulating bad experiences in the past.

Keep in mind that a person with post-traumatic stress disorder or a depressive disorder has less ability to properly manage their feelings than a person with iron mental health.

And, just as the past influences emotional wounds, so does The moments that follow that difficult moment carry a lot of weightA person who experiences their pain in the company of people who understand, listen to and support them will have a better chance of healing their wounds than someone who has to deal with the pain alone, in silence and without any outside help.

Some people live their whole lives unaware that they have open wounds in their feelings. They live in flight, feeling half-heartedly, in constant fear and suspicion, harassed by irrational thoughts that make their lives worse.

And the worst thing is that they think it's normal to live like this.

It may seem obvious, but The first step to healing any emotional wound is to be aware that it existsSome factors that may warn you that you have unhealed wounds are:

The most primitive part of the human brain reacts to danger by activating two types of mechanisms: fight or flight.

This is a natural reaction to fear: a mechanism that prepares the body to survive a danger that the human brain perceives as mortal.

However, these mechanisms are meaningless in the face of most of the dangers in today's world, because your life is in danger only very rarely. Furthermore, as your entire body prepares to flee, the fight-or-flight mechanisms produce a great deal of stress, as well as a multitude of unpleasant physical sensations that can weigh down your daily life.

On the other hand, These mechanisms are of little use against emotional dangers.When you avoid a certain feeling, instead of making it go away, you only make it bigger.

This was demonstrated by a study conducted by the University of Texas in 2011, which concluded that repressing emotions made people more aggressive and worsened their emotional state.

Not dealing with an emotional wound does not mean that it ceases to exist. In fact, not managing the pain caused by a traumatic experience causes that trauma to be always in the back of the mind and let it come to light from time to time.

When this happens, you are not only affected by negative feelings, but it is also very likely that your body reacts to the fear caused by these thoughts by triggering those unpleasant sensations caused by the aforementioned fight-or-flight mechanisms: nausea, dizziness, labored breathing, profuse sweating, muscle tension…