Have you ever wondered about the signs of emotional healing and if you were on the right track? In this article we will discuss seven signs of emotional healing so that you can develop the insight and awareness to track your progress on your healing journey.
Healing is not a straight path by any means but these signs of emotional healing can be guideposts that can bring you comfort along your journey. Healing can be long, arduous, lonely, hard…add any word to describe a extremely difficult experience and that basically sums up emotional healing.
In this post I hope to make the experience less lonely and isolating for you by exploring the signs of emotional healing so that you know you are not alone, fumbling in the dark and that you are actually making progress on your path.
In this blog post you are going to learn some specific signs to look out for on your healing journey. Such as a greater connection with your body, increased awareness of your emotions, honoring your own needs and so much more. So let’s dive into signs of emotional healing that you should be aware of to give you the strength and encouragement you need during this challenging time.
Keep reading below to find out the important signs of emotional healing that you need to be aware of. Remember healing is not linear! It is not a straight path. There will be many ebbs and flows and just like water you have to let it flow. So let’s get started!
7 Important Signs Of Emotional Healing
1. Connection with your body is a sign of emotional healing
One of the most important signs of emotional healing is your connection with your body.
Often when you have gone through events or experiences in your life, that you now need to heal from, your connection with your body was severely impacted or sometimes completely cut off. Your body developed a protective numbness to shield you from those overwhelming experiences so that you could continue to function.
Your body holds a lot of beautiful wisdom that you may not have access to because you had to sever that relationship to survive past difficulties.
But thankfully your relationship with your body is never completely over. No matter how long you have been out of touch with it or how long you have been numb to its feelings and sensations. One sign of emotional healing that you can be certain you will see on your path is an awakening to your connection with your body.
You will no longer feel numb and you will notice that there was a lot going on outside of your conscious awareness pertaining to your body that you were not even aware of. You will start to feel alive and that a part of you that had been dormant has come back online.
And it has!
2. awareness of your emotions is a sign of emotional healing
Often due to trauma and other difficult experiences, you have developed the protective and adaptive coping mechanism of not being aware of your emotions. This of course makes perfect sense especially in instances of violence or abuse.
And if you were in a situation that after the difficulty had passed, no one was there to support you in processing your experiences, you will remain disconnected from your emotions and experiences.
As one of the signs of emotional healing you will begin to experience your emotions again. For many this can be startling!
Where were all of these feelings and emotions? Had they been hidden this whole time?
The answer of course is yes. Like the disconnection from your body mentioned above, this was again done to protect you and keep you functioning. Your body and internal system is very wise and knows how to keep you functioning in your day to day life.
But…and its a pretty big but…
You no longer need this lack of awareness of your emotions now. What helped you survive and persevere in the face of trauma and difficulty is no longer necessary for you now. Now it may often act as a barrier in your ability to process your own feelings and connect to others.
So you becoming aware of your feelings as you heal is a good thing! It’s actually pretty wonderful because you are meant to feel and be connected to life. The fact that you are waking up to your emotions means there has been a shift within you on your healing path, so congratulations!
3. decreased feelings of guilt
One of the signs of emotional healing that is not often talked about is the disappearance of guilt for having emotional needs.
Often when you are going through a traumatic situation, especially if your traumas occurred as a child, your emotional needs were sidelined and made to feel irrelevant. For many people in their emotional healing process this is a really hard thing to overcome.
If you were a child who was made to feel that you were not supposed to have emotional needs because they were an inconvenience to others, then it will be really hard to connect with your needs as an adult or even know they are there. For a lot of us in this process it is a HUGE blind spot. I speak from personal experience.
But it can be overcome because as you heal you will learn, and your inner self will receive the message, that it was always okay for you to have emotional needs and have them attended to. You just had the misfortune of being around people who were unable to attend to you in an emotionally healthy way as a child.
But now as part of your healing process you can connect with your own emotional needs and not feel the guilt of a child that you are disturbing or bothering anyone or asking for too much. You weren’t asking for too much then and you are not asking for too much now.
A wonderful book I often recommend to clients is Self-Therapy by Jay Early. He walks you through a process of working with your inner child and being the nourishing parent you always needed.
Now that you are on your own path of emotional healing, you can see the importance of taking care of your own emotional needs and finally being on a path to give yourself what others weren’t able to give you so long ago unapologetically.
And if there are any relationships or people in your life who are not in alignment with this new healed version of you it is okay to release them with love as you travel a new path of deeper connection with yourself.
4. increased emotional capacity
As the signs of emotional healing continue to unfold you will notice that your emotional capacity or bandwidth increases.
What exactly does this mean?
Well in your previous emotional state you probably weren’t able to tolerate a lot of emotional disturbances and may have often felt frustrated, irritated, aggravated and may have often felt overwhelmed by life. This could have been regarding anything: our day-to-day lives, work, relationships with others, children, family, partners, anything that brought out your emotions could fall into this category.
But as you heal and do your inner work you will see/notice/feel that there is more spaciousness inside of you now. An ability to see/notice/feel in response to what is currently happening in front of you and within you. You now have the space between the information you are receiving internally and externally and your reaction.
Which leads to the next point…
5. Less emotional reactions
One of the hardest parts of being a survivor of any trauma, particularly childhood related, is the level of emotional reactivity it can leave us with.
It seems contradictory, right?
Above I mentioned awareness of your emotions as a sign you are healing but: “If I am having an emotional reaction, doesn’t that mean I am aware of my emotions?”. That’s not exactly how it works.
What I am talking about here is just a reaction without the emotional insight and awareness that signals the emotional healing that I mentioned above. When we are acting from a place of emotional reactivity we are just responding without thought or awareness.
These reactions are a byproduct of an overtaxed nervous system that was not able to bring itself back into regulation after the stressful event/s. Through our relationships with friends and loved ones coregulation takes place. Their love, comfort, presence and understanding brings our nervous system back into a balanced state: emotional regulation.
As mentioned above often we don’t receive this and the emotional response is kind of running hot like a livewire without anything to ground it.
The image spirit just gave me is of a person with a basketball. If the ball is your emotional state and you are just slamming it against a wall over and over again that is the equivalent of being emotionally reactive. Only one thing is happening one way. The pressure from being bounced against a wall is building up. Your emotional state is only being experienced one way with no real control or flexibility over it.
But if you are able to dribble the ball up and down the court with great control and focus that is you managing your emotions well. You have them in your hand and they are under your control. They are there and you feel them but you are in control of them firmly. I feel that was a pretty good analogy but I don’t play basket ball so I hope you get the point. LOL.
So when you have the emotional spaciousness mentioned above, that means that you are in better relationship with yourself and your emotions, so that when things come your way you are less likely to go into previous habitual habits of emotional functioning or dysfunction that may not have been helpful. You are better able to assess what is happening inside of you before you respond. Which leads to the next point…
6. a sense of calmness is a sign of emotional healing
This sign of emotional healing is something many of us search for our whole lives and often seems unattainable. For many this has been artificially achieved by isolating ourselves and shutting the world out. This can lead to less external stimulation but really our inner sense of calm has not been accessed effectively.
This sense of calm is already exists inside of you but has just been covered over by the disconnection from your body, lack of emotional awareness and/or being in a heightened emotional state often. All of these processes can be very fluid within us shifting and operating at once. Remember we are never just one way all of the time.
But when we are connected with our bodies, aware of our emotions and feelings, have some spaciousness inside of ourselves to process, even briefly before we react, we will automatically stumble, lurch or fall into an increased sense of calm.
You’ll just notice it there as part of you. You won’t be like a Buddhist monk or anything, even though they work very hard to cultivate that sense of calm, but you will notice it there in a way you hadn’t in the past.
A part of you that is always there that you didn’t have as much access to before. Leading to our final point…
7. awakening or reconnection to your intuition
Emotional healing leads to an awakening, reconnection or deepening of your intuition! YAY!!!
This is definitely a cause for celebration because it is a game changer.
Often as part of the difficulties we experienced, many of us went into shutdown mode and have been in some form of an emotional tailspin ever since. No judgment. I have definitely been there.
But…But…
When your emotional responses calm down, when you are no longer in a super activated state because of traumas or other emotional difficulties, when you have spaciousness in our body, when you are connected to your body your intuition comes back into your awareness!!!
Get out the champagne bottles because its time to celebrate!
Often the greatest sources of fear and disempowerment that you might feel is because you feel lost, alone and without guidance. Being on this plane of existence is extremely hard but your intuition is your homing beacon. It is your compass and the map that you were talked out of using but…
It is your grounding rod as you navigate this plane of existence. It speaks to you through all of your channels of experience: your thoughts, your feelings, your body, your emotions, your experiences. Everything.
But we cannot get any of that information if we are in a super activated state. We can only get a small part of it, and unfortunately and sadly, some of us get none of it at all because we haven’t taken the time to do the important and necessary emotional healing work.
If you are on this path of healing I know you are not doing it for giggles or because it is fun and easy. You are doing it because you are a warrior who wants a different experience of life and I salute you. Keep going. I promise you it’s all worth it. Every part.