Lessons From My Healing Journey

No healing journey is a linear path and every path is unique and personal, but I know how valuable I've found others' tips, so this is me paying it forward. In this episode, I share 4 of my top lessons that I continue to carry with me.

Tune in, if you're:

• Feeling stuck in therapy,
• Feeling overwhelmed by your feelings (sadness, anger, anxiety, you name it),
• Wondering how to feel better,
• Or simply curious about another person's healing journey. :)

Transcript

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Life can sometimes feel like a lot, but you don't have to do it alone. I strongly believe that we're stronger together. Here we're gonna slow down, have real talks, make sense of things together, and explore ways to intentionally grow the life you want. We're going to talk about mental and physical health, relationships, money, work, and community. Welcome to Rooted in Intention with me, Garina Gomez. Hi, welcome back. So in this episode, I'm gonna be sharing some lessons for my healing journey. But before I fully jump in, I want to share how do you even know if you would benefit from doing some healing? And one of the things that I've come to from my own experience and from what I've seen in others is that you're really gonna start your own healing and doing things different when you're done with your own pain, when you're done with your own suffering and you're done repeating your own patterns that are getting you the result that you don't want. I think once you've hit that, it just really becomes crystal clear that you would benefit from doing some healing work, some self-introspection. And then lastly, on this, if you think things from your childhood continue impacting you today, that's definitely a common reason for why a lot of people end up doing some type of healing work. For instance, if you had a very explosive parent and now you're noticing yourself exploding very easily on your partner, on your kids, or with your friends, then that could be a sign that some things might need some healing, that there might be some wounds, or maybe you grew up with a very critical parent and now your inner voice is very critical of you, which is killing your self-confidence. So I think those types of things many of us are aware of and could see the connections of how they came from our childhood, but we aren't quite sure how to move past them. I think when those things are becoming very evident, that's a sign that you might benefit from doing some type of healing work. Now, this doesn't mean that you have to wait until things are bad or until there's a problem or there's an issue to do any type of self-improvement, self-development. I myself feel like I have always valued growth and I appreciate learning and self-development, as you probably do as well, which is why you're listening to this podcast. But I do think that there's a difference between learning and self-development and healing. And at least for me, when I've engaged in learning and self-development, I already started from this place of feeling grounded and sturdy. Whereas when I felt like I really started my healing journey, I was more than anything feeling just very overwhelmed and overcome by this deep sadness that I couldn't shake it off. And I don't think that's gonna be the case for everyone, but that's definitely what signaled to me that I needed to do some healing work. And that's when I started therapy. And then from there, it was like I opened up a can of worms and my healing journey had a whole bunch of different ups and downs and squiggles. And that's why in this episode, I want to share with you all four lessons that I really learned throughout my healing journey that got me from this state of feeling just completely overwhelmed by my own emotions, feeling anxious about so many things in life, and really just feeling stuck to finally coming to this space of just feeling really grounded in myself and capable of navigating and moving through my emotions and having confidence and being able to show up in my relationships in a healthy way with new skill sets. But at the core of the four lessons that I'm gonna share today with you, I want you to remember that healing is personal and that it might take a unique and a mixed approach to different things, and that it might take different therapists or different therapy types, different books, different healing approaches and different healers, and to just follow the breadcrumbs from the universe to guide your journey. And because healing is so personal, keep in mind that if you try something that worked for someone else and it doesn't work for you, that doesn't mean that there's something wrong with you. It just means that you might just need something different. The same way that if I'm thirsty, a tea might quench my thirst on a hot summer day, but it might not do anything for someone else because they might just prefer a soda and that might be the only thing that's going to quench their thirst. So try different approaches, try different things, and stick with the things that work for you. So, with all of that said, now on to the four key lessons. Okay, so my top lesson throughout my healing journey has really been creating a different relationship with my emotions. And I think if you grew up in a family that just didn't really do emotions or talk about emotions, this is probably gonna be a game changer for you too. Because as I was mentioning earlier, right before I made the decision to start therapy, I was feeling just very overwhelmed with my own sadness. And I was feeling stuck and I was experiencing a lot of anxiety, and I didn't know what to do with these emotions, and they just felt overwhelming and like they had a chokehold on me. And I feel so silly saying this now, but in some of my first therapy sessions, it was really about me creating the safety to actually be able to experience my emotions. So I mentioned sadness, for instance. To some degree, I wasn't actually allowing myself to experience sadness. And this is a little tricky for me because I want to maintain some of my family members' privacy around some things that were going on. But essentially, family things happened, right? And I was feeling very overwhelmed with the sadness. And I remember telling my therapists, like, I don't want to feel this because I feel like it could take over my life. And even though I did allow myself to cry, I didn't fully allow myself to move through the emotion. And I think this is something that until you experience it, it might not make full sense, but I had to allow myself to fully sit in the sadness, to fully allow that energy to move through my body. And it was only then that I think that I fully metabolized the emotion. And another big emotion that was really hard for me was anger. I felt bad feeling anger. I didn't feel like I had the right to be angry, and I felt like I should be more grateful about life and the things that were going well. So with anger, it was easier to notice how much I didn't allow myself to actually experience that. So I would say that a big part of my healing journey was actually learning how to actually feel my feelings and to feel them and not be completely overtaken by them. And one of the books that was a game changer for me with this was Healing the Soul Wound. And there was something about the title of this book that really called to me. And it was at a point where I was like, I feel like I'm still stuck with my feelings and my emotions, and I don't know how to move past them, even with therapy sessions. But it was this book that changed things for me because it allowed me to create a different relationship with my emotions. So if you're interested, go check out the book. I think it was technically written for clinicians, but I picked it up and I read it and I actually found it super helpful. I could probably have a whole podcast episode just about that book because it talks about decolonizing therapy and viewing mental health and healing through a Native American lens. But for this episode, I'm gonna share some of the connections that my mind made with this book of how to have a better relationship with my emotions. And that was to view your emotions as this separate entity and to ask them what they are needing of you. So for instance, when I was feeling this deep sadness, I liked doing almost like a meditation type of thing. And I kind of viewed the sadness as this separate entity that was outside of me, almost like a friend sitting across from me. And I would just sit with the sadness and I would just allow for it to exist and then ask it like, what do you need from me right now? And I think at the core, the reason that that helped was because I was able to create a relationship with my emotion and I didn't make it a problem for it to exist, but I actually just allowed it to exist and to function as a signal about what I was needing. And this has worked really well for me with any emotion that has come up. So for instance, with anger, I do the same thing. I create this little separate entity and I allow the anger to exist, almost very similar, actually, to the movie Inside Out, where each of the big emotions is its own personality. So sadness is obviously going to show up very different to anger, which is gonna show up very different to anxiety. But essentially, what that practice has allowed me to do is to not be so overly consumed by the emotion itself and to allow it to exist, which helps with obviously not suppressing it. And then that practice also allows you to check in about what is that emotion signaling to you. So for me, for instance, when I asked sadness what it needed, it oftentimes just needed to be held. It needed to be felt, it needed to be accepted. Anger, anger was loud and strong, and oftentimes it and oftentimes it told me that I needed to correct something or set a boundary, it sometimes even brought up grief. But I'm diving into the weeds of my brain now. Essentially, the main takeaway from that was what major difference it made to actually create a relationship with my emotions. And I think that if you oftentimes feel like you're overwhelmed by your own feelings of maybe also sadness or anxiousness or anger or despair or hopelessness or whatever, if you create a relationship with those emotions, I think that already moves the needle by a lot, not just in your overall healing journey, but also in the day-to-day, because you're never gonna get rid of your emotions and life is always gonna be happening. So emotions are always gonna be happening. So being able to have that relationship with your emotions and knowing how to navigate them is something that everyone needs to learn how to do. So that's my top lesson for my healing journey. So another top lesson came as a result of me learning about trauma and doing therapy, which led me down this path of uncovering a lot of childhood trauma, which I think was helpful in being able to talk about things from the past and create like a cohesive story and meaning behind it. But I think at some point I hit the plateau of how much it was actually benefiting me revisiting the past. And I eventually learned that if I need to work on things, I just need to allow life to happen. And believe me, if you have unresolved trauma still, if you have things that trigger you, those are going to be your signs about the things to be working on. And that kind of goes back to what I started the episode with of how do you even know if you need to be doing healing work? Just allow your life to show you if you're feeling stuck, if you have enough pain, if you're done with your own BS, or if people are bringing things to your attention, I think that's enough to show you where you might need some healing. So I'll keep this one relatively short and move on to the third lesson that I wanted to share with you. And that is that some healing only happens in relationships. And I think this is particularly the case if you have some wounds from previous relationships, whether it's relationships with your parents or with friends or with romantic partners or even coworkers, if you were burned in relationships in some way, shape, or form, yes, you're gonna be able to do some healing on your own, but I think that the ultimate healing is gonna happen inside of relationships. So for instance, for me, I've been relatively open about how hard conflict was with me and how activated I would get whenever I perceived conflict within my romantic relationships. I would get very anxious and flooded almost by fear. And in my individual healing, I learned about regulating my nervous system. I learned about how to create safety within my body. And that got me to a point where I was a lot more comfortable with conflict. And although I was working on some of those elements together, the thing that really, really helped was actually having new experiences that proved me otherwise, that proved to me that having conflict was safe. And I think this was especially true for me in my romantic relationships because I had two partners that reacted very different when it came to conflict. In one of my earlier relationships, I'll just call this boyfriend one. The conflict with that person oftentimes did really feel unsafe. Boyfriend one would get very defensive, and then all of a sudden, we were talking about how he must be like the worst person and yada yada. And that left me feeling very unsafe within the relationship because things oftentimes exploded more than they really had to. Now, that compared to conflict that came up in a different relationship. I'll call this boyfriend number two. With boyfriend number two, when I brought things up, he for the most part remained very grounded and receptive to what I was seeing. So what those experiences ended up doing was reinforcing the healing work that I had been doing to get comfortable within conflict and served as evidence that in fact having conflict could be safe. And so those were almost like healing experiences. And that's why I've come to this idea that some healing is only going to happen within relationships, because that's going to allow you to either one, practice the things that you've learned or two experience different things with someone else in a healthier relationship. So that's it for the third lesson. And the last lesson that I wanted to share with you today was how much I think we have really underappreciated spirituality. And I think this is especially the case if you maybe grew up religious and left a little bit of a bad taste in your mouth. And being able to differentiate between religion and spirituality, I think is so important because as part of my healing journey, I felt really called to reconnect with my roots. So although I was born in the US, I have Mexican roots. Both of my parents are Mexican. And I grew up really appreciating my Mexican background and learning Spanish. And at the same time, I grew up feeling like I didn't know enough about my background. I think it's no secret that the history that we learned within the US isn't very comprehensive. And I think that really influenced my identity and my sense of self. And I actually found it very healing to reconnect with my own history. And as part of that, I learned a lot more about Mesoamerican history and Mesoamerican practices. And that's what really drove spirituality home for me in a manner that really resonated. And interestingly enough, there was something about spiritual practices that really allowed me to change my relationship with uncertainty, which I think was actually one of the driving forces behind my anxiety is having a lot of discomfort with uncertainty. But I think having spiritual practices is what allowed me to just let go and trust the process. So if that sounds appealing to you and you want to get started with spiritual practices or learning about Mesoamerican history, I would definitely check out the curandarismo books by Erica Buenaflor because those have a wealth of knowledge and then you can go from there. But I really do think that there's something to spirituality that we just don't talk about enough in the modern world and that we have disconnected from. So if you're on a healing journey, I would definitely recommend that you try some spiritual practices and see if anything resonates with you. So those are the four lessons that I wanted to share with you all. And hopefully that helps you along your own journey. And if you're not on your healing journey, hopefully you appreciated hearing some of my insight thoughts. And maybe these will be helpful for you down the line either way. But thank you so much for tuning in. And if you haven't already, please remember to leave a review. I would love to hear your thoughts about this episode and other episodes that you've listened to. Okay, that's it. Bye. Thank you for joining me for another episode of Rooted in Intention. Until next time, and remember to keep showing up for the life, relationships, and community you want. Now go.