How do I know I am healing?

What is healing?

How can you be sure what you are doing is working? How do you know you are healing?

Let's start with what is healing?

The dictionary says - "the process of making or becoming sound or healthy again"

A very simple explanation - Healing involves strengthening positive neural pathways that are focused on healthy connections and safety while reducing the over-stimulated pathways that are monitoring for threats. In short - we want to improve our emotional regulation and feel safe, know that the threat that hurt us is no longer hurting us. Move our nervous system from fight or flight, to Rest and Digest.

This can take time, and that means we need to practice patience and self compassion, which is why a good self-care plan is always part of the first stages of counselling. One helpful aspect of counselling is that the counsellor is often able to notice these small changes and highlight them so you too are aware. Feeling that you are making progress is important. It helps you understand your innate capacity to heal. We know when change happens slowly we tend not to notice, of course what we want is to be healed and our monitoring is looking for the end result not noticing each small yet significant step towards healing. Healing is a journey, and we continue to heal long after we find safety. Healing is also not a linear process so it is natural when we have a moment of feeling overwhelmed we notice that and feel that we have gone backwards, perhaps we even feel that we are failing. Which is why when working with a counsellor it is beneficial to have the progress recognised.

How can we be sure what we are doing is working? How do you know you are healing?

Often my clients report realising that their response to things has reduced, become easier to manage - they still recognise that events that use to cause significant interruption to their lives cause them interruption - just that they feel they can regulate and calm themselves, allowing them to find a solution or regulate their emotions quicker. This can lead to certain events eventually not causing any discomfort but sometimes discomfort is the perfect response to the event - the event warrants discomfort or more.

Healing is often described as I feel confident that I have the strategies to manage the event. This knowing we have the strategies reduces the emotional response to the event, and we report feeling confident rather than anxious thatwe may be faced with that circumstance again.

It is important that we listen to our body and our thoughts - this is how we learn to have the appropriate response and move ourselves towards safety and connection. It is not uncommon for people who attend counselling to believe that their response is not warranted, in these cases we often focus on understanding that the nervous system is doing its job perfectly and that changes to the environment are what needs to change or finding a more balanced way to live. We don't want to work on building the nervous system to accept the environment as safe, we actually need to come up with strategies to make changes - trust ourselves that things aren't as they should be or we deserve. That if we make changes by moving ourselves to a safer space, our healing will start.

Often the need to heal comes unexpectedly and we are unprepared and don't have the knowledge to know how to heal, if you are curious how healing may look for you through either Counselling or Yoga, I invite you to book a 15 minute Free Connection Call with me.

I wish you all a nourishing journey towards Healed and Thriving!

Kirsten xxx