Emotional stress cannot be seen.  It is felt within and often our bodies have to reflect to us physically what pain is inwards.  This pain can cause our bodies and mind a lot of stress and too often we focus only on the physical signs. We take more pills and treatment, and the feeling does not get better until we choose to explore what is on the inside.  A Holistic approach is needed so we can find a pathway within.  Often the adult intellect cannot understand why the feeling is there for it has achieved certain material goals.  Nothing major has happened of late yet this feeling within stays around. 

As children we do not have the intellectual knowledge and understanding to process life and its realities, yet we feel it all.  Our minds are threatened by the amount of pain on the inside and because it is not equipped to understand it, it either fabricates a story or adopts a belief about self and life to validate the amount of pain we are feeling inside. Thus, we start believing something about ourselves or life which is not always true but causes us a lot of emotional stress.  The belief we adopt at that time attracts a pattern of events into our reality. Or we find a behaviour that soothes the pain or blocks off the pain whilst we carry within us unmet needs for a long time.

Long term emotional stress could come from our childhood, from a loss or trauma experienced but never acknowledged or explained.  In the past our elders thought it best not to discuss loss, death, or grief with us thinking that they were protecting us and hoping we would forget about it and get over it.  Yet, what that did was leave us alone in a room with an elephant – a huge unspeakable thing.  Because it is never spoken about it allows us to make assumptions about ourselves, life, and its realities. Looking back now we can see that the elders were actually protecting themselves as their pain was never acknowledged and perhaps they did not know how to deal with it and thus rather avoided the subject. 

When we are adults, we start recognizing certain patterns in our lives that we keep bumping into.  These similar patterns drain us and leave us feeling lost and confused.  Some of us may start a journey of self-awareness to understand self more deeply.  As adults we have gained more intellectual knowledge and experience about life. We can compare the beliefs we have about ourselves to what we believed about self and life as a child, and recognize that there is a gap.  Identifying emotional stress can empower us to start a healing journey by meeting those unmet needs. 

By recognizing an emotional immaturity because of a lack of acknowledgement, understanding and re-assurance, we rather recognize survival thoughts, beliefs and behaviours which are now outdated and need to be unlearned.

The adult mind may resist going back as it justifies how far it has come and refuses to entertain the past.  So it continues avoiding it.  Yet, that pain and those unmet needs will find any little crack or opportunity, whether it is convenient for the adult mind or not, to show up.  For how else should this wound get your attention if you do not go there voluntarily?

The emotional pain and unmet needs are not a threat.  They just beg to be heard, acknowledged and released.  It needs you to offer some of the intellectual wisdom you have gained to it.  It needs your reassurance, understanding, compassion and love.  It is true you have gained a lot of insight, knowledge, and wisdom since your childhood.  Yet you have never offered that innocent child within any of it.  I always tell folks the longest journey you will ever take is the one from your mind to your heart.  Yet, the moment the mind can see that inner child and its wounds of innocence and ignorance, and we allow the mind to offer its strengths and compassion, the healing is powerful.  We can reclaim the power we have invested in those unresolved areas and become whole.  The holistic route starts with the body, yet it recognizes emotional, mental, and spiritual pain too and allows room for integration and holistic healing and balance.

As a Holistic Counsellor my role is to create a safe space so you can get to look within and start the Journey within with compassion, understanding and no judgement, a space to acknowledge, allow and release.  To empower yourself with life skills to reconnect to parts and power forgotten.  Guiding you in creating a Holistic Care Plan for Self toward Wholeness.

Start that Journey today…

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