In this article, we discuss methods for emotional healing, using wisdom from a few different fields.
All of us have experienced ups and downs in emotions in our lives. Some of us let the negative emotions take control of us and become stressed or worse. But there are ways to heal our emotions, to come out stronger from whatever traumas we have experienced. Below we consider a few ways for healing.
Dissociation from traumatic events
If we have experienced a traumatic event in our lives, we often play it vividly again and again in our minds. One way to heal from such an event is dissociation.
In this technique, we visualize the event exactly as it happened to us in the past, but we visualize it in third person, as if it is happening in a small black and white TV set. The idea is to make it less vivid, so that we stop getting traumatized by playing the event on and on. We can even experiment with the speed and volume of the event as it plays in our head, we can play it with a faster or slower speed, in a lower volume or in complete silence.
Also, to enhance the healing process, we can visualize a happy event in our lives, and try to make it more vivid by enhancing the colors, volume and the size of the playback.
Doing this a few times with the traumatic as well as the happy event can speed up the healing.
Visualization techniques for healing
One useful way for healing, both physical and emotional, is visualization.
We close our eyes, and visualize a light in front of us (which can represent God, or Buddha, or an object of our worship, or just light, whichever we are more inclined to) and visualize the light slowly coming into our body and mind and healing each part of our emotional and physical being. As the light touches each of our body parts or limbs, we imagine that the part is healed completely. This visualization is extended for healing our emotional or spiritual body as well, similarly to the physical body.
Practicing loving kindness to heal our emotions
Loving kindness meditation (also called metta meditation in Buddhism) is another way to heal our emotions.
In this meditation, we sit in a meditation posture with back straight, close our eyes and make a heart felt wish “may I be well and happy”. We generate a feeling of warmth and absolute loving kindness to ourselves.
We remain with this thought of loving kindness to ourselves for a while and then gradually extend it to others. First, we extend the feeling of loving kindness to our friends and well wishers, “may all my friends we well and happy”, then extending the feeling of loving kindness to strangers and neutral persons, and finally even extending to our enemies.
Emotional freedom technique (tapping technique)
The tapping technique or emotional freedom technique consists of tapping the various chi points on our body as a way of healing the energies that may be trapped in those points.
By following this technique and tapping different parts of our head along with an affirmation of well being, we can heal our body from effects of all negative emotions.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)
CBT analyzes the link between our emotions, behavior and thoughts to break through patterns of negative thinking that are unhelpful to us.
In this technique, we consciously go through our interpretation of any traumatic event to analyze its effect. We ask ourselves: what actually happened, how we interpreted the event, what emotions we felt as a result of such interpretation and what effect it had on our subsequent behaviors. By analyzing and deconstructing our emotional reactions in this way, we can sometimes heal our negative emotional responses to negative triggers in our life.
Hypnotherapy and self hypnosis techniques to heal negative emotions
Hypnotherapy refers to the practice of healing oneself by going into a hypnotic trance state, which is an altered state of deep relaxation where we can give suggestions to our subconscious. The entry into the trance state can be facilitated by a hypnotherapist. Self hypnosis is when we ourselves enter the trance by going through a series of steps, and when we are in trance healing can take place.
There are a number of ways in which hypnotherapy can help one to deal with negative emotions and heal them. Some of the techniques include:
Time regression: When in trance, regressing in our memory to the point of time before the traumatic event happened and then replaying it, but this time in a way that healing happens and the event does not leave a negative effect
Cutting the ties that bind: When in trance, visualize oneself cutting the ties, represented in various symbols, with a partner or a person with whom we may have a negative experience with
Using ideo motor techniques: Here we use techniques to associate a happy feeling or memory to a certain physical action, such as rubbing our thumb and middle finger. Once we have practiced this association a number of times, we can use it whenever we have a negative emotion by repeating the action that gives us the happy feeling.
Use of metaphors in trance: Using metaphors, such as a cloudy sky that gradually becomes clear, to represent our state of mind when under negative emotions, healing from a dark and cloudy state to a sunny and happy state.
