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7 Stages of Emotional Healing: Meaning, Benefits & Alternative Ways

Unexplained sadness and anxiety are taking a stronghold on more and more people today. Even the specialists in mental health fields are not being spared from these emotions. 

One effective strategy that I found to be always useful is emotional healing. It can help you get rid off the causes of feeling sad for no reason.

The 7 stages of emotional healing involve a process whereby a person systematically goes into their past and feels everything that they had suppressed at that time. 

In this blog, I’ll help you with the steps of emotional healing trauma, its meaning, tips, benefits, and alternative ways. 

What is Emotional Healing?

Emotional healing is the process by which a person starts to be aware, accept, feel, and process every emotion (of past and present). It helps in releasing pent-up emotional energies and becoming a fully functioning person.

From a little child to a full-grown adult, we feel a range of emotions, triggered by daily life events. However, generally instead of fully processing every feeling, we try to suppress them. 

Such suppression leads to the creation of emotional blocks within our energy system and subconscious mind. It’s these blocks that later on create emotional maladjustment. 

After emotional healing a woman standing in a valley at the time of sunset, with her arms hugging herself.

Emotional healing trauma helps in resolving such unprocessed feelings of the past thereby making you a better-performing person in the present. You can do such healing by yourself or with the help of aids like a therapist or books on self-healing.

However, before trying to understand the 7 stages of emotional healing, let’s first find out if you really need it.

When Do You Need Emotional Healing? 

You will need healing if you are facing any difficulty related to emotional adjustments. You might need it if you are facing any of the issues below.

  • Constant feelings of sadness, anger, fear, guilt, or stress. 
  • A diagnosed mental illness like anxiety, depression, bipolar mood disorder, or post-traumatic stress disorder.
  • Feeling stuck in a vicious circle of mental pressure, confusion, and extreme discomfort. 
  • Extreme sense of loneliness, insecurity, or low esteem. 
  • Over-reaction to even minor events in life. 

Please note, that if you are facing a medical condition, it is advisable that you perform healing emotional wounds under an expert’s supervision. Now let’s understand the 7 stages of emotional healing trauma.

How to Do Emotional Healing?: 7 Stages of Healing

Understanding the process of getting relief is easy. However, performing it by yourself takes a lot of willpower, perseverance, acceptance, and courage. 

Animated image of a stressful woman with thread-clogs in her head being opened by a hand.

Below is the entire process of emotional healing trauma:

1. Move Away from Distractions 

The first step you need to do while easing down your pain is to move away from distractions. Switch off your phone, turn off the music, and try to have some isolation from people around you. 

2. Calm Your Mind

Start with some easy meditation so as to ease your mind for healing. You may try relaxation techniques, mantra meditation, or movement meditation. However, my personal suggestion would be Vipassana meditation, as it will help you better in spiritual emotional healing, by helping you to look at things as they are. 

3. Present Moment Awareness

Finding mindful awareness of the emotions you are feeling currently is among the most important steps of emotional healing. What are you feeling currently? Is it sadness, anger, fear, loneliness or guilt? You’ll also need to accept this emotion as it is – without exaggerating or downplaying it. For a few minutes remain into this moment. Whatever comes naturally, do it – cry, punch on pillows, be afraid, and/or look at your pains. 

4. Find Emotional Blockage in the Body

Finding the blockages within your body is an important part of the 7 stages of emotional healing.

Every emotion shows itself in some way within your body. Loneliness and low worth are felt as a pinching pain in your stomach. Fear is generally felt as constrictions in the lungs. Sadness occurs as a pinching pain near the heart. While anger adopts itself as burns from the stomach to the chest. 

In this present moment, look into your body when you try to identify the discomfort. If you find it, keep looking at it, without any thought for a few minutes – it will help you in resolving the emotional blockages. However, if you are not able to find it currently, there is no need to fret on it. You can move on to the next step.

5. Go into Your Past

In the next step of emotional healing, you will need to keep a hold of your current emotion, while moving into your past. Let this emotion take the charge. Whilst still feeling this emotion, try to remember an event in the immediate past that triggered this same feeling. Focus less on the event, and more on how you felt. Once you fully feel it, then move into the next event in your past, when you had this same feeling. Try to remember and feel as many events as you can.

During the whole process of feeling your feelings, remember to always maintain some of your focus inside the body. It will help you in making it much more efficient.

6. Move Deeper into the Past

Once you have felt the events related to your recent past, you will need to go deeper for better healing. Maintain your focus on the same emotion, and look deeply into your early childhood days. From there you can also move into the time when you were in your mother’s womb. Try to feel the emotions you felt in those times. 

Going into more depth will require you to feel the pains of your relatives and ancestors. One by one, go into the shoes of people around you – siblings, parents, grandparents, and then further back to parents of grandparents. While holding onto the same emotion, try to feel as much as you can from the perspective of people around you. This strategy is the part of ancestral healing process within the body.

7. Come Back to the Present Moment

The last step in the 7 stages of emotional healing is moving back to the present. 

Once you feel fully exhausted, it is time to come back. Re-focus your attention on the body. You will feel that a significant amount of blockage has been cleared out from it. For a few minutes, maintain your awareness of this present moment. Now you can take a break for the day. Wait for another event which again triggers discomfort, and provides you a chance for further healing emotional neglect

Now that you know the exact steps of doing the healing, let me help you with some of the tips that could come in handy to you!

Tips For You to Aid Your Healing

There are certain tips that you may use, to help you through the process of spiritual and emotional healing. They may look simple, but they can really make or break the game!

Let’s have a quick look at them in the below pointers. 

A man who has undergone stages of emotional healing - standing in bliss amidst sunflowers.
  • Love yourself. The more you love yourself, the more you will be motivated to carry through the healing process. 
  • Do not judge yourself for experiencing high-intensity emotions. Having them just means that you’re a more intense person than the others. 
  • Lose the fear of isolation. Sometimes it is better to form your own cocoon, so as to aid the healing work. 
  • Build perseverance. I understand deep healing of emotional wounds is not easy, as it will trigger a lot of intense feelings. However, it’s the perseverance that will take you through and across the darkness. 
  • You can’t fix it all at once. Healing takes time, and should not be forced. 
  • The progress will not be linear. There will be days when you won’t be able to sit through the entire process or have all your feelings triggered back at once. But, that’s part of this journey. 
  • Try to maintain some healthy habits. Maintaining a good sleeping, eating, exercise, and meditation pattern can carry you easily through this journey. 

If you’ve been looking for the answer to how to emotionally heal yourself, the above tips will help you a lot. 

But how to understand whether you’re healing the emotional neglect or not? Let’s find that out below. 

Benefits: Signs That You Are Healing

If you are healing, you will know it. You can simply look for some of the common signs below that show you are getting relieved of your pains. 

  • You now feel less disturbed emotionally.
  • Sadness, anxiety, loneliness, and other low frequency emotions occur less within you. 
  • Even if an intense emotion arises, you can now look at it with ease.
  • Major blocks within you seem to have dissolved.
  • You now feel more energetic and yet peaceful.
  • Now you can relate more to people around you.
  • You can sleep well.
  • There has been a shift of focus from suffering to growth. 
  • The start of an unexplainable joy. You feel to have the heart of a child as said by Jesus.

Although, the best way to heal emotional wounds is to go through the process mentioned in previous headings. However, you may also look at some alternative ways that may aid or give you some relief.

Alternative Ways to Emotional Healing

Apart from the 7 stages of emotional healing, there are wellness activities that can help you to achieve some relief. You can also use them as an aid to your journey.

A man peacefully sitting in a pond with his eyes closed, and view of mountains behind him.

Some of the popular activities for spiritual emotional healing are mentioned below: 

  • Yoga: The way one moves and bends parts of the body in Yoga, helps in some relief from emotional blockages in regions of the body. 
  • Salt Baths: Immersing yourself in water filled with rejuvenating salts can help a lot to have some peace and even try womb healing techniques
  • Meditation: All forms of meditation activities will help you relieve your pain.
  • Physical Exercise: Intense exercising can get release from pent-up energies. It’s in fact a wonderful aid in the process of emotional healing.
  • Crystal Therapy: If you believe in the power of crystals and their impact, you may benefit from this form of therapy. 
  • Positive Affirmations: Positive affirmations have been found to be helpful in relieving some of the pains. However, there have also been arguments that they may hinder the healing method of mindfully watching your emotions. 
  • Alternative Therapies: Art therapy, sound therapy, dance therapy, group mindfulness activities and cuddle therapy are some alternative ways that can aid in your journey. 

So to answer the question of how to emotionally heal yourself, the above ways could prove to be good alternatives.

However, I will suggest you use them only as an aid to your journey. So to heal emotional wounds effectively, there is no better way than to go back to your past and feel everything that you suppressed in your subconscious. 

To Sum it Up

The 7 stages of emotional healing can help you a lot in finding a way out from your past emotions. 

By healing your emotional self with one step at a time, you can move more ‘n’ more farther from those unexplained feelings of sadness and anxiety. 

A man standing peacefully with eyes closed and both hands using the gesture of Gyan Mudra.

So why wait any longer? Let’s start this journey here and now!

FAQs

  • How to do an emotional detox?

An emotional detox is just like emotional healing trauma. You can do it through meditation, self-contemplation, and with the help of a healing practitioner. 

  • Why is emotional healing so hard?

Healing your emotional self is a lifelong process. Do not force it upon yourself. The best way is to let it happen naturally, while you make conscious efforts to meditate and self-contemplate. 

  • What is the hardest emotion to overcome?

Often deep sadness, loneliness, and emptiness are the hardest emotions to overcome. However, with the right efforts to heal your feelings, you can overcome them and become a new person. 

  • Is crying emotional healing?

Crying is a positive indication that you’re facing your emotions, and not suppressing them. If you cry from your deepest heart and spiritual energies, it can help you to shift your emotions in a positive direction. 

  • What does emotional healing feel like?

Emotional healing feels like a large load of some heaviness is cleared out from the deepest you. With every new emotion resolved, you start to feel more and more light.