Here’s why you’re getting stuck in your healing journey [Ep 22]

Have you been trying all of the things to move forward in your healing journey? 

Therapy, podcasts, reading, meditation but you still feel like you’re not getting anywhere? 

There are often reasons why you can plateau and feel like you are not making progress. This episode helps you to discover what they are so that you can stop being so hard on yourself and make the changes you’ve been working so hard to make. 

If you’re just getting started or you just need to refresh, listen to this episode on How to Begin Your Healing Journey 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Today I'm going to talk to you about why you might be getting stuck in your healing journey. There's no preamble because I'm in between client sessions, so let's just jump straight in. Welcome to Healing Childhood Trauma, the podcast for millennial women who are ready to heal from the past. Here we have the deeper discussions on emotional well-being and practical tips that will empower you to transform your relationships and underlying anxiety from insecure to secure attachment. I'm Lisandra, your host and psychotherapist. I'm a little bit obsessed with human development, deep conversations and finding the lesson even in the most challenging of circumstances. I'm very happy to have you with me on this journey of self-discovery where we unpack the past and heal in the present. You are getting stuck in your healing journey because you are not seeing the progress that you want or the progress that you expected that you would see. So in this episode I'm going to tell you why this happens and what you can do to move forward. And I am taking on one-to-one clients at the If you want to have one of those spots then follow the link in the show notes to book a free call with me and then we can talk about if we're a good fit to work together. But for now let's focus on what happens when you're getting stuck in your healing journey. One of the first things that I see is that you might have very unrealistic expectations when it comes to your healing. you might have it in your mind that healing means that you don't get triggered anymore, you don't have really strong emotions anymore, and that once you've gone through the healing journey, you're kind of done. But the reality is that it doesn't work that way as much as I would love to tell you that it does. Because the thing with healing is that there are going to be setbacks. There are going to be times when you've done all the work on yourself You've been showing up for yourself. Even if you haven't been going to therapy, maybe you've been doing the self-work of reading books, of tuning more into your intuition, trying to journal, meditation, all of those things that you know help to facilitate you on that healing journey. And so you might have it in your mind of, I'm doing all this meditation, I'm doing all of this stuff, but I am still being triggered. And the point of healing is not that you will no longer be triggered. We can't stop the triggers from happening, but we can control how we respond to those triggers and how long they impact us for and how we respond to them, how we then regulate ourselves to come back to ourselves and to not spiral out of control. But the point of healing is to not feel anymore. because that's the opposite of healing. We're not healing so that we don't have any strong emotional reactions. We're not healing to stop feeling. We are healing to learn how to ride the wave of coping with those feelings. And setbacks can feel like failure, but honestly, that is just part of the journey. it's it's not a easy process to go through it doesn't look like how it might appear to look say on social media it's not about you know solo trips to bali and finding yourself and you know this clean girl aesthetic of green juice and you know finding the love of your life and then everything being plain sailing after that the reality of healing is that it's slow and steady And it needs to be that way because that's how you regulate your nervous system. Slow and steady in healing, especially in trauma healing, is actually what your nervous system needs to have that feeling and hold on to that feeling of safety when it's there. And this leads me very nicely into the next point of the reason why you are getting stuck in your healing journey is is because your nervous system is not regulated. And if you are going too hard and too fast, it's actually very dysregulating for your nervous system. There are things that are being spoken about in terms of how you regulate your nervous system. And quite a common thing that I've seen on either social media or people who are in the wellness space are advocating for this is the practice of cold plunging. And actually, if you have a dysregulated nervous system and you have experienced trauma and you haven't done enough of the deeper healing work, enough of the nervous system regulation in the very gentle ways, something as extreme as cold plunging is too severe for your nervous system. So instead of it actually regulating your nervous system, it actually contributes to dysregulating your nervous system so we can't just do all of the wellness practices that we see online when we don't really know how that applies to us and that's why in trauma healing work self-soothing and co-regulation are key aspects of regaining that feeling of safety and that is a lot of the work that i do in therapy with my clients you can start to do that even if you're not in therapy by allowing yourself to process your emotions rather than trying to run away from them or trying to avoid them. So it's learning how to sit with those feelings and to sit with that discomfort and really allow yourself the space to process without judgment and really just finding the ways that help you to have a feeling of safety and a feeling of calm. Another reason why you are getting stuck in your healing journey is because you are avoiding dealing with the harder emotional work you are dealing with it in a very superficial way of oh I'm just going to do this lovely little journal prompt I'm going to go for a little walk you know really doing like the light work rather than the shadow work the shadow work is dealing with the messier parts of you maybe the parts of you that you are actually ashamed of or the parts of you that you try to hide about yourself or the things that you dislike about yourself that is the deeper work of therapy and the deeper work of self-healing that goes beyond the superficial practices of i'm going to light this candle i'm going to do self-care i'm going to have a bubble bath all of those things have value but if you reach a certain point where you're getting stuck and you're not dealing with the deeper inner work that's often the reason why you're just not going deep enough and sometimes what i found is that even in therapy you're not going deep enough either. You're talking on the very superficial things and not all therapists have the ability to do the deeper work necessarily because we can only go as deep as we've met ourselves. And the reality is not all therapists go to therapy. Not all therapists are particularly self-aware and I've seen that myself through myself going to therapy and just the kind of dynamic and interaction that I would have with the therapist that I'm working with. So just something to pay attention to and to be mindful of. If you have a resistance to doing the deeper work, the things around shame, the things around grief, anger, when you avoid tapping into those deeper emotions, that can also contribute to you feeling stuck. And you might keep yourself in the learning phase and intellectualizing your feelings reading listening consuming information but without actually applying the work in action without applying what you've learned about attachment in your relationships rather than just doing the academic side of okay i do this because of that you know really intellectualizing your feelings intellectualizing your emotions instead of actually taking the time to feel them and process them There might be a bit of self-sabotage there where you are convincing yourself that you're showing up, you're doing the work, but actually what you're doing is you are avoiding the most painful parts that feel too painful to go near. That's why therapy can also be a really useful tool in that because it's really hard to be able to see some of those coping mechanisms that come so naturally to us by ourselves that's why sometimes we need somebody else who has the outside perspective who can see things from a different point of view who can gently challenge and gently make you see where some of those things might be showing up for you because in therapy it's not the therapist's job to heal you but they are facilitating that healing process with you And that leads me into the next reason why you might be getting stuck in your healing journey is because you are trying to do it alone. And when you've experienced relational trauma, we heal from relational trauma through healthier relationships. We are not designed to do life alone. We are designed for connection. We find safety in connection, connection with ourselves and connection with others. And so if we then avoid that part, if we try and do all of this self-work in isolation, that's only part of the work. The other part is how do you do that in the context of work? community and relationships that's why having the right support is really crucial and it has to be more than just venting to a friend even if in that moment it feels really good it's kind of keeping you stuck you're not moving past the venting you're not moving into the deeper side of healing to the part where actually hearing your own voice and your own perspective is more important than getting the validation from your friends or the people around you who are might not always one either have your best interest at heart or two they might be giving you advice from a very limited perspective or a very limited understanding because when you have that kind of relationship with someone it's very difficult for them to just have that to almost not have an agenda no matter how how well-meaning they are of you because they have a relationship with you there is a different type of agenda of i don't know whether they want you to stay in a relationship for example or you know maybe they don't want you to find yourself and find your voice maybe they they benefit from you not having boundaries for example sometimes there is an agenda that friends and people that we care about can unconsciously have in regards to our healing journey And then another reason why you might be getting stuck is that your old coping mechanisms are resurfacing. And when you become triggered, you might go back to the previous behaviors that had helped you to feel safe in those moments, such as numbing or avoidance or people pleasing. For you to be able to heal, it requires you being able to catch those things happening in the moment in real time. not just recognising them after the fact. And we really do this by having more compassion for ourselves over self-judgment because that's what makes it so much easier for you to be able to shift those behaviours rather than feeling stuck or negative about yourself because you've gone back to old habits or old ways of coping. This reason why you might be getting stuck may be a little bit more deep-rooted. which relates to your self-worth because there is a part of you that doesn't actually believe that you deserve to heal there is a part of you that is really stuck in that internalized place of shame and the cycle of guilt that keep you stuck in those cycles of self-abandonment and in order to get past that in order to to move past that you need to be rooted in self-compassion And I also find that a lot of inner child work can also help to shift that mindset. So being able to recognize what it is that you needed when you were younger and finding the ways that you can start to give that to yourself. That is literally what inner child healing is. And it helps you to shift that mindset of I'm not good enough. I don't deserve to heal to actually I am good enough and I do deserve to heal. The final reason why you might be getting stuck in your healing journey is that you are focusing more on the external validation rather than the internal healing. So you are working on healing to fix the relationship or get the relationship, find the one. Or you are trying to fix a toxic pattern in your family or you're trying to prove yourself worth to people who don't see your value. And it's taking the healing out of your hands into the hands of somebody else so that they actually see you and they see the value in you rather than you working on yourself to see the value in yourself and you having that self validation, you having that self acceptance. The real shift happens in healing when it becomes about self connection and not just about the external outcomes or what you get or the relationship that you're hoping to find healing isn't about doing it all perfectly and it's not about constantly staying in that healing journey you also need to go out and live those experiences you need to practice in action you need to get out there and form connections and work to have healthier relationships with yourself and also with others but you can't do that from hiding away from relationships It's about staying committed, even when it feels like it's slow or that it's messy or that it doesn't look like you thought it would. It's staying the course. So if this episode has resonated with you at all, just take a moment for you to reflect on your own process and your own journey and perhaps maybe some areas where you might be stuck. And is there, you know, maybe one small area that you can make a shift in this week? And if you need deeper support, you know where to find me. The link is in the show notes. Okay, thanks for listening. I'll see you in the next episode. Thank you for joining this episode of Healing Childhood Trauma. I hope you found today's discussion insightful and empowering. Remember, healing is a journey and you are not alone on this path. if you enjoyed this episode please subscribe rate and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform and you can share this episode with a friend your feedback helps this podcast to reach more women who are ready to heal and build secure healthy relationships and heal from the past