Feeling anxious, depressed, lost, stuck, empty (often inexplicably) are very common experiences. We often mask over them, and don’t realise that the people around us are feeling them too.
When healed & whole, we naturally feel confident and purposeful. We know what we want to create in our lives, and easily give our energy to this creation. Fear, anger, and futility become virtually non-existent, as challenges are purposefully confronted without taking a toll.
Everyone has the gifts of fulfillment, clear intuition, self-love, and ease of being. The challenge is to restore free and easy access to these states. The block? Emotional wounds.
Most of us are unknowingly carriers of unhealed early life woundings. Becoming who you want to be, who you know you truly are, is a matter of healing.
“Many people are not readily able to feel confident, content or purposeful. This represents a huge loss, because of the realisable potential within each of us.”
Contentment, strength, and purpose are natural states of being.
So why is this so often not the case?
Feeling empty, low, flat, stuck, and futile can be feelings that correspond to depression. While worries, nervousness, butterflies, hypervigilence, racing thoughts and hearts, fear of people, are often described as symptoms of anxiety.
I have come to see depression and anxiety as signs of a deeper and often overlooked problem. When the deeper issue is healed, your natural state of wellness and wholesomeness is more readily available to you. In other words, without the chronic hard work you can feel content and enjoy the process of discovering your own life.
Getting the message from the people around you to “buck up” or “shake it off” are entirely unhelpful. These responses amplify self-blame, guilt, and even feelings of shame. Anxiety and depression are not just a matter of power over with will power.
Why can’t I just be happy, what’s wrong with me?!
The truth is that we always orient towards what we think will help. Even the most apparently self-destructive behaviour or negative feeling is a bid for well being. Truly.
What goes wrong?
No matter how many positive affirmations you make, how many times you tell yourself the ‘rational truth’, plan your success strategy, treat yourself to something nice, or go to the gym, the relief is often at best only temporary.
In the long run, these strategies don’t bring you the feelings of wholeness and worthiness that you intend. This apparent failure to be “happy,” is 100% not your fault.
There is a good reason why these techniques only work superficially. They do not clear the root cause of why you feel any combination of low, nervous, worried, reactive, hostile, empty, invalidated, powerless, out of control, helpless, or alone.
The rational mind, will power, and positivity are not the right tools for this healing job. To get out of these painful states and cycles, you need to dive into the belly of the beast and heal the root cause.
You might be surprised…
I have been sharing this with friends, family, and clients for years. You are not the problem, not broken – do not fix. There is nothing missing or defective about you.
What you are experiencing as shame, depression, anxiety, instability, disorientation… is an unrecognised developmental trauma.
In spiritual and energetic terms, this is the wounded inner child. More about that here:
In Psychological Terms – What is Developmental Trauma?
Developmental Trauma is like a block that disrupts our natural balance, leading to feelings of anxiety, depression, low-self-esteem, uncertainty about our role in life, and a chronic nagging feeling that something is “off” without really knowing what that is.
Trauma is also a subjective experience. This is one of the most important things to understand. Trauma has nothing to do with how apparently intense or harsh an event was to people observing it.
It has everything to do with how the adult, teenager, child, toddler, baby, fetus…. experiencing the event felt able to stay safe, valuable, and in control.
Developmental Trauma is an emotional injury that stunts your natural growth. When we endure such an injury as a child, (for example being criticized often, punished too harshly, invalidated emotionally, ignored, controlled, or living in a toxic family home) it does three things when it remains unhealed.
- It freezes a part of our consciousness in that traumatising moment
- The emotions, sensations, thoughts, beliefs, and wounding of that moment become locked inside of us
- We lose touch with our authentic being, which leads to feeling insecure, angry, or disoriented
- We form relationships, make life decisions, and favour activities that are driven by the unhealed wounds rather than our authentic nature.
Most Developmental Trauma is Unconscious
We don’t remember what happened, or why we feel the way that we feel. We just feel it. Shadow work is a critical part of healing these unconcious wounds. Our emotional pain in the here and now is the portal to the shadow.
Early life emotional wounding is trapped inside most of us, and relegated to the subconscious. We don’t remember why, but we feel ongoing unhappiness, emptiness, nervousness, low mood, harshness, self-criticism…
The truth of the matter is that many many more people are living with early life emotional wounds than they realise. It only takes one wound to cause unresolveable anxiety. This is because the past echoes into the present. It also means that a single healing can lift a huge weight off.
A single unhealed trauma makes us more vulnerable to future trauma. This is why a relationship break down, an interpersonal conflict, or a bump in the road can knock one person completely off track while another moves through the challenge without a scratch.
Healing Developmental Trauma
Although the body has matured into its adult form with the passage of time, the unresolved wounds of the past are held within as energies that continue to radiate the frequencies of the wound. We can conceptualise this fragment, this trapped energy, this wound – as an inner child.
The goal of healing is integration. We want to integrate the fragments of our consciousness (the lost and wounded inner children that each represent an emotional wound) back into a whole.
We want to bring the pieces of ourselves back into wholeness.
When we access the past trauma and heal it, we can shut off the ‘trauma alarm.’ The scattered mind and negative states are replaced with a feeling of security. In other words, you restore your natural path.
A trauma is frozen energy.
Parts of you are frozen in the past. This is called fragmentation. Not all of you is here and now.
Negative states and emotions that are rooted in developmental traumas can be difficult to detect, because we are either used to them, subdued by them, or resigned to them and they have become the norm.
This new norm is actually a distortion that makes it difficult to experience natural states of happiness, security, and purpose. A negative repeating pattern in life, a chronic negative emotional experience, ongoing interpersonal conflicts or fears, are a sure sign of developmental trauma.
Although we may grow up in surroundings that are seemingly ‘ok,’ having no need to battle with abject poverty, starvation, or war – the loneliness, emptiness, sadness, and worry can remain intact.
These are telltale signs of an emotionally wounding childhood, are so often symptoms of depression and anxiety.
Healing is a gradual process. Every healing process that you do restores your original wholeness. There is no prescribed way to heal. In fact, different people will require different processes, be drawn to different techniques or schools of thought, and ultimately are able to heal.
I love to combine energy healing with psychotherapeutic work to resolve symptoms of depression and anxiety, by working with the real wounds.
Since we are made of mostly energy (including our thoughts and emotions) it is important to consider that our psychological injuries are non-physical. This makes energy healing an important part of your healing work, including shadow work, and inner child work.
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Rachel is a spiritual psychotherapist, energy healer, and spiritual empowerment teacher. Her goal is to provide you with the information and presence you need to heal your past, restore your natural ease of being, and self-actualise.
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