(YOU can read the article below or watch the video Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjhBqPdSfUs )
Many people who have been on the journey, on this path of healing for a long long time can get stuck on or caught up in one particular thing. Is you’ve been working on a particular emotional wound, or you’ve been stuck on an inner conflict, or you’ve been trying to forgive, or move on, or grow… and it just hasn’t been working – there is a really good reason for that. The main reason that people don’t heal is because of denial.
That might sound odd if you’re one of the people who are very self-aware, and who go hunting for their shadow – the answer is still denial. It’s a slightly different version of denial. It’s not that you’re not aware of the struggle. You’ve got awareness of your unconscious, what you’re denying is the part of you that you actually want to change. If you’re in a state of anger or resentment but you actually want to be in a state of forgiveness if you haven’t healed that yet because you’re denying the part of you that is angry you’re denying the part of you that wants to be resentful.
This is very often what we do when we see these less than ideal states within us.
We try to crush them ,we try to destroy them, we try to disconnect from them. We don’t look at them, and what that does is it creates a fragmentation inside. It creates a splitting, and if you think about healing – like what a healed states actually feels like – there’s a wholesomeness, there there’s a wholeness, there’s a completeness. You can’t have that, if you’re split, or in denial of any part of you.
The reason that we go into denial even though we’re very self-aware is because we’re striving for perfection we’ve got some ideas. Some ideal, some template of a thing that we’re trying to work towards – and we see qualities or states or feelings within us that don’t match that template. Sometimes it’s a template that we’ve invented, you know “what enlightenment looks like,” what our ideal standard looks like. What a perfect healed person “looks like,” and sometimes it’s a standard or a template that we’ve integrated. We’ve seen an example of somebody else being a certain way that we’ve come to idealize and strive towards, but either way these are targets that are not honest, they’re not true targets.
They are the structures that we’ve created, and we end up in this space where we try to change or distort ourselves to become this template instead of going within and healing these parts that we are in denial of. Then evolving into our true form, so healing often gets confused with perfection – and if you’re stuck on something that you’ve been working on for a really really long time probably you’ve got stuck on what you should be.
If you’ve got an idea of what you should be and if it’s really really strong you’re likely to try to avoid, and be unconsciously sneaky with yourself, and circumvent, and try to get around these parts that aren’t the way you think they should be. Healing is about being very very very very very honest with yourself about what you’re feeling, and then the second part of that is learning to accept and even approve of these parts.
One of the reasons that we go for perfection and we confuse perfection for healing, is that in the end what we’re really going for is love. We want to be loved. One of the woundings that many of us go through is when we’re growing up is we feel like we are not completely loved because we’re “not good enough.” When we get criticized or when our behaviour, our action, doesn’t get separated from who we are as a person and we are told off or are reprimanded, or we get consequences for something that we do, and that distinction doesn’t get made that we’re not bad but the thing that we did was bad – we can start to feel like there is something wrong with us. So a lot of us who are on a healing journey, we’re not actually on this healing journey for ourselves.
We have this unconscious goal that we’re going to become perfect, so that we can become good enough to finally get love. Many of us aren’t actually aware that that’s the real reason we’re trying to heal. Once that gets uncovered, you stop healing yourself because you want someone else to accept and approve of you, and you start healing because you love and care for yourself. Then that old structure of trying to heal or fix or kind of plastic surgery yourself into what you think the perfect state of being, is that gets washed out and is placed with healing as a process of evolving these aspects of you that are calling for care and are calling for nurture. It’s a very different process and at the end of that you get to discover Who You Are. That healing process becomes a creative process of evolving through your wounds instead of denying your wounds, and trying to change yourself and replace yourself with what you think is perfect.
If you’ve been trying to heal something for a very long time, and you haven’t been successful with it, it’s because you’re not fully accepting of or fully looking at (or fully giving a hug to if I can put it in that kind of cheesy way) those parts of you that actually need to be healed. You’re probably angry with some versions of you, or with some states within you – that don’t match the ideal. Because you’re angry with those parts of you for being “less than perfect” you’re attacking yourself from within. There’s nothing about going through this kind of process that’s actually going to heal you, you just end up harming yourself and beating yourself up, and repeating the same kind of wound that was done to you.
How to Heal Perfectionism
So you can’t expect yourself to be perfect in order to heal – you can hold yourself and kind of receive yourself in all of these messy states that you find along the way. One of the best things you can do when you’re going through this healing, and you stumble upon these unliked or unwanted ways, observe what you’re feeling and observe what you’re thinking – and just notice how you start talking to yourself when you see or sense or feel that you’ve gone into a negative state.
How to Forgive yourself
If you’re feeling like your goal is forgiveness and you notice that you have resentment if you try to attack and destroy the part of you that’s activating resentment you’re never going to get to forgiveness. That’s not the real path to forgiveness the real path to forgiveness is to walk through your resentment and to understand and acknowledge your hurt and by caring for yourself through that process of acknowledging your heart you can actually get to forgiveness. In that state of forgiveness, you’ve actually gone through the evolution that this experience provides for you, and you’ve activated some natural potential within you. You’ve not just cut out the thing that you think shouldn’t be there and replaced it with something “better.” You can’t replace it with something “better” you can only grow into it and so if you’re fighting with anyone part of yourself if you’re fighting to change any part of you or dissect it or replace it then you’re not allowing yourself to go through the natural healing process, which is actually an evolutionary process. You’re evolving yourself through a wounded state into a healed state, and you can’t cut out the middle bit.
You cannot deny point A in order to get to point B. You actually have to go through it, and that process of going through it is what develops your potential. You can create yourself into who you are as a more evolved, advanced being by looking at the parts of you that you actually disagree with – and learning to hold them, and carry them, and understand them.
A lot of these emotional wounds are actually parts of us that are still immature, and If you deny these parts of you that are immature, they’ll stay in their unhealed states. Very much like going towards an abused wounded animal, or an upset child, the way to help these beings evolve is not to suppress or compartmentalize like put in a cage or try to force to be something else.
You let yourself be exactly who you are, you let yourself feel exactly what you’re feeling and you learn to not make it wrong and very often that process of just being with the parts of you that in the past you’ve denied can actually dissolve them and bring you up into that healed state that you’re after. So healing is not really a process of turning yourself into a perfect being or the way that you think you should be, but it’s allowing yourself to see where you are and to feel where you are, and to move through that to become who you actually are. You are not replacing yourself with something “more perfect,” or more ideal. You’re helping them [these parts] to mature. You’re actually allowing them to dissolve, [integrate] and then you move through into your more evolved, more natural, more whole, more healed state of being.