Shakti Gawain in The Four Levels of Healing

“The essence of emotional healing is this: being in touch with what you are feeling, being able to say honestly what you are feeling to at least one other human being, and having that person respond with empathy, as in “Oh, I understand.” This lets us know that we’re not bad, wrong or crazy for feeling what we feel and that we’re not alone in our experience.”

“When we were infants and children we had many strong feelings. What we needed was to have people acknowledge and respond to these feelings in appropriate ways. For example, we needed to hear things like, “I understand that you’re very upset”, or “I can see that you’re feeling really sad.” In essence, as children we needed reflection and validation of our feelings from our parents, families, teachers and the surrounding world. We needed to be assured that we have a right to our feelings, that they aren’t wrong or bad. We needed to feel that others can understand and empathize with us when we experience strong feelings. We needed to be allowed to have our own feeling experience. No matter how hard parents tried – and they all do the best they can – children inevitable experience some degree of emotional hurt, neglect, and abandonment. Because we’re so vulnerable as children, we are deeply wounded by these experiences and carry them inside us for the rest of our lives, or until we do our conscious emotional healing work.” Page 55.

“It’s important to get in touch with the needs underneath our feelings, and to learn how to communicate those needs effectively. Underneath most of our emotions are our basic needs for love, acceptance, security, and self-esteem. We need to know the vulnerable child who still lives deep inside each of us; and to learn to become the loving parent our own inner child requires. If we want to experience the full range of our being in this life time, we need to commit ourselves to heal the emotional wounds from our childhood and early life.” Page 56.

“Our cultural conditioning tells us that we should be self-sufficient and in control, that it’s shameful and embarrassing to need help. Some of us may feel that we are “smart enough to figure it out for ourselves”. As I stressed before, you cannot think your way out of your emotional wounding.” Page 58.

“Emotional healing is an ongoing process. We move through it layer by layer, sometimes gently, sometimes intensely. Everyone is different, and we each have our own rhythm and timing.”

Here’s the good news: Emotional healing really does work! It is possible, in time, to heal the old emotional wounds so that they are no longer painful feelings we try to run away from or stuff down inside of us. Instead our painful past experiences can ripen into deep wisdom. In the process, we can learn to become comfortable with all our emotions and bring them into a natural healing balance.” Page 60.