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The Power to Heal Emotionally Is Within Us
Nobody is too damaged to heal. These four steps can take us there.
Damn you, emotion! Sometimes I want to surgically excise you from my life. Mostly, I want stick you in bottles, so I can guzzle down joy until I’m good and ready for sorrow.
Only that’s called addiction. And I know where addiction ends up. For reasons I can’t fathom because I present a lot of risk factors, I’ve never struggled with a serious addiction. But emotion? My inner life has been its own unchecked pandemic…beginning when I perched on a second floor windowsill at the age of six, late one night, feeling like I’d be better off taking a permanent dive.
If nothing else, my path has been about discovering courage. It doesn’t feel like courage — more like, “Why the hell am I still alive?” But you keep going. That is courage; when you look at your life and marvel that the stuff you’ve been through wasn’t enough to kill you without any help from ropes, pills, or guns.
As I kept on keeping on, I learned some things about emotional healing. Healing comes from facing and feeling the bad shit — in a way that works for you.
If your life has been so overwhelming that emotion mows you down like a withered tree, or you never learned many healthy patterns in the first…
