Why Changing Your Thoughts May Not Be Enough for Healing

Perhaps you’ve tried therapy before and even though it helped, you can’t get to where you want to be. If you’ve only participated in talk therapy, you may need to add some somatic or body work to get to a place where you feel safe in your own skin – meaning your body feels balanced and you can easily connect with others versus wanting to isolate.

You Can’t Think Your Way to a Feeling of Safety

The truth is you cannot think your way to a feeling of safety. It has to be felt in the body because you do not have conscious awareness of all of your memories. They live in your body as implicit memories which come from the right side of your brain. As babies, our right hemisphere of the brain is more developed than the left hemisphere which brings in thinking and consciousness. The right side of our brain is where sensation and emotion are felt. You have to experience safety in your body through the nervous system because implicit memory can override logic. The lower parts of your brain, mainly your brainstem and limbic system, can hijack the higher executive functioning in nano seconds! And it happens without your conscious awareness!

So, when you pay attention to what happens within as your body takes in information through your five senses, you might notice you feel some things. Once you become aware of that, you can begin to change and heal. You can’t change what you aren’t aware of, but once you have self-awareness, you can choose to enter a healing state.

Your Unconscious Brain

Your brain is predictive and protective as it constantly scans for safety and danger, and it will use every experience you’ve ever had to predict what will happen next as an attempt to keep you safe. It remembers all the things you don’t have conscious awareness of, but you might have a feeling or sensation in your body that tells you something. And then you can be curious about that because when you give the body what it needs, it begins to heal. You are always either in a stressed state or a healing state and it’s important to know the difference because stress can feel like our normal if that was our experience. And patterns of protection begin to replace patterns of connection, and connection is what we were created for! But not with just anyone – with God and safe people.

Your Beliefs

When you have a belief that you are defective, it becomes this sense of shame. That shame tells you that you don’t deserve loving, healthy, and good relationships where you are valued, seen, soothed, and safe. And when you carry that experience with you, you make choices based on beliefs that were created as a survival strategy – perhaps as an infant – which then got settled in your nervous system as a felt sense. And because you tend to choose what’s familiar, you choose what feels normal to you which can be unhealthy if that’s what your experience has been. But when you can begin to notice what’s happening in you and begin to have awareness of your thoughts, urges, behaviors, emotions, and body sensations you can begin to make different choices with yourself, with the people you choose to be in your life, and in the places you make a part of your life. You are created for healing and redemption and growth, but it doesn’t happen in isolation, it happens within safe, healthy relationships where our relational injuries get healed.

Anger

As you heal, you may notice anger that surfaces. This is normal as you begin to connect to the reality of your experience. You will have to work through that anger and move toward grace for yourself and understanding of the person who hurt you. Hurt people hurt people until they make sense of their story, become secure in their God-given identity, and begin to live in new ways in a community of healthy, supportive people.

You Are Not Defective

Let me be clear, if you were given an insecure attachment, you are not defective in any way. You never were! Just pause and think about that. You were created in such an amazing way that you were able to develop a strategy to survive! But you don’t need that same strategy in adulthood. You can build new ones that serve you in the present and help to heal the past. That is the beauty of doing grief and trauma work! You develop new strategies through new thoughts, new behaviors, new relationships, new communities, and new views of God. And that, my friend, is hopeful!

Support

If you need support as you make sense of your story so that you can live the life you are meant to live, reach out to us here. It would be an honor to walk alongside you on your healing journey!