HEAL YOUR HIDDEN WOUNDS...

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Have you ever found yourself confronting painful memories of situations you experienced when you were growing up? Remembering these situations can be like re-opening old wounds and feeling the same emotions over and over again. Fortunately, you can use productive strategies to help you heal, Queen. One of those strategies is journaling—writing down how you feel and think. 

 

Try these journaling techniques to help you resolve the pain of negative childhood memories:

 

1. Write about what you thought and felt. Go back in time and think about what the negative situations were like for you. This may become a very emotional experience, but whatever emotions come up, embrace them fully. Feel everything despite of how much it hurts to relive certain things; it’s all a part of the process.

 

2. What are your current thoughts and feelings? Next, use your current “adult mind” to take a look at the situation the best you can. What does your adult mind tell you about what really happened? Maybe, you see things more clearly now. Jot down your current interpretation of the situation.

 

3. Document how the challenging situations affected you then. How did you react as a child to what happened? How did you make sense of the trying situations then? Who, if anyone, did you talk to about these troublesome times? Mention them in your journal.

 

4. Think about how the hurtful events from the past affect you now. See if you can make any connections between your past and present. Make a conscious decision to better manage your feelings and behavioral choices now. Write down how you can manage your emotions differently.

 

5. Vow to gain understanding. If it was a situation when your parent did something that you just couldn’t understand, can you make sense of it now? Maybe, your father didn’t make you stay home from that trip to Atlanta to punish you—maybe, he was hoping to protect you from something unsafe. 

 

6. Re-write your history. Re-construct your childhood on paper. Through this process, you get to relive your childhood the way you wanted to. The brain doesn’t distinguish from “real” and “fake,” so if you can re-imagine your childhood in a more positive way, the negative feelings that you had will be replaced. It may sound a little crazy, but try it out anyway. Re-writing your history can truly help you heal.

 

7. Make a conscious decision to overcome your past. Whatever your old hurts, decide to disconnect them from your current life. This effort must be made consciously and with great thought. Write down how you can release yourself.

 

8. Recognize that these events were in the past. As you record your thoughts and feelings, make note of how long ago the situation or events occurred. Label them as “in the past” in your journal. Start a new section called “in the present” and write about how you’ll respond to those types of hurts now.

 

9. Formulate a plan to let it go and move on. In your writings, consider steps you might take to move on in your life and live more openly and without being tethered to your past hurts. 

 

10. Give yourself permission to release old, negative emotions. In your journal, jot down that you no longer have to carry that hurt. Allow yourself permission to leave it behind you. You can even draw a picture of the tangled web of feelings and state that you’re leaving all the pain right there between the lines of your journal.

 

Expressing yourself with pen and paper, or even on a computer, will help you release your negative feelings and move on with your goals. Live your best life now, Queen, by using journaling to help heal old wounds. What’s more powerful than you?
 

Affirm: I Release the Past »