Steven Barnes outlines the first five steps of a 10-step emotional healing process. Start by acknowledging you need help, forgiving yourself for being imperfect, and accepting that your happiness is your responsibility alone. Then build a daily ritual with journaling or meditation, and find people who support you.
Greetings. This is Stephen Barnes. I'd like to welcome you to 10 Steps to Healing the Wounded Heart. Now, whether it's a broken heart from romance, loss of a job, death, any emotions that are so powerful and overwhelming that it's difficult for you to manage them. Guilt, blame, shame, anger, rage. This process will help you deal with it if you will trust it and you will try it. The most important and the first step in healing wounded emotions is simply to acknowledge that you need healing. Quite often, it's difficult for us to admit that we need something outside of ourselves or that something is hurt, something is wrong. We'll often prefer to believe that there's something wrong with our bodies than to believe that our emotions have been damaged. But you have to grasp the fact that all of us, all of us, have wounded emotions in one way or the other. The question is, how do we function despite our wounds? There's no shame in that. So the first step, most importantly, is to tell the truth. The second step in healing the wounded heart is to forgive yourself for not being perfect. To acknowledge that all human beings have areas in their lives where they're not functioning at 100%, and that's just perfect. That's what we are. It is also critical to look at whatever emotion it is that you're feeling. Grief, loss, like I said, guilt, blame, shame. And deal with the fact that underneath the presenting emotion is the core emotion of fear. Fear and love compete for the same place in our hearts. The more fear you feel, the less love you can experience. The third step in healing the wounded heart is to accept total responsibility for your happiness, your own happiness. Now, we've all experienced dysfunctional relationships where the other partner expected us to take responsibility for their happiness. This is a con game. When they can get you to take responsibility for their happiness, unless they're taking responsibility for yours, it's automatically imbalanced. And even if they are, it's codependent. You are not responsible for theirs, they are not responsible for yours. An adult, an aware adult, understands that he or she is responsible for the way they feel based upon the perceptions and values and thoughts that they have. Once you start taking responsibility for this, your feet are on the right path and you can start gaining leverage. Be selfish, but be long term selfish. In other words, expect to deal with these people again and again and again throughout a long future, and you will take good care of them. Step number four. Take constant action. You need to create a daily ritual that enables you to check in with yourself every day. It should only take five minutes at the minimum, but that is a good chunk of time. It could be journaling, meditating. It could be checking in with a special friend who has taken responsibility or accepted responsibility to monitor you as you are monitoring them. There are any number of different things you can do. Brisk exercise, walk around the park. Something that you're doing every day to check in with yourself. It's a daily ritual. I would suggest journaling and meditating. Healing the wounded heart Step 5 Find a support Group none of us make it through life alone. You're going to want a partner. You're going to want a group. You're going to want to go online through reading, blogging, journaling, online journals, Facebook, some way for you to contact other people. This is important because of the fact that your ability to heal yourself is going to be partially dependent upon the resources outside you. This is not a matter of making them responsible for you. It is a matter of of having someone to speak to during critical moments. If you cannot find other people, there are resources listed on your screen and the bottom line the most important person for you to have as your ally is yourself. This is why you have to have your daily meditating, your daily journaling, to make contact with the deeper ranges of.
