Things Left Unsaid Are Hard to Carry
But putting words to our experience helps us let things go.
There are so many ways that we can lose relationship with others, but still hold unresolved feelings:
Sometimes they’ve died, but there were things left unsaid or problems that were never addressed, and those things still weigh on us
Sometimes people we felt we needed chose to leave or abandon us, and we’re left with a hurt that we want to express to them, but can’t.
Sometimes we’ve had to leave the relationship for our own safety, but there are still things we wish we could say to the other person.
Sometimes we still have a relationship with them, but because they never want to address the problems, it’s like there’s this gap between you.
Without a way to express how we feel to the other person, it can seem like we’ll be stuck carrying this emotional pain forever
But what if there was a way to let it go, without the other person being involved at all?
How We Can Heal
Stuck emotions act a lot like weeds: if you just express the part that shows up on the surface, it’ll keep coming back. But if you can dig all the way down to the roots and pull those up to the surface, you’ve dealt with the whole thing. So to deal with those stuck feelings, we can…
1 Help you activate the stuck feelings in a controlled and safe manner so they’re ready to be worked on.
2 Use Emotion Focused Therapy exercises that help you get all the way to the bottom of your stuck feeling.
3 Express the entirety of our feeling, and in the process let it go more fully.
Going through this process helps you reorganize your experience, so that the deep intensity of the wounds or unmet needs can be lessened significantly. Anguish turns into disappointment, sadness becomes acceptance, fear becomes trusting our boundaries. You may still feel some unpleasant emotions, but in a much more tolerable way that doesn’t burden you.
One of my greatest passions as a clinician is guiding people through difficult experiences into healing.
There are few things I do in therapy that feel more rewarding then helping people learn to let go of pain they’ve been carrying for years, maybe decades. Especially because for so many of us, we believed this relief wasn’t possible.
You don’t have to be burdened by the pain of your past relationships for the rest of your life.
I’ve seen so many people learn to let go of the hurt they carry by using the tools found in Emotion Focused Therapy. If it can work for them, it can work for you too.