One of my favorite comic book characters is Wolverine from X-Men. I find that accelerated healing power of his to be super-awesome.
Now in real life, unless you’re a Navy SEAL or something, you won’t have much use for accelerated physical healing. However, I find that most people find tremendous value in accelerated emotional healing.
What Is Accelerated Emotional Healing?
Quite simply, it is the ability to bounce back quickly when something bad happens: your partner breaks up with you, your boss fires you, a loved one passes away, they cancel the next season of Dr. House and so on.
Some people try to not feel any pain altogether when bad things happen, which often doesn’t work. A much better approach is to focus on bouncing back from pain quickly instead of not feeling it at all. The people who are able to do this are usually the people who are the happiest with life.
4 Steps to Accelerated Emotional Healing
In my communication coaching, I often touch on the subject of emotional healing. I believe there are four steps that work best in making it happen fast.
1. Accept Life as a Rollercoaster
Some of us get trapped in this illusion that we can somehow reach a point where our life is smooth and nothing bad happens anymore. Real life doesn’t work that way; it’s a rollercoaster with ups and down.
Accept life as a rollercoaster and keep it in mind like this. As a result, bad things won’t take you by surprise and you will find it easier to get through them and get over them. Don’t become paranoid expecting terrible things to happen everyday, but don’t delude yourself that life can ever be completely smooth either.
2. Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket
Have you ever noticed this pattern unraveling? A person gets into a relationship; they’re very excited about it, they start spending more and more time with their partner and less and less time with their friends, until they eventually have no more fiends and the relationships consumes all their free time.
Then when the relationship ends (as it often does), the person has absolutely no social support system. They feel lonely, they get depressed, they take about two years to fully get over it. This is what happens when you invest all in one relationship, both in your personal and your professional life. For this reason, I encourage you to keep your people skills sharp and your social circle strong.
3. Don’t Repress the Pain
Often, people try to drown their pain using distractions. Drinking, eating, partying, having sex all can be used for this purpose. Unfortunately, as more and more psychological research now points out, distractions only make the pain submerge for a while and when it comes back, it comes back even stronger.
You don’t want to wallow in self pity, but you don’t want to repress you pain either. Pain is a natural part of the healing process. Sometimes you just need to accept it and up to a certain point, let it be.
4. Practice Realistic Thinking
If the hurt a bad event creates has a very high intensity and lasts unreasonably long, it’s frequently due to unrealistic thinking. In the heat of the moment, you start thinking to yourself that “this is intolerable” or “life will suck from now on” and so you feed the pain instead of letting it drip away.
Of course, this is nothing more than dramatizing and unrealistic thinking. If you want to heal quickly, an essential thing to do is to take conscious control of your thinking and correct it when it distorts the facts.
Accelerated emotional healing is a truly amazing super-power. When you have mastered it you can embrace life as it is, with the good and the bad, and you can always make the best of it.
Image courtesy of Monja
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You reminded me here of the 5 stages of grief: denial/anger/bargaining/depression/acceptance – they go into your third step, because grief has to go through all stages to be consumed.
I really like your 2nd step/advice. I’ve been through a rough patch a while ago, and having more than one friend to help with it was acutely necessary. You cannot count on just one person to be there for you when you go through grieving over a great loss. Sometimes one cannot empathize, one is not in the mood to see you grieving and avoids you, one is that who makes you laugh and go party, one is that who gives you that warmest hug when you need it most… When you are grieving you need all the support you can get. And it’s not fair and not OK to impose all your grieving on just one person.
I find that steps 1 and 4 are mainly the same thing: be realistic. Well, some stages of grief distort our sense of reality. That is why we should always have a friends-and-family-support-system when we grieve.
Hi Mortyse,
This is why I call it a social support SYSTEM – it’s composed of more than one person. It can support you from all directions and help you bounce quickly.
Thanks Eduard for the emotional tip. I will use it on some of my trainings 😀
Trainings! 🙂
I am afraid I didn’t get your idea…?
Hi, Eduard. I love this site and the free advice you offer. I have a question.
Do you have any advice of have to talk to someone or people in general about conspiracy theories? They usually dismiss you in these cases.
Hey Jay,
That depends: do you believe in the theories yourself, or you just like the topic? Either way, the first thing that comes to my mind is to avoid using the phrase “conspiracy theory”. The topic itself can be interesting if you don’t label it using words with a negative connotation.
This is one of my favorite topics. Masons, illuminati, templars, rosicrucians…
Yeah, I don’t call it conspiracy theory, because its pretty much in plain sight with all the consequences and evidents all around the place.
YEAH! Never, never ever put all eggs in one basket! When we need to focus on one great thing like our goal in life, a potential lasting relationship or retirement plans, we must also keep options open. AND! At the same time, enjoy each day that comes, not pour out joys only when we’ve achieved all we aspire for. It’s the same with everything, right? People often commit that mistake of not leaving an ounce of happiness for the moment, self-respect and pride, even a few for flecks of treating themselves right. In the end, when the basket falls off, all eggs are broken. That’s just sad. Emotional healing after such tragedy would naturally come more burdensome. But if we learn to live by the day while staying committed to our goals, learn to relax and take a breather while we pursue the peak of success, and keep our self-respect, dignity and identity even if we’re in a serious relationship, it’s much more different. In fact, a loss will be a loss, more painful and maybe a bit more frustrating. BUT! We still cherish many moments we lived well, keep our pride intact, our sense of being still whole – broken, chipped, maybe, but still whole.
It’s true, all the four points discussed in this post. Wonderfully explained as well. Emotional healing and moving on would come easy IF we followed these. What a great read as we face a turn to another year!
Arina, you touched an idea that my grandfather taught me when I was a child: that you must learn to take joy in small things, not to postpone feeling joy until you have reached your latest goal, because this way, depriving your soul of joy, and getting used to it, it wilts, it withers, and thus one day you’ll find it’s dry and has no idea how to feel joy anymore. If we go through life expecting that rewarding day when we have reached our goals and we can let ourselves enjoy the moment, well, one goal fulfilled, there’s another one waiting – when do you take that proverbial time to smell the roses? When you’ll be smelling their roots?
A wilted soul is one that has no force to see the positive aspects of life, that will take blows the worst way possible, that will be easily affected by stress and depression.
So, take time to feel joy, take a walk on your lunch break, watch the sunset, take a jog in the morning, go for a drink with a friend in the evening, stop to play with a dog, smile at a small baby, cook your favorite food, start a foodfight with your loved one… don’t, don’t, DON’T FORGET to take joy in the small things of life! That’s the food your soul needs.
Ha! I love it when my readers interact with each other, not just with me 🙂
I like the article, though I doubt that putting all your egg in different baskets creates the kind of person I would like to associate with, an achiever, a producer, and real man.
Other than that… I can get it.
Cool Spohie,
Not all your eggs is different baskets. That’s going to the other end. Just not all in one single basket either.