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