MTD Vocal Freedom

Healing is about re-examining your past and processing old unprocessed emotions with the help of new context, insight and support. Even though it can pave the way to a life of new-found self-awareness, freedom and joy, it is often NOT plain sailing.

When we feel unsafe as children we develop coping strategies to best survive perceived dangers. These strategies end up impacting how we view ourselves and our place in the world. For example, if anger wasn’t seen as an acceptable experience in your household, you may have developed the coping strategy of swallowing your anger and becoming a people-pleaser, keeping your body in a state of hyper-arousal because you didn’t feel safe to fully express yourself. This may affect your sense of self-worth – you may believe you’re only worthwhile if you are in a good mood, pleasing others above yourself. Unfortunately, the coping strategies we develop growing up can harm us in the long-run, even if we were rewarded for them in the past. Sometimes those coping strategies work for us well into adulthood… until they don’t.

Healing is an uncomfortable journey precisely because we are challenging old coping strategies and, in that process, challenging old beliefs about who we are, where we belong, and how we should operate in the world. These beliefs and their resulting behaviours have been reinforced thousands and thousands of times, and your body has associated them with safety even if they are, ironically, harming you.

That’s why healing can be so uncomfortable and downright painful, and why we sometimes find ourselves totally lost on our journey. I call this process in healing the ‘untethering’. It’s the part where we’ve let go of old habits but we haven’t yet built new ones. We’ve let go of old ideas about who we were, but we haven’t yet discovered who we are. We haven’t necessarily got a direction yet, but the ropes are cut, and there we are floating in a sea of new possibility, waiting for the wind to pick up.

What adds insult to injury is that as your identity becomes untethered, sometimes your relationships become untethered too. Our past identity led us to occupy certain roles in our relationships and drew us to certain friendships. When we start behaving differently, people in our lives start to notice. Your friends who were drawn to who you were are now unsure about who you are. They relied on you being a certain type of person for their own sense of stability and order.

Your steps towards healing may make your friends uncomfortable because they made friends with the unhealed you for a reason. Perhaps you changing reminds them about their own unhealed behaviours – perhaps they also feel they need to change, but aren’t yet ready to. Either way, you taking steps towards healing shouldn’t rupture your friendships. It shouldn’t… but sometimes it does, and that hurts.

Venturing out of your well-established family role may also trigger your loved ones. Family roles are formed in relation to each other so your new behaviours could be threatening to topple the whole system. Which is not your fault. You taking steps towards healing shouldn’t rupture your familial relationships… but sometimes it does, and that hurts.

Whatever you are healing within you, one thing is certain: this journey may hurt. Losing friendships and experiencing rifts in important relationships isn’t easy and can lead to a profound sense of loneliness. You may also feel somewhat betrayed as you realise that those around you may not fully support your healing. Remember though that these negative reactions say more about them and their relationship with themselves than their love for you.

Remember also that you have to lose in order to gain. Whatever you lose along the way, just know that the vacuum created by loss WILL be filled – you are getting ready for incredible gains in your life. On your healing journey you will discover who you really are beneath fear, and who you were always meant to be. From that will come a new sense of strength and purpose, and that’s when you will find the people who were always meant for you. The ones that appreciate who you REALLY are, not who you tried to be in order to survive. And their friendship and companionship will be everything you deserve.

Stay strong, and get excited. If you feel untethered, it’s a sign that great things are coming your way!

If you’d like to get in touch (even just to say hi) I’d love to hear from you! Please get in touch. I’m here to help – you are not alone!