In this article, I am going to speak to you about the 5 most common emotional wounds to help you identify if you have them and to help you better know and understand yourself as well as how to heal yourself. Just by identifying the emotional wounds that have impacted you, will help empower you and you’ll be able to understand and accept yourself more.
Every emotional wound can leave painful feelings, ingrained patterns and limiting beliefs but there is also a gift to uncover if you take the time to heal and transform them. In this article, I will go over them in order to show you that if you are serious about healing your emotional trauma, you will be winning on the other side. There are beautiful gifts that await for you on the other side of recovery.
It’s not always what happens that is the reason behind emotional wounds. Most often, because of the vulnerability, the personality and sensibility of a child, it’s how the child interpreted the event that will have the ultimate impact on her. The same event can happen to two children and the impact will be completely different. The more sensitive child you were, the more certain events and behaviors of your primary caretakers will have an impact on you.
1. The abandonment emotional wound
There doesn’t have to be real abandonment in order for a child to feel abandoned. Children are very sensitive and they can easily feel abandoned. It can be your mother that promised you something and she didn’t keep her promise, it can be your father not showing up at your birthday, it can be the lack of emotional support. It can also be real abandonment, like a mother abandoning her child or the father disappearing by leaving his wife and children. It doesn’t really matter how the child in you felt abandoned, what really matters is how you, as an adult, are coping with your abandonment issues.
You can very easily be triggered and feel abandoned. Example: you set up an appointment with your boyfriend and he arrives 30 minutes late without warning you. You wait and you wait and you get so anxious and feel so many painful emotions but you don’t know what to do. You might feel unsafe, not important, not valuable et so on….You are angry and you want to cry and when you finally meet with him, you are so angry and you scold him. You might even feel rage and not want to talk with him anymore. What we notice here, is that the trigger is rather small in comparison with the emotions that are felt and this is a warning that healing is needed here. It doesn’t excuse the behavior of your boyfriend but rather shows the difference between the trigger and the emotional pain that is felt.
If you don’t tackle this emotional pain, each time there will be a trigger, you will feel the same pain over and over. You will try to cope with it by trying to change your partner or even control him but because you take power over someone else instead of trying to change yourself, the universe will send you the same trigger over and over until you understand that you hold the power over your healing and over your life. You will attract the same situations over and over until you have had enough and you release your past trauma related to abandonment.
How to do you heal from abandonment issues? After an event where you have felt abandoned, you go home and you get your journal out. You write down absolutely everything that you feel, you let yourself scream and cry, you don’t judge or rationalize what comes out. You do this until there is nothing left and you have found your limiting (negative) beliefs. Underneath every emotional wound, there are often limiting beliefs. You can easily transform your limiting beliefs by affirming new positive beliefs as soon as you wake up or just before falling asleep. You can apply this exercise for every emotional wound that I talk about in this article. I give you the exact 3 steps of healing your trauma in the video at the end of this article.
Another way to heal your abandonment wound is to practice self-care and to keep yourself busy when you feel alone and lonely. Do your favorite activities, put yourself first, practice a new hobby, do what brings you the most joy, create, learn, read, write, anything that fuels your soul. By putting yourself first, you will create that sense of security and importance that you so need to heal yourself.
The positive aspect of healing your abandonment emotional wound is that you learn to prioritize yourself, to take care of yourself, to love yourself and to take care of your own needs. When you are at this stage of loving yourself and putting yourself first, you will not be triggered anymore and in a situation where your partner is late, you might even feel just a bit disappointed and even make the decision to not wait after him. You will feel strong and empowered and make the best decision in every situation and not feel that you depend on someone’s else treatment because you always have your back.
Also ask yourself: where in your life are you abandoning yourself? Where do you put others first? Where do you choose partners that abuse you in the name of love? Where do you cling onto other people because you can’t be alone? We often abandon ourselves and expect others to be there for us when we are not loving and putting ourselves first.
On the spiritual side, the abandonment wound teaches you that you are the child of God. Even if everyone abandons you, you are never abandoned by God whom loves you. When you connect with the love of God, you will feel an unconditional love that will heal you and fill you up.
2. The rejection emotional wound
The rejection emotional wound stems from being rejected over and over in your childhood years. It hurts you so much that you’ll eventually learn to avoid rejection and you’ll reject yourself before anyone can reject you. You become fearful, you walk on egg shells and you calculate every little gesture that could mean you could get rejected and hurt.
By learning to avoid people in order to not get rejected, you don’t get to create new relationships and you might even find yourself isolated, sad and lonely. You need to realize that not all people reject you and if you have had parents that didn’t know how to love you but rejected you, is not your fault. You need to stop rejecting yourself because you don’t depend on anybody anymore. When you stop rejecting yourself, you don’t really care anymore because the worst pain doesn’t come from being rejected but from rejecting yourself. A child will always put the fault on her in order to survive, therefore learn that there is something wrong in her that makes people reject her.
The truth is that there is nothing wrong with you and you were always perfectly imperfect, valuable and enough.
Getting back in the zone of going towards people and start building new relationships is vital to your happiness. Start testing one day at a time and you’ll see that the majority of people will not reject you so that you train your brain to take the risk of going towards new people.
You can do the same healing exercise referenced above for the abandonment emotional wound in order to release any trapped emotions in your body and so that you transform any limiting belief that you might have because of your rejection wound. By doing that, you won’t have to force yourself to go towards people, you’ll be more natural because you would have removed all emotional and mental blockages by doing the healing work.
The positive side of healing the rejection wound is that you learn to accept yourself fully and to fully embrace whom you are no matter if people like you or not. Knowing that you always accept yourself no matter what, will make you feel more empowered and courageous when you interact with other people therefore giving you the chance of enriching your social life.
Ask yourself, where am I rejecting myself? Where do I give in to the fear of being rejected instead of putting my needs first and take that risk of being rejected? Where do I reject myself because of the fear of being rejected by others?
On the spiritual side, the rejection wound teaches you that you are never alone. Your guides and angels always protect you and have an eye on you, therefore you are never rejected and alone. Loneliness is only an illusion created by the 3D world. In the spiritual world, you are always loved, guided and protected.
3. The humiliation emotional wound
Humiliation can stem from being ridiculed, laughed at, judged or critiqued in your childhood years or it can happen when you are humiliated in front of more than one person. Humiliation can be a very painful emotional wound as well. You would feel shame and ridicule and you will learn to protect yourself by hiding whom you truly are, by wearing a mask to hide your true self. You will learn to avoid being center stage because you will learn to avoid humiliation at all costs. You will avoid showing your true self because you deeply believe that whom you are is shameful and should be hidden.
How do we heal from the humiliation wound? First, we start to accept that it’s ok to do mistakes, it’s ok to not be perfect, it’s ok to be different and unique, it’s ok to not have the perfect body. We should not be ridiculed for whom we are, how we behave or what we say or believe in. Healing starts with radical self-acceptance, with expressing any emotions related to our humiliation wound be it shame, anger, resentment, guilt, felling worthless, feeling bad, feeling not accepted. Once we accept that we are not perfect and that it’s ok to do mistakes, we stop caring about other people’s opinions and we start taking to risk of being and showing whom we truly are at our core. We slowly remove the mask that we wear and we show our true colors while being ok with other people’s views of us and we are our true selves no matter the consequences because we have learned to fully love and accept ourselves no matter what.
The positive side of healing your humiliation wound is that you get the courage to get out there a make a fool out of yourself because you are free of other people’s opinions or ridicule. It is so freeing to be yourself and to truly show whom you are authentically. You take critique with a grain of salt and only keep the constructive criticism and let everything else out. You put your own opinion above everything else, therefore letting others the freedom of being themselves. Because you free yourself, you give others the freedom of being themselves.
You have to ask yourself: where do I put myself in humiliating situations? Where don’t I respect myself and let others humiliate me and not take a stand for myself? Where don’t I stand up for myself and accept myself fully?
On the spiritual side, the humiliation wound teaches us to fully accept and embrace whom we are, to see ourselves as perfectly imperfect, to forgive ourselves and to shine our light no matter other people’s opinions or judgements. We are a spirit in a body first and foremost and we have come here to experience life through our unique view and personality and to learn from our experience and mistakes.
4. The betrayal emotional wound
The betrayal emotional wound stems from having your trust broken. Someone does something to you that makes you feel you can’t trust them anymore, something that broke the trust you had in them. If you confide in someone you trust and that person tells someone else about it or uses that against you for their own benefit or to critique, guilt or berate you, that is considered betrayal as well.
Betrayal has a big impact on your relationship because you will feel unsafe to confide yourself in that person, especially if that person is very close to you or is a love partner. You might try to repair the trust and take a chance again with that relationship but if that person betrays you again, this could harm the relationship or you could become very protective of what you are saying to that person.
If you learn to not trust a person that is very close to you that is supposed to love and protect and keep you safe and not use your vulnerability against you, you will have trouble trusting other people in your life. You will keep your secrets and your thoughts to yourself because you will have trouble trusting people.
How do we heal the betrayal wound? We express our emotions in relation to it and we choose what we share and what do not share until that person deserves our full trust. You can journal out any emotions related to how you felt when you were betrayed and find any limiting beliefs that stem from that wound. You can then transform these beliefs with more positive and empowering beliefs.
The positive side of healing your betrayal wound is that you learn to trust yourself before trusting others, that you learn to protect yourself when needed. You learn that ultimately you are the key keeper of your heart and that some people need to earn your trust before having access to it.
You have to also ask yourself where are you betraying yourself? Saying yes when you want to say no, trying to please other people while not taking into your account your own needs, accepting something that is not acceptable to you, not listening to your gut instinct, not following your intuition but other people’s opinions or advice.
On the spiritual side of things, the betrayal emotional wound teaches you that you have to ultimately trust yourself and be loyal to yourself. That you are responsible of protecting yourself and you should safeguard your vulnerability with people that don’t deserve your trust. It teaches us to stop betraying ourselves and listen to our inner guidance instead of listening to the outside noise and to take our own values into consideration instead of searching for outside validation and reassurance.
5. The injustice emotional wound
The injustice emotional wound stems from an injustice done into you in your childhood years. Something that you felt was not fair, and should have not been done to you. The injustice wound can leave a very deep scar in you and it can leave you feeling hopeless, angry, powerless.
You will see no solution and you feel that injustice that has been done into you can’t be repaired. Injustice is very painful as well because you feel that you can not change what has been done to you and that you have no power over what happened to you.
How do you heal your injustice wound? You express all emotions that come from that injustice wound and you transform your limited beliefs linked to that wound. You start making yourself justice on the things you can control and let go of the things you can not control.
Gift of the injustice wound: The best thing that can happen from the injustice wound is that we realize that we do have power in our life over other things. Were in your life you are not using your full power to get ahead in your life and get your dreams and objectives come true by applying your potential to make them true? Ask yourself: where am I betraying myself by putting my dreams and goals aside and by not fully investing myself in making them come true? Where am I betraying myself and not listening to my intuition? Where am I betraying myself by not affirming my needs and taking my rightful place and for standing for what I believe in? Where am I betraying myself by giving my time and energy to people that use me and occupations that don’t make me go forward in life?
On the spiritual side of things, the injustice emotional wound teaches us to stop sabotaging ourselves out of creating our best life. It teaches us to make ourselves justice by doing whatever necessary and fully applying ourselves and being consistent in making our dreams, objectives and dreams come true. It teaches us the importance of creating our best life by prioritizing objectives instead of giving away our time and energy to people and things that don’t deserve our valuable time and energy. It teaches us to consecrate ourselves fully to our dreams even if it means that we have to sacrifice, be consistent and focused. While we do not have control over everything in our lives and we might feel powerless, we do have control over some of it and this is where we can be powerful. Also, remember that nothing happens against you, everything happens for you, therefore, let life give you that necessary push towards the right direction by derailing you from the wrong path. Sometimes, injustice is a blessing in disguise!
If you are serious about emotional trauma, I have a video that gives you the 3 tools to heal trauma for good: https://youtu.be/8_QBeWpyqoU
Counselling therapist, spiritual guide and creator of the Transformation 360 method
