Have you ever needed stitches for a bad cut, or a cast to set a broken bone? If so, you understand what it means to create the conditions for healing.
Let me elaborate. Your body is a self-regulating, self-healing organism. For example, your bodily temperature automatically self-regulates depending on the exterior OR interior environment. If you get sick, you develop a fever as your body combats the infection. If you take a hot yoga class, your body sweats profusely to cool down. If you go outside during winter without a coat, you shiver to warm up. Maintaining your optimal temperature is an automatic bodily function that serves your highest good.
Your body also knows how to spontaneously heal itself physically when the conditions for healing are present. When you break a bone, for example, you go to a doctor who sets the broken limb with a cast. The cast creates the conditions for the bone to heal; the doctor doesn’t heal your broken bone, your body does! Your broken bone self-heals once you’ve created the conditions for healing to occur.
Amazingly, your body not only knows how to self-regulate your physical systems and self-heal physical wounds, it also has the capacity to regulate your emotional system and heal psychological wounds, when the conditions for emotional regulation and psychological healing are present.
Like everyone, you are unconsciously operating on automatic pilot when it comes to your emotional and psychological systems, just like you rely on the automaticity of your physical systems.
As part of normal development, we all use intelligent, albeit unconscious, coping mechanisms to manage the emotional and psychological complexities of our families and culture. Your emotional and psychological coping systems develop in childhood and operate automatically throughout life in an effort to keep you regulated and highly functional. Some common coping strategies include perfectionism, people-pleasing, overeating and the use of OCD-like control.
While your coping strategies are enormously helpful to keep you emotionally and psychologically safe during your upbringing, they are often outdated by adulthood. Furthermore, your coping systems usually involve various ways of unconsciously cutting yourself off from your authenticity, or prioritizing others’ needs over your own, which over time results in a lot of inner conflict and strife.
By the time you reach adulthood, you’re often very well versed in a lot of self-contempt, self-blame and self-doubt as a result of relying on your unconscious coping mechanisms. These negative ways of relating to yourself work to keep you small and safe within the confines of the coping systems you developed as a child. Beating yourself up feels normal when life or relationships get hard, and you end up struggling with painful feelings of guilt, shame and resentment.
Tragically, many people begin therapy feeling ashamed and defeated that they haven’t “figured out” how to improve their mood, their relationships or their lives. Despite working so hard for so long to feel better, they’ve ended up sinking even further into the quicksand of their difficulties.
As Einstein noted, you cannot solve a problem using the same mind that created it. People who struggle with psychological or emotional problems want to feel better but are often unwittingly creating conditions within themselves or in their lives that prevent the very growth and healing they seek.
Enter: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
The first step in the ACT approach is learning to shift the way we relate to ourselves and our difficulties.
When you resist, judge, control or dismiss your unwanted thoughts, feelings and experiences, you remain locked in a destructive pattern that works against you. By learning to see, accept and care about your own suffering, on the other hand, you develop a compassionate stance that gives rise to your body’s innate capacity to heal old emotional and psychological wounds. It takes courage to create the conditions for healing, but therapy can help.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) provides specific processes and skills that you can learn and practice to create the conditions for healing both emotionally and psychologically.
With Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, you will:
- Become curious about your suffering, rather than blame yourself or others for it.
- Open up and learn to regulate your uncomfortable emotions, rather than beat yourself up for feeling bad.
- Learn to care about your own pain, rather than push it away.
- Recognize your unhelpful thought patterns and choose not to get caught up in them.
- Forgive yourself for mistakes you’ve made, rather than judge yourself for your imperfections.
- Choose to take responsibility for your behavior by acting in accordance with your values, rather than reactively acting out in self-sabotaging ways.
- Aim to stay present in your life and connected with yourself, no matter what.
Using ACT, I’ve personally learned to change my relationship to myself and have developed the capacity to hold space for my clients as they find the courage to create the conditions for healing in their own lives.
But don’t take my word for it. Find out for yourself how ACT can help you create the conditions for healing in your life. Be courageous. Reach out to us today and let’s get started.