What happens when we ignore our emotional wounds?
When we fall victim to the culture of ignoring and resenting our raw feelings, we cannot heal them. It makes sense, right? What happens even at a deeper level is that any unhealed wound influences you.
Subconsciously it affects your thoughts, feelings, and subsequently also your decisions. So, there is nowhere to hide.
You can never escape from what you fear because it’s within you.
Let’s say that you’ve been raised by a dominant parent who never seemed to appreciate you. No matter what you did, it was never good enough. This deep wound influences you into your adult life. Unconsciously, it makes you thrive to become the best at your company. You’re hard on yourself, and you don’t allow yourself to rest and relax.
As a result, you become stiff and numb your feelings by watching TV, surfing online, alcohol, or extreme sports. If you’re in a relationship, you reflect your dissatisfaction on your partner, so you argue often. I could continue and on to show you how this old wound impacts and penetrate your whole life.
I hope that by now you can see that you can never escape from yourself and your wounds. Your wounds can teach you valuable lessons if you face them. It can help you to find your self-worth and help to release the need for control.
Thus you become freer to do the things what you’ve always wanted to do – not what you thought you needed to do to win the love or your parent as in this example. Every wound you face will make you feel whole and lighter.
Why healing your emotional wounds is a must?
1. Wounds are influencing your decisions
Just as I’ve explained in the example earlier, when we carry pain within ourselves, it wants to come to the surface. When someone pushes your button, your initial response is to act and speak out of your pain.
When two adult people argue, and they act like little children – it’s their unprocessed wounds that speak through them.
2. You can never escape your wounds
The more you want to run away from uncomfortable feelings, the stronger they get. Your negative feelings want to be acknowledged and witnessed. Hence running away is like hiding from a child who wants your love and attention.
What does the child do when you run away? Starts crying. Just like your wounds get more intense, so there is nowhere to run away anymore.
3. Unprocessed feelings manifest in your life
If you’re in the center of negative attention in high school, it’ll continue in some shape or form in your adult life. Negative feelings have own vibrations which are actively attracting experiences and people into your life even if you’re unaware of them. This explains why people repeat the same problems and dramas.
4. Unhealed pain makes you fear to live
Just as a tyrant dog begins to fear people, the same happens to us. We start to be afraid of life. Instead of being courageous and experience the depths of life, we get stuck somewhere at the surface. In the known shallow waters of life where we feel safe. Thus we think that we avoid the pain.
5. Your wounds help you grow
There is also a positive side to the negative feelings. Yep! One of the reasons why unprocessed feelings want to get your attention is that they carry some teaching and lesson for you.
This lesson is usually very liberating and makes you become stronger and bring more balance to your life. Therefore there is no reason to avoid them because only be embracing your demons you become whole.