Do you have that sinking and gut-wrenching feeling every once in a while?
One of the reasons can be not knowing how to heal emotional pain and accumulating unresolved emotional pain for a long time.
Emotional pain can be described as heartache due to unfortunate and painful events. It can also surface due to depression, anxiety, and stress. There are numerous reasons one feels emotional pain, but the important thing is how one tackles it. Emotional pain, when left unchecked, can worsen with time; therefore, proper strategies should be constructed for dealing with this pain.
By the end of this article, you will get to know healthy ways that can help you deal with emotional pain.
Signs of emotional pain
Stress is nowadays a common factor in everyone’s life. This affects us in various ways, including physical injury, emotional pain, damage, or loss of something. Emotional distress may be caused due to some non-physical source or due to the actions of other people.
A lot of people go through emotional distress but do not know how to heal emotional pain. There are even people who are not even aware of the signs of emotional pain. These symptoms may vary from person to person and may last for weeks, months, and sometimes even years. The common signs are:
- changes in your appetite,
- sleeping for hours,
- feeling drowsy,
- having low energy,
- thoughts of self-harming,
- constant body aches for no reason,
- feeling hopeless,
- consumption of alcohol, etc.
If you see any such signs, you should know how to help someone heal from emotional pain.
Effects of Emotional pain
Emotional pain can also cause physical pain and may even worsen it. Though both pains are different, research says they share some neurological similarities. Some common effects include the following-
- severe headaches,
- muscular cramps and pain,
- pain in the neck, arms, and legs,
- rise in blood pressure,
- increase heart rate, etc.
Why should you deal with emotional pain?
Dealing with emotional pain is hard but not knowing how to heal the emotional pain is harder. One should accept the emotional pain from some past grief or loss and learn how to deal with it. If something happened a few years back and you still do not know how to heal emotional pain from the past, then within no time, you might be in the worst situation. The best way to get rid of emotional pain is to treat it healthily.
One should always express feelings and emotions in a healthy way. Letting go of the emotional pain and negative feelings that hinder the way of moving on in life is the most valuable thing one can achieve. Emotional pain can cause lots of circumstances that can hamper not only our mental state but our physical state as well. Many people can’t accept the fact that they are facing emotional pain, and due to this, they get stuck in a vicious cycle of negative thoughts, which makes them more unstable. Because of this, they will always prefer the negative coping mechanism to calm themselves down for a temporary period. This helps them to numb their feelings, but they do not get the point that this temporary happiness may lead to permanent disaster in their life.
People prefer consuming alcohol to finding a healthy support system. This is due to unconsciousness and is not helpful at all. Everyone should know ways to heal themselves from emotional distress because this is one of the common things most people go through in their daily lives.
13 Ways How To Heal Yourself From Emotional Pain
Keeping emotions under check is very important for all of us, and dealing with emotional pain is one of the hundred steps you need to take to achieve better emotional health; here, we have listed the best ways to recover from emotional pain.
1. Find the source
The first and foremost point to remember to learn how to heal yourself from emotional pain is to identify the cause. If you observe that you are in emotional distress, you first need to identify the source and then work on it.
Ask yourself about the incident that sent you on this downward spiral and how long you have been suffering from it. It might be due to unfortunate incidents or toxic people in your life. It surely will take some time to analyze the cause, but once you do, you can start working on it and have a clear-cut goal ahead of you.
2. Distance yourself
Once you understand the stimuli causing you to feel all the emotional pain, the next thing you need to do is, detach yourself or distance yourself from the trigger. It might be a person or any situation.
Create a distance between yourself and the stimulus which might be causing you pain. Making physical distance from the trigger can help you relax your body and calm your mind.
3. Start journaling!
One of the best answers for how to heal yourself from emotional pain is writing. Keeping a journal and venting out everything through your words on the pages of your journal helps you figure out your emotions and heal yourself internally.
Maintaining a journal helps ease your emotional pain as it clears your head and shifts your focus to happier aspects. Describing your emotions enables you to be in touch with yourself and your feelings. Being in touch with your emotions can help you control your emotions better.
4. Stop shutting yourself out!
A lot of people don’t accept their emotions intentionally and suppress them for an extended period of time. Momentarily you might feel as if you are happy, but in the long run, it might derange your mental health and even cause severe anxiety, depression, and other mental health illness.
The more you represent your feelings, the more out of control you will feel. It might seem difficult to face your emotions head-on, but it is worth it! A great way to stop shutting out is to talk to a loved person who might understand your feelings.
5. Accept The Harsh Truths
Acceptance is difficult for everyone, but facing your truths, no matter how bitter they are, helps you realize your situation and make peace of mind with it. Suppose you are in a toxic relationship where you might be feeling gaslighted or emotionally manipulated to feel more pain. In that case, you need to look at the facts, identify them, and emotionally detach yourself from such a situation and person.
Acceptance helps you look at the real world. It is one of the toughest ways how to recover from emotional pain. Take some time out for yourself from your schedule and then think things through and determine what you need to accept so that you can move on with life.
6. Let things go
Life isn’t fair, and no doubt it has brought too many hardships that might have caused you immense emotional pain, but letting it go and not holding on to the negative is one of the answers for how to heal yourself from emotional pain.
Refuse to be a victim, don’t wait for your negative memories to go away; practice various mental health activities that might help you be more positive. Make room in your mind for happier memories through activities like guided meditation.
7. Stop ruminating
To truly understand how to recover from emotional pain is to stop ruminating about the mishaps. Don’t feel immense stress from ruminating about your past and making yourself a victim. Going over and over again in your mind can never solve your problem. What has happened has already been done and cannot be undone.
Repeating negative events in your head hampers your mental health and can cause more pain. Letting go of such thoughts from your head give you space for more positive thoughts and events.
8. Practice self-compassion
One of the most crucial things to learn is self-compassion. In this world full of chaos, we stop taking care of ourselves. We should never forget that we must treat ourselves the way we treat others. Often we beat ourselves over small things in life which might cause emotional pain in us.
9. Take time to heal
In this fast-paced world, take a break and take time for yourself where you can focus on your healing process through various self-care activities. Just like physical pain, emotional pain needs time to recover fully. As we say, time heals everything. It might take you some time to feel better, but when you stick to the process, you can see the results yourself.
Take a break from the world, work on yourself, and treat yourself; it can help you with your process.
10. Cry it out
It is not always compulsory to be tough and face the situation with a straight face; sometimes, we all need a good cry. It is okay if you cry; crying is not a sign of weakness or vulnerability; it shows how in touch you are with your emotions.
As per Medical News Today, there are many health benefits of crying. Not just your physical health, crying helps you feel at peace and even releases mental tension, thereby uplifting your mood. Don’t hold back your tears; cry your heart out if you feel like crying. A good cry can make us feel good!
11. Try therapy techniques
There are numerous therapy techniques used by mental health therapists, and two of the most common and effective methods are Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT).
CBT is considered one of the best methods to learn how to heal yourself from emotional pain by working on the thought process to create a healthier and positive way of thinking.
12. Start laughing more
For a change of pace in your life, start laughing more!
Laughing doesn’t mean you are disregarding your pain, but it is a medication for your soul to learn how to be happier. When you start laughing more, you unconsciously begin practicing optimism.
Humor and laughter also have therapeutic applications for people suffering from stress and anxiety. The three humor interventions, i.e., emotional, cognitive, and social, helps reduce emotional pain.
13. Look for professional help
If you have been suffering from emotional pain for a long time and no matter how hard you try, you don’t seem to be recovering, then go for therapy. Talking to a professional to learn how to recover from emotional pain is always helpful. Going to therapy also increases mental health awareness in you.
Finding the right mental health therapist is quite challenging, so here we give you the top 5 easy-to-use and affordable sites for online therapy for mental health issues.
CONCLUSION
The above-mentioned strategies for how to heal emotional pain can help you with the process of healing yourself only if you work on it. Self-healing is a long process, and the critical essence of healing is patience.
Working on your mental health also helps you to heal yourself emotionally. Here are some short-term mental health goals that can help you bring the desired change in your life.
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