Isn’t it true that your emotions really take a knock when your heart is aching, especially when healing from an emotionally abusive relationship? Sometimes it feels like the day of healing is a million miles away. The difficult experiences you encountered during your time with an abusive manipulator can take a while to be purged from your system.
It’s definitely healthy to experience a range of emotions. However, it’s unwise to have the negative ones consume your existence. You’re better off working towards healing the hurt. That way, you can start to experience joy and happiness again.
Emotional healing is possible if you work at repairing the source of the hurt. As you’ll see, that may mean making some tough decisions:
1 – Remove negative influences from your life. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll realize something important. Some of the negative influences may very well be the people closest to you! It’s going to be a challenge separating from them. But your emotional health is more important that maintaining those relationships.
- Do you still allow an abusive Ex a window through which to contact you? This is one of the most self-destructive areas of self-sabotage when healing from an abusive relationship. We often come up with all kinds of creative excuses to keep an Ex in our lives when the truth is, most of those supposed “reasons” are just ways to deny and avoid reality.
- Are any of your friends or family guilty of adding fuel to the fire? Can you identify times when they’ve encouraged you to forgive someone who offended you?
- You can very quickly identify people whose advice is riddled with negativity. Do you have energy vampires in your life? Avoid allowing the years of friendship to cloud your judgment. You can almost guarantee continued misery if you keep them in your life.
2 – Accept responsibility for your actions. It’s pretty hard to look in the mirror, right? Deep down, you know your actions resulted in the hurt you feel. But it’s difficult to accept the part you played.
- Confront your wrongdoings. Be courageous enough to accept responsibility for your actions and then set healthy boundaries for your relationships going forward.
- Inner peace can elude you if you try to cover up the role you played. Inner turmoil can feel just as unbearable as physical discomfort.
- In the same breath, be willing to forgive yourself so you can move on to better days ahead.
3 – Live according to your moral compass. You likely have a set of morals to live by. And while you know they exist, you may sometimes avoid them when making decisions. Abandoning morals is the easiest way to make missteps in life.
- Go back to your roots. Take a hard look at what really matters to you. Start to embrace those morals one by one.
- Start to repair how you approach situations. If making a decision means abandoning your moral compass, take another route. Just like any other compass, your moral compass keeps you on track. It’s the best way to avoid getting lost in the sea of emotional decision-making, especially if you’re in a relationship where you consistently compromise your personal integrity and values.
4 – Commit to daily renewal. The road to emotional healing is long and winding. It’s something that usually takes quite a bit of time to achieve. But it can be done! All you need to do is re-commit to the cause every morning when you wake up.
- Daily renewal is the best way to turn your healing into habit. When you go for days without that renewal, it’s easy to slip back into the heartache. Be fair to yourself. Remember you deserve the healing.
- At the end of each positive day, celebrate your progress. Congratulate yourself for completing one more day of healing and positive living.
Achieving emotional healing isn’t an automatic process and it won’t happen magically on its own. It takes time and a lot of attention. Now is the time to really take care of yourself. Focus on what you need and block out the noise around you. Use these tips to help you on your healing journey as you rebuild your life after narcissistic abuse.
Copyright 2017 – Kim Saeed and Let Me Reach
