The concept of inner healing may be foreign to you. It certainly was for me until about a year ago. I’d heard the term, but beyond that didn’t really have a good understanding. If the concept of inner healing is the same for you, then you may be even less aware of how it affects our health. So today I am going to:
- What inner healing is.
- Health impacts of unhealed past trauma and hurts.
- How self-healing can improve your overall health.
Up until recently my health journey has consisted primarily of physical health and mindset and mental health related practices. While I’ve also been working on my spiritual health over the years, I hadn’t ever approached inner healing, at least not in the way I’ve come to learn about it in the past year. So, when I talk about health, or whole health, I’m referring to your entire being: your mind, physical body, and your soul. We are not just our physical body; our mind and our soul are also components of our being and they require just as much care and attention as the physical body. These are the three pillars, if you will, of my work around whole health. Before getting into how inner healing is connected to our health, I want to lay a bit of a foundation.
So, whole health and healthy habits fall into the same three pillars I mentioned above. First, the soul/spirit; we are an energy body, we are a light body inside of a physical body. The soul or spirit part of us is also where things like forgiveness, emotions, feelings, memories, our conscious and subconscious minds, and our conscience reside. Second is the mental part of us; our minds. This is where our attitudes, beliefs, thoughts, inner dialogue/how we speak to ourselves occurs. Third, of course is the physical body and we take care of that through how we eat, hydration, and exercise.
In my podcast and in this blog, I talk a lot about ways we can improve our health. This includes practices around improving our mindset, like how we talk to ourselves and being aware of our thoughts and inner dialogue. Thoughts become our reality. Your subconscious mind just knows what it’s receiving in the form of your thoughts and in the things you say verbally. It doesn’t know the difference between a good thought or a bad thought; there’s no discernment in the subconscious mind. So, it takes the thoughts that you’re giving it most of the time as orders, and it’s going to go try to make them true. So this will come through your behavior, it’s going to come through your day-to-day, through your mood, your perception, and you don’t realize it’s happening.
Next is the physical health of course and you can improve health through exercise, properly fueling your body, and hydrating with water. Last is your spiritual health and you take care of this through things like meditation, prayer, connecting to God, doing the self-healing work, and energy healing. So, now that we have this basic foundation of the core components of what I think of as whole health, let’s get into how health and inner healing are connected.
- What is inner healing?
So what is inner healing? What do I mean when I say that? It is essentially the process of healing past trauma, hurts, and other events in your past that you were not equipped to process emotionally when they occurred. They leave an imprint that your brain and ego don’t really know how to handle, which later turn into various behaviors, conditions, etc. that serve to protect you.
Trauma includes a range of things along a spectrum of severity. Now, I know for me when I first started learning about this and I heard the word “trauma,” I thought Oh, well I don’t have that because in my mind it was limited to extremely violent experiences, physical abuse between parents, witnessing violence, being abused, etc. However, it is not limited to these extremes. That is not to dismiss these types of events and traumas, but I want to clarify, because I learned that I had actually experienced trauma and have trauma to heal and things that I had not processed, that I was not equipped to deal with at the time that they occurred.
So, trauma also includes the less severe experiences, which can be things that had a deep emotional impact on you. This can be betrayal, where someone you’re supposed to be able to trust betrays you and that really hurt you and left a significant mark on you. Abandonment is another one, like if one of your parents left or your parents got divorced and you didn’t see one of them as often or something like that or you could have just felt abandoned. Feeling unloved maybe not getting what you needed emotionally as a child. It is things that left an imprint on you, so it’s just becoming more aware of that so these experiences or events that you went through that were just beyond what you could process at the time that they occurred and they involved emotions that you just didn’t have the bandwidth or capacity to deal with or understand.
That brings me to adverse childhood experiences or ACEs. There are lots of great free resources on Adverse Childhood Experiences. You can search online and find a number of free quizzes that you can take to get your own ACE score. It’s really helpful because it brings awareness to whether you may have trauma or past hurts that you maybe need to heal and aren’t aware of and it also gives you an idea of maybe the level that you’ve experienced and potentially want to health.
So I have taken the ACE quiz myself and I have a score of 6, which is sort of in the upper middle range of score. 0-3 is generally considered low to moderate anything above 6 is considered a high ACE score. Some of the websites will also show you statistics for your score relative to others as well as what risk level may be for certain health conditions.
So when you look at these comparisons for the scores and the risk of health conditions, right away it is clear that the higher your ACE score, the greater your risk of certain health conditions, such as mental health conditions and chronic diseases, like heart disease. It will also show you the difference in impact based on the score range you fall in; so a zero to three you have some risk for all these things, but when you get to the middle the 4-6 range, it’s more than doubled on all of them, and then when you get over a score of 6 the risk triples or doubles, and in some cases case it is a four-fold increase of risk . So, it’s very clear that there is an impact and a clear connection to your past traumas and hurts and your health. - Health impacts of unhealed trauma and past hurts.
OK, so what are some health impacts of unhealed trauma? How does this happen? So, when the trauma occurs there’s a physiological effect and a psychological effect. Physiological effects are like your heart races, your blood pressure goes up, sweating, feeling hot, maybe shaking. Your body just kind of going all kinds of crazy things in response to what you’re experiencing. Then there are psychological effects like fear, anxiety, nervousness; you might cry it might bring up sorrow. These same things can also happen when we experience things that remind our brain or subconscious of that traumatic, hurtful, or stressful event. It creates that same response in us later. So this can come in emotional triggers where you’re in a situation, you’re experiencing something and you get these same exact responses and you may be having intense reaction to something that may not even phase the person next to you right but you’re having all these same experiences.
So, how do we carry this through our life? Well, we do all kinds of things. First, we make associations in the mind with the traumatic events; we draw connections to it to help us avoid similar situations later. We develop defense mechanisms on the subconscious level; this can be things like when you hear people say he’s very guarded that’s an example of a defense mechanism, where we put a wall up to protect ourselves from emotionally. It can also be physical things, like keeping weight on or your body just puts weight on you and you can’t seem to get rid of it and that can also be a form of protection.
We also make adaptations or compensations, so this is things like perfectionism and hyper independence. I have experienced both myself and continue to work through these. I was bullied quite a bit when I was young, over several years. It was a daily thing, and it was verbal and physical from many different angles; pretty much every group of kids that there was in my schools. It had a very significant impact on me and so as I got older, I developed perfectionism, In my mind, subconsciously it was like if I was perfect if I never made a mistake if I looked as perfect as I could if I kept my weight down, if I was dressed just right, or whatever there was no room for anyone to pick me apart, there was no room for anyone to criticize me or scream at me or yell at me.
Hyper-independence is another one. I’ve had a number of relationships in my life where I’ve been either abandoned or I’ve been cheated on I’ve been lied to I’ve been betrayed I’ve been let down and these were all close relationships very close relationships that I felt deeply connected to the person, some were family members and over time it turned into hyper independence where it was like I’m not going to ask for help. I’m not going to let anyone help me. I don’t need anyone or anything so that’s those are a couple of examples of adaptations or compensations that we can make.
Adopting limiting beliefs is another it’s more of a byproduct that happens from these experiences. A little bit later I’ll get into what limiting beliefs look like so I won’t go into it too much here and then other thing we do is we learn to avoid right; we learn to avoid certain situations certain emotions. We suppress emotions, we actively suppress emotions this is where you can start to see things like behavioral health conditions – mental health conditions or behaviors that can be harmful like cutting is one example; it can be substance use disorders because you want to numb out the feelings you don’t want to feel. We can also develop things like alexithymia where we just don’t know how we feel and we don’t feel; we’re so out of touch with our feelings because we suppress them so much that we aren’t in touch with how we feel at all. I have had that myself as well.
Then of course emotional triggers, which I go in depth about in my most recent podcast episode if you want to check that out it’s called Seven Steps for Healing Emotional Triggers. These are basically an emotional reaction to something that happens or something someone says or does that’s just automatic it just happens it’s automatic and it’s it stems from a past trauma or hurt but, again, in the moment you’re not aware of that; it’s subconscious.
We don’t like feeling these negative or bad feelings like anger, fear, sorrow, and so on, so we suppress them. Sometimes we numb them with drugs or alcohol. We do things to distract ourselves from them. We just do whatever we can to avoid feeling them or processing them, so they end up getting stored in our bodies; because, at the end of the day, these feelings are energy. When we suppress them, they end up in different parts of our bodies, depending on the emotion involved. I go quite a bit in depth about this in http://Energy Block and How they Keep you from What you Desire. I also include a visual on my blog post by the same title that breaks down the parts of the body and associated health conditions if you want to check that out. - How self-healing can improve your health.
By doing some inner work and self-healing you can clear these feelings and the associated energy of them stored in your body, reducing your risk for some of the health conditions tied to these suppressed emotions. You can also reduce and mitigate risk moving forward by becoming more aware of your feelings, allowing yourself to feel them, and processing and releasing them, so you don’t store them in the body. The more you do the inner healing work, the more attuned to your emotions you will become and the better you will get at releasing them instead of holding onto them.
There are a number of things you can do to heal your past traumas and hurts, or just improve your awareness and processing of your feelings. Journaling is one, and there are various resources you can find to help with prompts to work through for this purpose. Identifying and healing emotional triggers is another great practice. I covered this in depth in Seven Steps for Healing Emotional Triggers. I also have a journal available on Amazon called Growth & Healing Journal that is a great tool for this. Practicing self-care, like practices around mindset, nutrition, and exercise are, of course great ways to reduce risks for health conditions. Last, energy healing is another great tool that can help with clearing the energetic imprint of these past traumas and hurts and it can also help you release these faster and without having to sort of relive the events over and over again.
I hope this has been helpful and increased your understanding of the connection between health and inner healing. Please share your thoughts in the comments. If you find this helpful and want to continue the pursuit of faith, fitness, and joy with me, please like and subscribe. You can also find Faith Fitness Joy on Facebook and Instagram or check out the podcast at https://faithfitnessjoy.podbean.com. Thanks for stopping by and I hope to see you in the comments and on the socials!