Your hidden wounds are the emotional wounds that are contributing to you experiencing challenges with your mental health and emotional wellbeing. These wounds will most likely be unresolved traumas.
You know you have them because you’re suffering from the signs of unresolved trauma; anxiety, stress, poor sleep, prone to fear, self-sabotaging patterns etc. But to call out these wounds or traumas by name could very well be tricky.
They’re lurking beneath the surface messing things up, but you can’t see them, or figure out what they are or where they’ve come from. This is what makes these hidden wounds much harder to heal.
We’re always reading about how most of our emotional ills come from unresolved traumas, but if you can’t think of any notable traumas you’ve had in your life then this can make them very hard to resolve. And so those unresolved traumas stay just as they are: unresolved!
So how do we get past this?
How can we heal our unresolved traumas
when we don’t know what they are?
A good place to start is where you’re at.
Start by becoming aware
Start becoming aware of what the challenges are you’re facing in your life.
Here are some good questions to get you started;
- What stresses you out?
- Are there any situations that you struggle with?
- What behaviour in others really annoys you?
- Where do you most often self-sabotage in your life?
- What are the things that you fear on a day-to-day basis?
- Are there things that always raise your anxiety levels? What are they?
- Are there goals in your life that continue to elude you?
Go through these questions and make copious notes. Don’t be fooled by the apparent ease of this exercise – it could take time! If you’re not used to doing this kind of self-reflection, then you might need some time to give this the thought and attention it deserves. Putting in the time at this stage is worth it, believe me.
It’s a great exercise in raising your self-awareness.
Next, look for the themes
Once you’ve gone through these questions, review what you’ve written and take a step back. See if you can spot any themes emerging.
Possible themes could include things like;
- not putting yourself or your needs first
- stopping when you reach the point of having enough… instead of carrying on until you have what you desire
- not speaking up for fear of judgement or because you’re worried about what others think
- need to plan to the nth degree which stops you from moving forward on things that can’t be planned in that way
These are just examples of patterns that could be playing out in a number of different situations or parts of your life.
So you might not be speaking up for yourself at work as well as in your relationships. And perhaps you’re not doing it with health care providers too.
Or, you always tend to have just enough in your life but can’t seem to break through that barrier… just enough money, your car is just about enough to get around etc. You struggle to get to a point of having exactly what you desire, or having too much or more than you need.
Once you’ve identified these themes or patterns you can start to pin point certain key themes. It may be that the ‘just enough’ pattern is showing up everywhere for you. Or that the fear of judgement one is.
If a pattern or theme is showing up in lots of places then we can safely assume that’s a key wound for you.
This is great progress. Now you can start to heal it.
What does healing a wound look like, practically?
I really want to help you to heal, and for me that’s best done when the rubber hits the road. Talking about your wounds and how you’re suffering from them will not heal you. So I will talk this through using an example to show you how this looks practically.
Let’s say that one of your biggest things is worrying about what other people think. This could be also be referred to as a judgement wound.
The judgement wound could show up as follows;
- Worried what other people think
- You judge yourself harshly
- You don’t speak up for fear of how you will be judged
- You don’t put yourself out there in any significant way for fear of judgment
- You stop yourself from receiving more or having too much because you might be judged for being greedy or selfish for example
- You struggle with criticism
- You hide your true self – for fear of judgement – so you put on a false persona. Deep down you feel that the real you is not worthy.
There are many other ways that this could be showing up for you, and this is for you to figure out.
But already with this list, you can now begin to heal this wound using what you know.
Now it’s time to heal!
If you were to use Head Trash Clearance to start this healing process then these are the clearances that you could do;
- judgement
- criticism
- being honest
- having integrity
- lying or being deceptive
- being a fake
- letting people down
- not being worthy
- not being deserving
- speaking up
- having too much
I’ve used clearances that relate to how this wound shows up for you and I hope that you can see how the clearances relate to the wound.
Deep wounds have many facets and various layers. The aspects I’ve mentioned above are how it shows up, but there is a root that is creating all this within you. To heal it fully, you need to get to the root.
It can be useful to think of our emotional wounds like trees. The facets of the wound are like the branches. These might be the fears and limiting beliefs that have sprouted as a result of this wound. But as with a tree, cutting the branches will only get you so far.
Cutting the branches will get rid most of the shadows
and let in more light, but the branches could grow back.
If you want to eliminate your shadows for good,
you need to pull up the roots.
In the case of an emotional wound, the roots are usually a trauma of some kind. Trauma feeds fear and anxiety so as far as wounds go, all roads lead to trauma.
How to identify the trauma behind a wound
The good news is that you don’t really need to.
It could be worth spending some time meditating on it and see if you can recall any particular events that may have lead to the wound. But this isn’t entirely necessary. At least with the way that I approach healing our hidden wounds.
By identifying themes, we can heal these root events without necessarily knowing what they are. This is how I approach healing our unresolved traumas.
In taking this approach, I’ve found that we are able to uncover many of the hidden aspects to our wounds. Aspects and memories that we have probably forgotten about, but that surface once we go through the healing. This can help to explain why we’ve been affected so much by this theme in our lives and can help us to find closure, which can be an important part of the healing. But in my experience, it’s not a necessary aspect. We can heal from these wounds without necessarily knowing where the wound came from.
Start healing your hidden wounds
If you’d like to start healing your hidden wounds, it makes a lot of sense to start with the universal emotional wounds. These are sometimes referred to as childhood wounds because we will have picked these up during our childhood. I’ve created Wound Healing Activations for many of these wounds. These activation packs have been created to help you to unpack these wounds and explore how they’re showing up for you, and then heal the,. You can find the full range of wound healing activations here.
For members of my membership The Clearance Club, I include Trauma Healing audio tracks for each of these emotional wounds so that my members can heal these wounds at a much deeper level.
The Clearance Club is for those who want to upgrade their mental health and emotional wellbeing. It provides you with a vault of head trash clearance resources organised by theme so that you can heal the key themes in your life. You can find out more about the Clearance Club here.
The Clearance Club includes healing audio tracks for a multitude of core emotional wounds including abandonment, rejection, guilt, humiliation, betrayal and neglect among others.
If you want to find out more about these wounds, please check out these blog posts;
The Humiliation Wound
The Injustice Wound
The Trust Wound
The Scarcity Wound
The Betrayal Wound
The Loss Wound
The Neglect Wound
The Guilt Wound
The Abandonment Wound
The Rejection Wound
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