Note: Hello, I’m back after taking a hiatus for a couple of months while I moved apartments. I found it to be harder than I anticipated, and needed to narrow the focus of how I spent my energies in order to take care of myself so I wouldn’t fall into a Shingles episode again. When we live with chronic illnesses or have compromised immune systems, we need to make choices that protect our physical and mental health. I did get burned out from the move and still tire more easily, but I’m on the mend and feeling my mental bandwidth returning. I learned that when I’m going through some difficult times, or even going through a positive change that is physically difficult, that I need to keep a gentle finger on the pulse of what I’m actually capable of doing, not what I think I could do. These past couple of months entailed focusing on my move, so I had to suspend writing, reading and commenting on other writer’s posts, and temporarily not go to my language classes. There is no guilt in my mind for not being able to keep all the plates spinning, just a gentle acceptance and knowledge that I’m doing all that I can at a given time. Sometimes nurturing ourselves is the best work we can do!

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Healing my heart and psyche was never about achieving perfection, just wholeness. Somehow the notion had crept in that if a person said they were working on personal development and healing, that it meant a person “succeeded” if they attained a place of “all-knowing” and “perfection”, but if they didn’t achieve those things then their journey was deemed a “failure”.

I just want to tell you that narrative is WRONG and it is impossible for any of us to attain those statuses, in spite of the people claiming to have done so.

We’re ALL a constant work in progress, for those of us who are working on growing and changing.

Others may choose to hold onto old beliefs even if they are very painful for them, because after all, change is a scary thing, and they may not have hit that inflection point yet in their life where they are faced with needing to heal and change.

Healing allows us to handle joy without feeling impending dread and to allow ourselves to develop happiness without feeling guilty or fearful.

The negative feelings that may accompany joy an happiness come from our own survival mechanism from having navigated repeated or long-term traumas. Since we survived so many abusive episodes, we came to expect them as part of our lives. If we did feel joy or start to feel happy, and the cycle of abuse would kick in again, we came to feel that allowing ourselves to feel good always came with a price.

We had internalized all the pain of the abuse, so seeing that joy and happiness wasn’t actually tied into the abuse cycle and that the abuse wasn’t a punishment for feeling good, well, that was a foreign concept for us.

We had been trained into accepting the cycles of abuse as a sort of punishment the universe and God had in store for us because there was something wrong with us and we were unworthy and undeserving of feeling good. We even may have been told we were being prideful if we experienced joy. We strived to become perfect in order to keep the destructive hammer of abuse away from ourselves, because we came to believe the abuser when they claimed we had triggered them into another round of abuse, not realizing that the responsibility lay at the feet of the abuser for how they treated others.

Healing also includes the component of working on changing our lives so that we are no longer in abusive situations, otherwise all we’re doing is surviving. Surviving is good if we really can’t change or lives to remove our abusers, but there’s more in store when we make those big, very scary changes.

Phoebe writes in “The Gift of Imperfection: How Flaws Make Us Whole“:

True healing begins not with relentless self-improvement, but with the radical act of acceptance. With the quiet, courageous decision to stop viewing ourselves as problems to be solved.

Let us no longer postpone our joy, awaiting some distant version of “perfection.”
Let us cease diminishing ourselves to fit into illusions that never honored our complexity.
Let us instead revere the richness of our lived experience—the stumbles, the scars, the softness we’ve tried so long to hide.

Perhaps it was never about erasing the imperfections.
Perhaps it was always about recognizing them as part of the sacred design.
Because maybe, just maybe, we are not meant to be perfect.
We are meant to be real.
We are meant to be whole.

Phoebe writes in “The Gift of Imperfection: How Flaws Make Us Whole“

No matter where we are on our healing path, we never have all the answers, we just keep striving to navigate through life the best we can with the tools we develop and keep developing.

Personal development for me entails developing better tools to deal with life, not cracking the code to live a Utopic life! After all, there’s no such thing as a perfect Utopia that works well for everyone, and doesn’t entail having to give up parts of ourselves.

If you’re now just starting to look at the big picture of healing from your past traumas and are feeling a little overwhelmed at all there is to do, know that a very slow pace is better than a rushed or hurried one, and that seeming baby steps do accumulate and are bigger than you realize!

This isn’t about being woke or unwoke. It is simply about healing your broken heart, changing your life for the better, however that look to you.

You are worthy! You deserve to feel joy without fear and to develop happiness without guilt!

Here’s some more reading to help you:

• Brain Rewiring
• Peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, rather than as you think it should be.
• Habit Power: We are what we repeat
• Challenge: When a negative thought enters your mind, think three positive ones. Train yourself to flip the script!
• As you think so shall you be!
• Even after a setback or negative experience, we can create a “reset” button in our minds!
• Turning Poison into Medicine
• Your triggers are your teachers
• Change the tapes!
• Baby steps serve a purpose to allow us to keep moving forward!
• Baby steps start the whole change happening!
• Teach ourselves to feel positive in order to see more positive things in our lives!!
• It’s never too late to teach ourselves!
• Don’t speak negatively about yourself!!
• Stop hating yourself for everything you aren’t. Start loving yourself for everything you are.

 ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

Blessings!
Thank you for liking, sharing this post and for following me!
Tamara

I hope you’ll poke around my Archived Posts Main page divided up into 3 sub-pages: Mental Health and Rewiring the Brain || Healing and Developing Ourselves || Positive thoughts and Affirmations to find a wonderful trove of supportive and encouraging posts!
https://tamarakulish.com/

My books: Now available through Walmart.com!

Developing Happiness When You Can’t Find It and How to Heal Your Life on a Deep Heart Level are available in paperback and Kindle. Audiobooks are available for the busy person!

Guided Journals help you work on a particular issue by answering questions to help see patterns and to find solutions:

Removing Inner Blocks ||  Anger Journal || Guided Anxiety Journal  ||  Joy & Mindfulness Journal   ||  My Boundaries Journal  || My Inner Thoughts Journal   

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