Things you need to stop to start healing: Therapist shares tips

In life, often we come across a phase of ourselves, when we feel the surge of changes happening – it comes with associations to different things, the urge to break through boredom of doing same things repeatedly, and mainly, the strive to change to become better versions of ourselves. Most of us carry bits and pieces of trauma that we have been subjected to in various stages of life. And in life, we need to learn to get over and heal from the trauma that we carry. To start the process of healing, there are two things we need to do – starting new things and stopping old things. Addressing this, Psychotherapist Emily H Sanders wrote, “You do need to find some compassion for yourself and spend some time figuring out why you’ve developed those coping behaviors. At what point were they helpful, protective behaviors, and in what ways are they hurting you now? It’s important to also take some responsibility for your choices too; if you view yourself with a victim lens, you’ll stay stuck.”

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Emile further noted down a few things that we need to stop doing to start healing:

Holding on: Sometimes we hold on to people, relationships, memories and things that mentally and emotionally drain us. We need to let them go.

Figuring out alone: No matter how strong we are, we still need help sometimes. Sometimes the strongest thing to do is to ask for help. It is okay to take help to figure out things.

Working hard to understand people: We often invest mentally and emotionally in people who do not do the same for us. This further creates a sense of insecurity and anxiety in us.

Judging ourselves: No matter whichever way we feel, it should be validated by us. We should stop judging our own emotions.

Being vague: Our boundaries and limitations should be of utmost importance to us. We should know how to respect them.

Avoid hard conversations: Sometimes all it takes to address the most difficult situations is through a conversation.

Pretending: Acting that we are fine when we are not, needs to be stopped.