6 Signs You’re Healing
How do you know if all the learning, growing, therapy, and healing work you’re doing is actually working?
When it comes to inside stuff, how do we track our progress? What are the benefits of waking up, feeling our feelings, and learning new skills for deeper, more meaningful connections with other people?
This week, I have a little checklist for you to use as a self-assessment to track your own progress.
Where do you feel like you’ve made gains? What’s your current personal growth focus?
1. You stop turning on yourself.
When things go awry, you no longer habitually blame yourself or descend into shame or defensiveness. You track your feelings, ground yourself in your underlying needs. You treat yourself with dignity and compassion. You take care of yourself with more gentleness and compassion.
2. You speak up without worrying as much.
You trust yourself to tell the truth, especially when it’s unpopular. You choose the clean, healing pain of truth-telling, instead of the lingering dirty pain of maintaining illusions and lies. Knowing that you’re eternally a work in progress, you settle into the flow of life and try things out, trusting yourself to repair rifts and restore connections when needed.
3. You become less sensitive to rejection and judgment.
You find yourself taking things less personally, realizing that other people’s behavior is an expression of their level of awareness, skills and capacity, and no longer respond to it as a report card on you. You find yourself grounded in your essential goodness and lovability, and have made peace with the fact that not everyone will like you.
4. You are not as easily triggered.
You can notice, track and work with your body when it becomes hijacked by painful memories, stored trauma, and unprocessed negative experiences that show up as repeating patterns in your life. You breathe, take time-outs, move your body, eat well, care for yourself, and reparent yourself in gentle, supportive, and kind ways. You stop feeding enemy images of others, draw on your healing communities, and bring yourself back to equilibrium.
5. You respect boundaries and set your own boundaries.
You say no when your body tightens up, and you say yes to things that energize and inspire you. You follow and trust your internal cues. You gracefully work with other people when they say no to you. You’re attuned to others’ boundaries, no longer projecting yourself onto others, nor submitting to others from a place of fear or people-pleasing. You ask for what you want, without demanding that you get your way.
6. You are no longer ashamed and prideful.
You join the human race as a full participating member, without believing that you are worse than others — or better than others. You work through and release shame, guilt, fear, and anger, using each of them as stepping stones toward deeper empathy for yourself and others.
Dr. Yvette Erasmus is a psychologist, teacher, and consultant who specializes in transformative education for human healing and growth. Synthesizing mind-body medicine, somatic experiencing, diversity and inclusiveness, nonviolent communication, and integral-relational-cultural psychology, Dr. Erasmus integrates core insights from multiple wisdom traditions and offers various programs for community learning as well as one-on-one consulting. To learn more, visit yvetteerasmus.com.
