Healing Our Emotional Pain and Relationship Pain

HEALING OUR EMOTIONAL PAIN AND RELATIONSHIP PAIN

DR. BARRY HAMMER

An important key to emotional self-healing is to fully embrace our emotional pain and relationship pain with an open, nonjudgmental, nonpartisan, compassionate, warmly loving heart. That warmhearted, compassionate, loving embrace of our emotional pain releases, untwists, or dissolves it back into its underlying substratum of undivided, pure, clear, love-life energy, which is inherently, naturally wholeness, self-consistent integrated harmony, wellbeing, relaxed, serene, security, without any intrinsic negativity, inner conflict, or painful qualities.

Resisting our judgments and inner conflicts only perpetuates and intensifies them; “what we resist persists.” It is important to compassionately, courageously, accept our natural judgments, reactions, preferences, and emotional pain without being controlled by, acting upon, or exclusively identified with non-constructive or inappropriate urges. We can let be and embrace our judgments and conflicted feelings but also see beyond them to a deeper level of our being that is unconditionally relaxed, serene, intrinsically self-accepting, and naturally, compassionately nonjudgmental.

We have an innate urge to restore our natural wholeness of being by reunifying with formerly estranged, disturbed, self-conflicted, aspects of ourselves. When we stop struggling against, distancing, or being overly dominated by emotional negativity or conflicted, disturbing aspects of our energy, then our energy is thereby liberated from self-division and self-conflict, which makes our energy, feelings, and behavior less tense, less negative, and produces greater inner relaxed peace, fulfillment, and wholeness of being. That inner wholeness is also our natural inner healing, health, happiness, wholesomeness, and holiness, not an idealized perfectionistic holiness, but attunement to what is naturally sacred, precious, beautiful, truly good, and life-affirming in ourselves and others.

Distancing ourselves from uncomfortable feelings and experiences produces a disturbing sense of inner self-division between knower and known, as well as between what we are actually feeling and more “positive”, desired sensations, concepts, and experiential states that we pursue and superimpose upon the uncomfortable feelings as a means of distracting ourselves and thereby escaping from them. Reunifying our energy and thereby healing emotional pain involves fully accepting and compassionately embracing whatever we are actually experiencing, and letting go of the pursuit of idealized notions of what we “should be” experiencing, feeling, achieving, “proving” or validating about ourselves, because pursuing what we hold to be “better” rejects and distances our actual experiential reality, producing greater self-division and self-conflict, which exacerbates rather than healing emotional pain.

The natural inner wholeness that heals emotional pain involves not distancing ourselves from our actual feelings and experiential states by superimposing predetermined, presumptive interpretations upon them, but rather, being fully unified with the energy of the feelings, without speaking for the feelings, so that the feelings can speak for themselves and resolve or dissolve themselves by revealing their underlying message. That is how embracing our emotional pain and inner conflict releases it back to its original substratum as pure undivided energy, which is an intrinsic wholeness and wellbeing without any inherently negative, painful, non-constructive, psychologically unhealthy, self-conflicting tendencies.

Being unified with our feelings and experiential states does not involve identifying with them, or acting on inappropriate urges. Whatever we identify with dominates us, and sticks to us like glue, whereas we are free to release and gain healing insight into feelings with which we are not identified. Reacting for or against particular feelings is a form of identification and self-divisive partisan exclusivity, whereas simply observing our feelings without judgment and predetermined interpretations produces liberating insight.

To restore our natural wholeness of being, thereby healing emotional pain and related negativity, it is helpful to be open to the whole range of our spontaneously arising inner and outer experience, with an accepting, compassionately embracing, non-controlling, non-censoring, non-selective, non-partisan, non-judgmental, non-interfering attitude. Taking a partisan, selective, judgmental attitude toward our feelings and experiences produces self-division and self-conflict between approved and disapproved, desired and rejected feelings and experiences. That self-division and self-conflict generates and exacerbates emotional pain and psychopathology, as well as contributing to related physical and social disorders.

Beyond all divisive self-interpretations abides the deeper core level of our being, which is inherently, unconditionally, relaxed, serene, security, wholeness, wellbeing, self-accepting, as “the peace that passes understanding.” (Philippians 4:7). When we let go of all self-divisive, partisan, selective forms of self-interpretation and judgmental self-evaluation, then healing and transformational insights can come from the “still small voice” of intuition (I Kings 19:12), arising from the unifying core integrity wholeness level of our being. Emotional pain and inner conflict is healed by being aligned with an energy pulse of self-consistent wholeness and harmony when we unify with and thereby compassionately embrace our emotional pain, thereby including it in our natural integral wholeness of being, functioning as a connective, cohesive, harmonious, regenerative, energy vibration.

We must let ourselves fully experience our emotional pain, hurt, and fear without exclusively identifying with it or reacting for or against it. Siding for or against, identifying with, pursuing, rejecting, distancing, and misinterpreting our feelings and experiences produces self-division in our energy field between approved and disapproved, conditionally accepted and rejected, or “self” and “not-self”, aspects of our energy, and that self-division perpetuates emotional pain and inner conflict. However, a nonpartisan, nonjudgmental, unconditionally accepting, compassionate attitude enables our emotional pain to heal by reunifying our naturally holistic awareness and energy field, and enables us to also naturally be more compassionate to other people without letting them abuse us or inappropriately take advantage of us. Relating to ourselves in a genuine, sincere, compassionate, empathically responsive manner enables us to also relate to other people in that psychologically healthy, loving way. Conversely, being at peace with others can help us also be at peace with ourselves, by undoing a false sense of division and conflict within and between the individual and relational aspects of our energy field.

Compassion, empathy, and unselfishly generous caring for other individuals is natural because (to explain in metaphorical terminology) the individual self is like a circle or cone that converges with other selves or circles/cones at the center or heart core level of its being, while being clearly differentiated from others at the circumference or surface level of conscious awareness, as well as naturally experiencing various partial degrees of relative overlap and relative differentiation, or a dynamic relative balance between centripetal and centrifugal energies, along the radius or intermediate level of our conscious awareness. The process of healing emotional pain and restoring our natural wholeness involves a relative degree of caring connection to others as well as a relative degree of compassionate connection to the experiential truth of ourselves, because the energy of our real individuality naturally extends into the energy field of others, to a relative degree, in contrast to the ego as a false sense of totally separate identity and continuous, dualistic, narcissistic self-awareness.

Reconnecting to others and to the experiential truth of ourselves in a genuinely caring, compassionate way restores our natural wholeness by reunifying the inner and outer, knower and known, or subjective and objective aspects of our individual awareness and energy field. Restoring our natural wholeness in that way produces healing of emotional pain and inner conflict, rooted in unnatural self-division within and between the individual and relational aspects of our being. That healing process of loving self-unification and nonjudgmental compassionate self-acceptance is like a process of inner alchemy that transmutes our emotional pain, inner conflict, and negativity so that it is harmoniously integrated with our natural wholeness of being, and adds to rather than detracts from the luster of our inherent spiritual grandeur of being, as part of the undivided whole spectrum or “many splendors” of our pure energy field.

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Dr. Barry Hammer offers transformational life coaching and interpersonal relationship advising to help people better understand and heal emotional pain and inner conflict. If interested, please contact him at his email address, mhbj58@gmail.com Anyone who wishes to read more of Dr. Barry Hammer’s inspirational/transformational insights should see his two published books, 1) Psychological Healing Through Creative Self-Understanding and Self-Transformation. (ISBN: 978-1-62857-075-5) and 2) Deepening Your Personal Relationships: Developing Emotional Intimacy and Good Communication. (ISBN: 978-1-61897-590-4). The primary author is Dr. Max Hammer, with contributions from secondary authors Dr. Barry J. Hammer and Dr. Alan C. Butler. These books can be purchased from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or our author/publisher website, http://sbprabooks.com/MaxHammer. The latter website also posts other blogs by Dr. Barry Hammer, and describes the books and authors.

See also Dr. Barry Hammer’s YouTube video on this topic: Barry Hammer, Psychological Healing Through Creative Self-Understanding and Self-Transformation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVrtJWHe1Dc&feature=youtu.be

BOOKS AND YOUTUBE VIDEOS BY OTHER PEOPLE THAT DISCUSS THE PROCESS OF HEALING EMOTIONAL PAIN AND INNER CONFLICT:

Deepak Chopra, Marianne Williamson, Debbie Ford, The Shadow Effect: Illuminating the Hidden Power of Your True Self (ISBN: 978-0-06-196264-6, Harper Collins, 2011)
Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers (ISBN’s, 1-57322-735-8; 1-57322-096-5, Riverhead Books, 1998 and 2010)
Idem, The Secret of the Shadow: The Power of Owning Your Whole Story ( ISBN 0-06-251783-X, Harper Collins, 2002)
Marilyn Gordon and Ormond McGill, Healing is Remembering Who You Are: A Guide for Healing Your Mind, Your Emotions, and Your Life (No ISBN listed, Kindle Edition available through Amazon, 2013, Wise Word Publishing).
Guy Winch, Ph.D., Emotional First Aid: Healing Rejection, Guilt, Failure, and Other Everyday Hurts (ISBN: 978-1-921966-35-4, Exisle Publishing, 2013 and 2014)
Deepak Chopra, Physical Healing, Emotional Wellbeing (YouTube video), http://youtu.be/_gJN7I0a9XU
Idem, Healing Quest: Deepak Chopra on Releasing Toxic Emotions (YouTube video), http://youtu.be/_gJN7I0a9XU
Burt Harding, The Secret of Healing Emotional Pain (YouTube video), http://youtu.be/fvV5ZCzQCOI
Tobias Lars, Healing PAIN, Spiritual Healing of Pain, Healing Emotional Pain (YouTube video), http://youtu.be/t-VPgL-MfXU