Wellness through Emotional Healing

Much of wellness stems from the way our minds and brains work. How we think - what we are believing - directly effects how we feel, and has major consequences on the rest of our lives.

It can take some practice to become aware of what we are believing at any particular time. The starting point for many is to clarify what you are feeling. What you are feeling generally correlates exactly with what you are believing. So asking your self the simple question, 'why do I feel this way?' often instantly produces the answer of what I am believing right now. In fact, from an emotional persective you are feeling the way you do mostly because of the beliefs you have activated at any particular time.

Changing Beliefs People try to change their beliefs by changing their self talk and speaking to themselves the truths they want to believe. Over the long term this can be helpful, however we learn through experience and we generally change our beliefs through experience too. The process of speaking the truths to ourselves that we want to believe tends to fall down in times of stress and crisis, and besides it can require a lot of effort. When the technique fails our brains revert back to providing negative interpretations about what is going on. This is because our brains draw on past experience to make sense of the current circumstances. If in the past experiences the brain is drawing on to make sense of current experience you formed negative interpretations of what happned you will be likely to interpret the current experience the same way. In a sense a past experience is being 'triggered' and the beliefs and feeling from that past experience are flooding out and effecting the making sense of current experience. It can be as if we are re-living a memory, yet we generally have no idea that this is happening and attribute our feeling and thoughts to the current circimstances. This is a very abbreviated explanation of one way the brain works.

The most powerful way to change deep beliefs (that tend to flood out and distort your perception of current circumstances) is to go back to the places where such beliefs were formed(via memory). In those places cognitions can be restructured and what was formerly felt to be true changes and no longer feels that way. This may not sound easy to do, however when guided by someone skilled in this approach it can be relatively straight forward.

This process of change starts with taking notice of how you are feeling in any particular circumstance, especially ones in which you feel your emotions are out of proportion to what is happening. Once in touch with the feelings, you stay in touch with them and let your memory drift and take you right back to when you first felt that way. This may involve a series or steps or be direct. Once back at the memory where you learnt to believe the negative belief, revelation of truth alters your interpretation of the earlier event and hence the beliefs associated with it will change. You can tell when it has changed because what formerly felt true no longer feels that way. Once this source of negative belief has been changed, the brain has changed and will not revert back to the previous negative interpretation again. The result is that a typical everyday circumstance which would formerly have been disturbing now is no longer experienced as disturbing or upsetting. 

Fortunately our emotions do make sense, even if sometimes we need to go back to another time and place to see where they made sense. and even more fortunately, through this process of cognitive restructuring, negative beliefs stemming from such past experiences change. Automatically it becomes easier to respond to life in the way we want. The energy and effort previously put into over-riding the negative belief and emotion can be used elsewhere. To me, that is really good news.

Summary: The way you feel stems largely from what you are believing at any particular time. What you believe comes from how you are interpreting current experience. The mind makes sense of current experience by drawing on past experiences that have similarities to the current ones. If it attempts to make sense of a current experience by drawing upon a past experience in which you formed negative beliefs - such as unresolved trauma - then you will feel the same emotions in the current experience as in the earlier one. When the experience that was being triggered has been restructured, then the beliefs with their emotions will no longer be available to 'leek' or 'flood' into current experiences.

This overall process has been described as 'mind renewal',  'emotional healing' or even 'soul therapy'. One of the most effective tools for achieving such mind renewal/ emotional healing is Theophostic Ministry. For more information about Theophostic Based Ministry - what it is, practitioners who use it and who trains people how to use it, see the links below.