Going Within As

The Way Out for Healing

By Deanne Kaye

Whenever I’ve had uncomfortable or painful feelings, I’ve tried to find the way out from them. In my teenage years, my way out was to suppress my feelings and in my 20s the way out was being independent at university and traveling the world. However, these were coping mechanisms that helped me feel less burdened by myself. When I got into my 30s and settled down to raise a family, I couldn’t suppress, deny or run away from my uncomfortable feelings anymore. They surfaced more strongly and needed to be dealt with. Actually, it wasn’t until I started seeing therapists, reading self-help books and attending 12 step programs for co-dependency that I even learned to identify what my blockages were. Before that, I only knew that I wasn’t feeling comfortable in my own skin and I wasn’t the peaceful and joyful person I had read about others having achieved. Therefore, the journey to heal finally became an inward journey. That was my real way out. If you really want to be free, it comes through facing your shadows. That’s your way out.

A key to this process is first being able to know what’s disturbing you. The indicator of that is usually frustrations that have reoccurred time and time again throughout your life. You’ve probably heard that others are a reflection of us. We are attracted to people that will bring out that which hasn’t been healed in us. Throughout most of my life, abandonment was an issue for me. This was something I addressed in more detail in my 2 previous articles. I didn’t really know the impact of having to face that abandonment until I married a man who was emotionally unavailable for me. We tried various ways to mend this, but no amount of counseling, expressing my feelings in “I” statements, or attempting to have date nights, could make him nurture that pain for me. Once I identified that I felt abandoned, I was able to then take the next step. I wrote out all the circumstances in my life I could remember that created that feeling. There is something powerful about writing things down as opposed to just typing or mentally reflecting on them. Over the years, I have heard about the power of writing as a healing tool. It releases emotions stored in our subconscious brain and frees up the neuron channels operating in our conscious reality. Then when we share it with a trusted person who can listen in a space of trust and acceptance, we can feel a shift happen. I also spent time in meditation to really feel the abandonment and bring love and acceptance to it. This isn’t a short-term process, sorry to say, but each time I was present with this abandonment energy and gave it space, it dissipated another layer. I came to see emotions as energy trapped in our bodies, and this energy then creates stories with a lot of momentum played out in our mind. Taking the time to distance ourselves from the story and observe the energy of the emotion, gives us the way out of the pain and discomfort.

Judgementalism is another attribute I was plagued with in my life. I thought that if I acted a certain way and followed good values, I wouldn’t be judged. But I was certainly judging myself, as well as others. When I was raising a family, I tried to do things “right” so I wouldn’t be criticized. We had good healthy meals. The house was clean. The kids got to their activities. I was good at my educational jobs, and I played the role of the patient wife and loving mother. However, at times, things would still fall apart and dramas would happen. What was I doing wrong? After repeated cycles of this, I started to see that me judging how good or bad things were around me was a huge burden. It is actually a mechanism for us masking low sense esteem. When we are judgmental of others and maintain a relationship with this attitude, we are using others to make ourselves feel better. As I became more whole and accepting of myself, judgmentalism’s grip on me lessened.

The biggest struggle of all for me has been with self-loathing. This was in conjunction with traumas around abandonment I had as a young child. A big experience in molding this self-loathing was when I was entering my teenage years. My mother let one of her boyfriends come into our home to live for a couple years. He was younger than my mother, into drinking and drugs and would blow up at times and hit her. Then came the inappropriate sexual touches and the exposing himself to me. After he came into my room in the middle of the night and did something in my room, which I later found out was masturbation, I remember feeling frozen in fear and hiding under my covers. I somehow managed to tell my mother about it the next day. Fortunately, she had had enough and got him out of the house. I internalized 2 years of such an unstable home life into disgust toward myself. Most of my life, I thought the level of loathing I had was unique to me, but when I started helping other women heal, I learned that it wasn’t so uncommon. The hate other women held would play out in hurting themselves through skin picking or cutting, hair pulling, eating issues, intense hate toward a specific part of their body or allowing themselves to be objectified by their partners for sexual gratification. This is all heavy-duty trauma that needs release. Various kinds of affirmations and visualizations also support in lessening this grip of pain held in our psyche.

If you haven’t been feeling comfortable with how things have been for you, it is crucial to look at what’s disturbing your peace and sense of freedom. There comes a time when the old ways of coping don’t work anymore. If you are ready to do things differently to find your way out, I’ll be glad to help!

Deanne Kaye has been on the healing path for over 30 years. She has explored traditional and alternative ways for healing and has been helping others since 2015 become free from such emotions as abandonment, shame, guilt, anger, self-loathing, fear, resentments, addictions and anxiety. She provides experienced guidance, step by step work, meditation practices and a space of trust and presence for releasing unhealthy thoughts and emotions.