...unless you prepared for & understood this phase beforehand.
Self awareness is an absolute of healing. It is the major stepping stone. After becoming aware of your wound, telling the story of how this wound came to be, seeing it, understanding it is a major component and a crucial phase of healing. But its just a phase. Next phase would be taking responsibility for healing that wound. This is where most people's ego gets involved. Because ego must keep us safe, surviving and belonging and because its purpose is so vital for our need to navigate this plane, the ego has become pliable, malleable and intelligent. That means that if you're in a situation/scenario where the ego feels it cannot overpower/defeat the thing that threatens it, it becomes its strongest ally.
So in this case, because the person understands the importance of self awareness, the ego cannot use any tactics to run from it anymore. Now, its sole purpose would be to find loopholes in this healing process in order to hijack and piggyback it. Crazy huh?
There are many ways in which the ego decides to handle the situation in a way that benefits it, but usually it looks like rehashing old stories and old wounds, intellectualizing & rationalizing the reasons, circumstances and emotions, for example. This makes up for what we call a resistance to healing. This avoidance technique that ego uses succeeds in making you bypass emotions by talking about emotions. The ego keeps you in the mind about something that is meant to be felt in the body. Again: crazy, huh. Discovering and talking about your pain is supposed to act like an anchor that pulls you deep into FEELING the emotions within your body, not away from them. But if you're prepared for this phase of resistance (it doesn't have to be the case for every individual), you can handle it with much more grace and you can actually transition in a smoother way.
You can never know if your ego hijacked your healing process unless you take a step back and look at your habits around your practices. Ironically, it is the practice of self awareness that can take you out of this never-ending loop of the mind. So ask yourself these tough questions:
▸Do I actively look for resolve to this situation/wound or do I find myself going around in circles talking about it?
▸Do I apply and take action to improve my life with the help of this new awareness that I have or is it just pure information?
▸Am I committed to actively embodying the better version of myself that I have access to as a result of this new awareness that I have?
Be brutally honest with yourself. If you realize that self awareness has simply become a mental process that involves no actual changes in your day to day life, the bad news is that your ego has erected a resistance to transformation. The good news is that you can start addressing that resistance with love and curiosity and see how it is serving you to stay in that mental construct of your pain.
One way of starting to unglue and melt this resistance is to drop into your body. Notice how your body responds to those specific emotions, embracing them, allowing them to be without judgement and, in doing so, making them ok to be exactly as they are. This is part of the process of finally releasing them.
At this final phase, finding resolve to that trauma becomes a natural step to take and it usually involves reparenting the inner child that had no support figure to help them and guide them to understand and make sense of a seemingly overwhelming and insurmountable situation. One could call it soul retrieval. But most people's ego won't let them go that far and rehashing the past gives them either a false sense of completion and healing or a false sense of moving forward on their healing journey.
If this is your case, I want you to know that you're not doing it wrong. Because it's all part of the process of becoming who you're meant to be, your authentic self, this too is serving you in exploring yourself even deeper. It's all meant to guide you back home to yourself. The hurdles and obstacles can be roadblocks to your healing or an opportunity to enhance your experience of yourself. But the choice to see it as a means to upgrade yourself from a place of self compassion, love and understanding is yours and its always available to you.
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