91. Woundology: Where Do Your Decisions Stem From?

At my lowest points, I felt stuck. I was living in pain, and my cup was so empty that I couldn’t offer anything to anyone else. It took a lot of self-love, self-mastery, and support to climb out of that hole. And I was recently excited to stumble upon a name for that phenomenon in “Anatomy of the Spirit: The Seven Stages of Power and Healing” by Caroline Myss.

In the book, Caroline writes: “Woundology is the tendency to insistently hold on to old traumas. You define yourself by your hurts, not by your strengths, and there in those hurts you stay stuck forever.”

I don’t necessarily agree with the “forever” part, but this framing really helped me contextualize my experience: I had an emotional, energetic wound that I continued to relive in every step I took. I had to do a lot of inner work to heal that wound and move forward with my scars, and there’s nothing we can do to remove those scares entirely, but we don’t need to stay stuck forever.

While reading this, did you realize that you are still carrying an emotional wound? If you do, although people may not be able to see it physically, it’s showing up in every action that you take. So, if you want to change something in your life right now and start making different decisions, if you feel stuck, you need to get to the root of this wound.

Staring to Heal the Wound

• First, how do you know if you have a wound? If you find yourself getting triggered by certain things over and over again, even from people who you’ve never met before, then you probably have an unaddressed emotional wound.
• So, next time you feel yourself being triggered, ask yourself: is this happening to me right now or am I bringing up something that happened to me in the past?
• Identifying where you’ve been wounded emotionally is one of the greatest challenges you will have to overcome, period, and that’s why I strongly suggest enlisting support. Find a practitioner (or practitioners) who align with you and what you want out of your life.
• We have a choice, as adults, to show up the way we choose to show up. Whether we want to believe it or not, what controls us most is happening in our minds. So, if you decide that you want to move forward, you need to start by forming an energetic connection with healing your wounds.

• Now, let’s turn this into a conversation! 

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