It takes Emotional Strength to See the Truth
By Jessica Prado Hanson
Healing starts with seeing the truth of why our bubble is dirty. In order for me to reach where I am now I had to see the truth of how bad things were in my life. Just like for any problem to be corrected we have to see what we are working with. In order for any problem to be solved we have to see it. One of my favorite comparisons is to a bullet wound because our emotional and physical body are so similar. So when our bubble is hit with an emotional trauma bullet we first need to figure out what we are dealing with. Just like when the doctors get scans and then go in to see what damage has been done and then they repair it. In order to do this things might look and feel worse. It takes strength and/or courage to get through it and a knowledgeable support system that knows what they are doing. Then there is the recovery after. You don’t get shot and then go out to work the next day if you want to be a mentally balanced person. We need time to mentally and physically heal and regenerate as we see if life changes. The same goes with emotional trauma. When I acknowledge my emotional damage faster I can start the healing faster. When I don’t, I end up with wounds that fester or maybe heal on their own.
Kind of like this scar I have from punching a window for drugs.
I didn’t go to the doctor and it got infected… Gross!
It didn’t heal properly and it looked gross for years, even now it is still visible 17 years later. I survived, but things would have been easier if I had admitted to the truth, and used a professional who knew what they were doing with my ahealing process. Plus I was risking my life with that infection. If I was in a healthy mental space of self love I wouldn’t have made that decision. I wouldn’t have even been there.
But the USA has come to a place where most of us are too overwhelmed to see any truth in the world because we are so blinded by the dirt on our bubble that the world beyond our pain is challenging to comprehend. Our economy is in trouble and healthcare is the leading cause of bankruptcy. The news cycle is now 24/7 which humans have not learned how to adapt to and also keep mental stability. Hearing about all of the issues the world faces can feel overwhelming and make us want to just block it all out. We are taught to participate or ignore, polarizing just like the news we watch. But I offer another idea- working to keep our bubble clean and clear, admit to damage asap, then assess it, and then work to improve the healing process. When people are in this state of trauma their bubbles are dirty and they are easier to control with fear as I see our leaders doing. We are in our primal state of fight, flight or freeze when we are in a severely damaged bubble because everywhere we look there is pain. This is why my resting heart rate for most of my life was over 100 bpm. Now it is in the 70–80 range depending on my stress levels and multiple sclerosis symptoms. My doctors told me they just think my resting rate is higher than other people and left it there. I now see that this is a sign of PTSD and that heart rate issue was very bad in my teens, when exercising my heart rate would go above 200 and I would pass out. It made physical activity very challenging for years. But once I started to dig deep within and work on these wounds from my past my Fitbit shows that my heart rate continues to lower the better I am at emotional regulation.
When I started to clean my bubble, things felt worse and overwhelming. Luckily I was able to do this in a safe place and I must say this is not normal, so many people do not have this privilege and if we want more people to be productive we might want to question the equality of opportunity in this nation. I am so grateful that I was given the ability to discover these things about myself and then share them with you. I see life so differently now that I am no longer living in that haze of trauma. The skills I learned in that process help me maintain clarity daily as I work on my mental hygiene. I see that we are all different and need support in figuring out what helps us to emotionally grow and stabilize. The type of mental stability where anything can happen and we are still strong and clear. Even better, for those types we get hurt and knocked into the hurricane of life we work on skills to get back to center clarity faster.
The hardest step is the first one, I think this is because that first step is so unknown in our culture.
I sure didn’t know where I would end up!
I had no clue that I would find such a deep mental clarity that changes how I experience life completely. Perhaps this knowledge can let people know that this is possible so their work will not go in vain. Just as exercising our bodies is good for us, these emotional muscles can get stronger. Facing the truth of how emotionally retarded and unstable I and my culture is was the hardest part. I had to really sit there and let myself realize that I had no healthy emotional coping skills because of how I grew up.
This is just the fact, and now that I see that I can DO something about it.
Although this was hard it is so important because just like with a physical bullet wound, you want to make sure you know what you are dealing with so you can actually heal. If you leave parts of the bullet inside a person or you don’t patch up every organ properly you have some serious issues. Kind of like when I thought drugs would help with my pain, that just made it worse and I had to reopen the wound to fix the additional damage. These methods are not sustainable if we desire a life of emotional stability. Luckily I have begun the adventure of finding things that help me stay centered and stable. I hope you also share because this is a subject I think I could always learn more about. We all have different things that fulfill our souls. Thank you for reading what fulfills my soul which is creating, and I look forward to hearing what makes you happy and fulfilled, so please share below.
