THE STAGES OF EMOTIONAL HEALING To have a clearer understanding of emotional healing and the process that individuals go through as they recover from their emotional wounding, it is important to have a look at the various stages that they traverse as they try to make sense of their emotional injuries and deal with them in the process of healing. When people experience an emotional devastation such as that of loss through death or divorce, they go through the various stages in the process of healing as they deal with their pain. Although these stages are universal, the sequence may differ from person to person. One may also move back and forth between the stages on the way to recovery and some stages may overlap with each other. They may also happen …show more content…
The focus at this stage is to acquire as much information and knowledge about the injury as possible. Questions such as the following are asked in this exploration phase; - What actually happened? - Why did it happen? - Why did it happen to me - How did I feel then? - What do I wish happened or had not? - What was most hurtful about what happened? The exploration stage hinges mainly on the memory and recall of what happened. Some people experience memory difficulties when they are very upset or when the event was highly hurtful. It is comforting to know that for the healing process, the memory and recall of the hurtful event does not necessarily have to be perfect. One can heal even with minimum recall.
Click here to unlock this and over one million essays
Show MoreMemories can express many emotional times and events in your life, but it’s terrifying when you can’t remember anything at all. In the novel Breaking Beautiful by Jennifer Shaw Wolf, the main character, Allie, goes through her life after a tragic accident where her boyfriend, Trip, drove off a cliff in his truck. Allie was found near the cliff but she has no memory of the accident. Allie is forced to return to her life before the accident with the exception of having Trip. Allie experienced some traumatic events that influenced changes in herself as well as some people, some being Trip’s death/the accident, having to go back to school, and having Blake there for her every step of the way. .
I constantly stay ‘plugged into’ my recovery community in a variety of different ways. I know that it plays a huge part in my personal recovery in helping me stay clean and sober. A few of the ways I am able to stay connected are through hospitals and institutions, as well as picking up service commitments at my home group. I am a big advocate of H&I’s because they were a key component of my recovery when I was in treatment. I was tremendously inspired when I heard someone who was doing well in the outside world share their experience, strength, and hope.
However, they have both also come to the reality that forgetting is not effective in helping their trauma (Komunyakaa
These mistakes of neglection caused them to loose their loved ones. Remembering will prevent those mistakes from happening again. So memory plays a very important role and remembering is
Letting go may hurt, but holding on is worse Toxic relationships, unfortunate friendships, and ethnic differences are all examples of negative experiences. Situations like these happen every day but knowing how to take it and deal with it can really affect someone. For this reason, the most important thing about growing up is learning to let go of dismissive times, past or present. Recovering from an incident can happen quickly, while for others it can take what seems like an eternity. For example in “The Perfect Murder” Doug, the main character, suddenly gets overwhelmed about his past.
There are multiple stages of grief and healing. The stages have no order, so one person may not be at the same stage as another when dealing with the same situation. The same thing applies to the stages of healing. In the novel “Ordinary People” by Judith Guest, the Jarrett family, Conrad, Calvin, and Beth are all in different stages of grief due to the loss of Buck and other reasons varying from character to character. The two main characters Conrad and Calvin move from stages of grief to stages of healing by recognizing why their grieving.
The five stages of grief shape the way one deals with a loss. Denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance are the stages that generically follow the death of a loved one. Outsiders may not understand the need for these steps and force a griever back into daily life (Axelrod). In Catcher in the Rye, Holden endures many of the stages when he grieves for Allie, his little brother. Although it seems Holden never reaches any sort of closure or letting go, his voice in the novel gives clues of acceptance.
Intrusive, traumatic memories are of real social concern, especially for people struggling with clinical posttraumatic distress. The ability to remember specific events is not a problem in itself. Rather, it is the involuntary intrusion of these traumatic thoughts that is a serious issue. Research shows that a task can interfere with the memory of an event shortly after it happened by affecting the consolidation process. However, it is still unknown whether interfering with the reconsolidation process can reduce the frequency of intrusive memories of traumatic events without affecting the memories in themselves.
There does not seem to be any significant reduction in emotional distress. It does not seem to end or decrease in severity across time. A person who is experiencing this continues to feel extreme distress. This person’s loss feels as fresh as when it first happened even though some time has passed.
This means that it shows how humans truly act and feel in situations that could happen and how humans care or hate for others. The five stages of grief are denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and acceptance. In Elsewhere, Liz experiences this. When she first dies, she does not believe that she has died. She thinks she is in a dream and that she will wake up and be home.
The first stage is the Repression of memories. For example, Sethe, throughout the first and the second part of the novel is haunted by the memory of murdering her child. The second step is the painful reconciliation with these memories. This happened when Beloved, the ghost of Sethe’s murdered child comes back in their lives. The third step is the clearing process which takes place in the end of the novel where Sethe tells Paul D about the murder she committed.
LOSS, GRIEF AND HEALING As human beings, we suffer losses of many kinds and sizes in our life time. While some of these losses are small and do not hurt much, some are big and hurt deeply. Those that are accompanied by pains that are difficult to bear include the loss of a loved one through death or divorce, cheating or unfaithfulness in a trusted relationship or loss of good health when a diagnosis of a terminal illness is made. In all these instances of loss, pain and grief are experienced and an emotional wound is created which needs healing.
After a death or loss of something close, people usually react similarly by going through the five stages of grief. These stages include denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. During a death of my Great Aunt, my family went through the stages of grief. I was close with her when I was younger, but I do not have many memories I remember with her so I did not experience much grief. On the other hand, my Great Uncle went through a lot of grief since she was his older sister.
Memories are one of the most important parts of life, there is no true happiness without the reminiscence of pain or love. This concept is portrayed in "The Giver" by Lois Lowry. The story tells of a 12-year old Jonas, who lives in a “utopian” society, where all bad memories are destroyed to avoid the feeling of pain. Jonas becomes the receiver, someone who receives good and bad memories, and he is transmitted memories of pain and pleasure from The Giver and is taught to keep the secret to himself. The author shows one should cherish memories, whether it be good or bad, as they are all of what is left of the past, and we should learn from it as to better ourselves in the future.
There are may myths relating to grief that actually prolong the grieving process - such as remaining strong and composed, or staying busy after pet loss. The normal healthy grieving process is just that - a process not an event. This process goes through a number of phases. Grief often begins with anticipated loss, particularly in the case of long-running illness or euthanasia.