Why can healing hurt so much?

Explore James' Teachings and Insights on All Things Spiritual

Why can healing hurt so much?

Aug 10, 2018 | JVP's Blog

Early this year, we launched the first session of the JVP Mediumship Level 3 Student Practitioner Graduate Program. The program is designed to provide mentoring and hands on training to a small group of gifted souls. Best of all, I’ve been able to share my platform with them – they’ve joined me at events, on Hay House Radio, and on the JVP Blog page! This week I’m excited to share an amazing piece from one of my Mediumship 3 students, Kristen Marchus Hemstad. Enjoy!
James

I work with people who are ready to “get over” “move beyond” or “resolve” past hurts and history.  Whichever way you choose to phrase it, the process of healing is not always a painless one. If all it took was saying “OK, hurts be gone!” we all would have resolved our stuff years or decades ago just by saying we are ready.  It takes work, patience, self-reflection, courage, honesty, getting out of our heads, forgiving ourselves, forgiving others, and action.

I worked on healing anxiety and depression most of my life through all sorts of therapy.  When I discovered I was a medium I thought I got to the bottom of all this and it would be easy going forward.  Nope, not at all and any feelings especially of panic came roaring to the surface.

I had more work to do and mentored intensely with my amazing teacher to help me help myself.   She did not and could not do the work for me, but she did give me the tools I needed to help myself.    She believed in me that I was not broken, held me accountable for my own feelings and didn’t allow me to make excuses for myself.  Being there with a person in their pain and not taking that pain way is in my opinion unconditional love. In short, I started to look internally to find my worth vs externally to be fixed.  How could I be fixed when I wasn’t broken?

Everyone looks at, sees, absorbs his or her pasts differently because no one sees, processes and feels events the exact same way so we unwind them differently as well.

With emotions, we tend to ‘overthink’ wondering why, what if, it’s not that bad, I had it worse than anyone.”  We try to make sense out of why something happened to us but we can’t as emotions are SO subjective.  You cannot think your way out of an emotional situation. Therefore talk therapy only helped me so far as I could not reason my way out of feeling how I did.

Let’s make emotional hurts more concrete by equating them to slivers in your hand.    Imagine…. each hurtful situation that has stuck with you, each negative thought in your head or other things you intend or feel you need to “heal” is a sliver of wood or metal in your hand.  One by one they are going into your hand but not coming out. They are all shapes and sizes. If you just ignore them eventually they can become diseased or at least come to the surface. Pretty soon that hand would be too painful to use.

We have all had a sliver and they do not come out on their own.  It’s a process of opening and drawing out which is not an enjoyable but the outcome after that intense feeling is relief.    Asking “why are you there sliver?” “how did I let you get there?” “I am going to push you in further so I don’t see you!” does not help.

We can medicate (suppress, overeat, drink, depression) the symptoms (anger, victimization, ongoing suffering, repeating behaviors) but the underlying issue (hurt) is still lodged in.  Our emotions are clues that we have work to be done on ourselves.

Emotion healing is not always pleasant.  It takes work, patience, self-reflection, courage, honesty, getting out of our heads, forgiving ourselves, forgiving others, and action.

Kristen is a Spirit medium and personal mentor www.KristenMarchusHemstad.com