Do You Suffer from Depression, Anxiety or Social Anxiety? Here's What Might Be Preventing the Healing.

Feeling anxious, socially anxious, stressed, depressed can be extremely painful and limiting to our life. It might cause us not to feel comfortable in ourselves, not to be ourselves or live our values, not to do what we would like, not to have the job we would like, not to live the life we would like. And now with the current economical situation, we find ourselves dealing with very stressful issues which can cause us a lot of anxiety.

But the thing is, we are not given a manual at birth which tells us what we can do when we do not feel good, or when life does not quite work as we would like to. We always do the best we can at all time with what we know; if we knew better, we would do better. When we feel anxious, stressed, socially anxious, depressed, etc. we find ourselves with feelings we do not like and we do not quite know how to deal with them. But once we know what to do, we feel empowered. And it is paramount to learn to be gentle with ourselves, and give ourselves time in the process of learning and healing.

In my work I have realized that there are a few things we commonly do or face that might be preventing our healing; here are a few of them.

The very first thing unfortunately we still face is the stigma still associated with mental health; this both in workplace environments as well as in social situations. People do not understand yet that not feeling well is exactly the same than having for example a cold. And people can be very judgemental and bullying, and sometimes the judgement or bullying comes in the way they call it ‘humour’. This makes people feel even worse and the healing process more difficult. Why? Because we normally feel bad about ourselves or ashamed when somebody criticizes or judges us; and this is immediately followed by beating ourselves up.

If we beat ourselves up we are not going to heal; we are never going to heal something by beating it up with a stick. And so we need first to find ways to become what I call ‘waterproof’ to outside judgements and then let go of beating ourselves up. The reasons why we beat ourselves up are mainly subconscious, we do it automatically; so it is necessary to do a process to become aware of them, and then let them go. Then it is paramount to learn to love ourselves. Love (with the capital ‘L’) in my opinion is the only healing force in the Universe - I will explain below where I believe healing comes from -, and by giving ourselves approval, we reconnect with it. Letting go of beating ourselves up and giving ourselves approval is in my opinion a fundamental step to healing.

Our beliefs might also be preventing the healing. Limiting beliefs on healing are for example: thinking there is something wrong with us, thinking we need to be fixed, thinking we have a problem and we need to solve it, thinking healing is down to us.

Another thing which hinders the healing is trying to figure things out to find a solution. But figuring things out never works: it actually keeps the problem there and might create even more of it. Why? This is because of metaphysics. The mind is only creative and what we hold in mind is what we get. If we focus on the problem, the only thing we get is the problem. I am sure you have experienced an ‘a-ha’ moment when you had an intuition about something and perhaps this happened when you were doing something completely different. That’s an example. The solution does not come from what we consider the mind; it comes from somewhere else, what is called universal intelligence, in the form of an intuition.

We perhaps think we need to figure things out to find a solution to our problem so that once we have the solution we will be fine, but this is the same as saying we are the source of our healing. I believe healing does not come from us, it comes from the Universe, God, Consciousness or Source Energy or however you wish to call it. An example of this is when we cut our finger with a piece of paper; we know it will heal and we let it heal, we do not try to think with the mind which cell is going to heal with which other cell. We just allow healing to happen.

Another thing that might be preventing the healing is what we think our problem –anxiety, stress, social anxiety, depression- is. In my experience, anxiety, social anxiety, depression, are simply caused by un-resourceful patterns of thinking, mainly subconscious, and kept in place by limiting beliefs.

To summarize the points I have just made: let go of beating yourself up, give yourself approval, let go of trying to figure things out and when the conscious mind is out of the way, we allow healing to begin taking place.