Choosing To Heal

You must do the hard work.  Eleanor Roosevelt said “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”  You must heal the wounds of your past and present.  There is no other choice.

Actually that’s not true.  You can become less of who you are instead.  You can continue to diminish yourself.  You can continue in your mess, your misery, your drama, your addiction, and/or your unhealthy and damaging relationships. And the most dreadful part is – it will only get worse.  Like a terminal illness, it will progress and become more miserable and toxic if not treated.  You could just stay how you are and leave it to your children to do the work.  And, by the way, if you are not living fully, you are teaching your children not to live fully.  Remember, they do what you do, not what you say.  They will grow to live their own version of your and/or the other parent’s toxicity.  If you don’t break the cycle of dysfunction, it will be your ultimate legacy to your kids.  (That’s why you have to do the work because your parents did not do theirs).  This is not to make you feel guilty, it’s meant to give you that extra push to commit to do the work and to understand the choice that you are making by not doing the work.

Or you can get to work and become conscious.  Live the life you were meant to live.  Live your calling.  Live with actual love (you know the kind I mean – patient, kind, adoring, playful, fun, trusting etc.)  Live with integrity.  Experience joie de vivre – maybe for the very first time since you were an infant.  As they say, you can get bitter or you can get better.   It’s your choice.

You really can do this.  It is not some pie in the sky ideal.  If you do your personal growth work, you will become stronger, more aware, feel freer, feel whole and experience healthy relationships and true happiness.

Personal growth work can happen with or without counseling.  The benefit of counseling, however, is that you get to have the healing even faster and you you won’t have to do your work alone.  Plus, the counseling relationship in and of itself is a healing force in which you will experience what its like to be treated with kindness and respect without judgment with a genuine, authentic person.  And believe it or not, it can be fun.  And besides, how much luck are you having going it alone?  (Are you counting the unrealized promises of your self-help book collection?)

I know what I’m talking about because I have walked the road and work with amazing women who are walking the road.  Join us.

Elizabeth Kupferman is a counselor in Orlando, Florida dedicated to helping women overcome depression, grief, and anxiety so they can find happiness and achieve their dreams. This article was posted on Sunday, June 7th, 2009 and is filed under Happiness, grief. You are welcome to trackback from your own site.

"Choosing To Heal" by Elizabeth Kupferman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.