This is the first of a 4-part series called, Clear Your Blocks to Healing.
The purpose of this series is to help you find the blocks and limiting patterns that are standing in the way of your progress. The exercises will also stop the unnecessary suffering caused by discouraging beliefs.
Part 1: Clear Your Blocks To Healing: Judgment, Self-Criticism, and “Shoulds”
Part 2: Clear Your Blocks To Healing: Feelng Worse, Symptoms Flare-Up and Cravings
Part 3: Clear Your Blocks To Healing: Adaptations, Patterns of Coping That Don’t Serve You
Staying committed to healing and realizing who you are and what you truly want isn’t easy. There will be times when you question whether you are actually making progress. And if you don’t see progress, you’ll doubt if you are on the right track.
You might even start to wonder if all of this is a waste of time.
The fact is, everyone who is dedicated to working on themselves, you will experience blocks at different points in your healing journey.
As you heal, each step brings you closer to your true self – and it can also reveal blocks and limiting patterns that were put in place to protect you.
This is actually a good sign! It shows that you are making real progress, and your awareness means the block is ready to be cleared!
You may do some great healing work, take a necessary and important step, and believe you have healed an issue completely. But some time later, you may find yourself re-experiencing the issue, feel like a failure, or become hopeless. Both the belief that “I am done” and “I am a failure” add unnecessary suffering to your healing process.
Understanding that healing includes times of apparent setbacks, and knowing how to handle them, lets you enjoy your progress with realistic expectations about the process.
This 4-part series will provide you with journaling exercises to help you find the blocks and limiting patterns that are standing in the way of your progress. The exercises will also stop the unnecessary suffering caused by discouraging beliefs.
These are actual blocks I’ve seen and heard from most clients as they go through the Core Emotional Healing process. While they appear as resistance to the work as it is occuring in the moment, some are also a part of long-term patterns or wounds, and clearing them can require deeper healing.
For example, the belief, “I can’t do this,” may rest in deeper feelings of disempowerment, shame, or feeling undeserving that came from early family conditioning.
So, while I include specific suggestions on how to move through your blocks so you feel supported and empowered, there are also “Deeper Exercises,” that you can try on your own. If you remain stuck, you may need additional support and guidance to heal on a deeper level, which can be found in the additional programs my husband, Doug Miller, PhD, and I offer.
I recommend that you use a dedicated journal to work through all of the exercises. You can come back to them over and over again whenever you need to and reference what you’ve done to celebrate your progress.
After 9 years of trying everything to heal, I finally fully healed my Candida symptoms, emotional eating, and dysfunctional relationship patterns with men. At that point, I thought I was pretty much done with working on my childhood wounds.
After meeting my husband, Doug, because we were developing a truly intimate relationship, I experienced some of the deepest and most vulnerable emotional triggers and pain of my life. When I healed these, I realized that after we heal our childhood wounds, more comes up to be healed as we move forward in our lives and relationships.
EXERCISES
Below are examples of how you may experience blocks to your personal work, followed by ways to correct them.
This first set Judgment, Self-Criticism, And Shoulds is important because it deals with common problematic beliefs about how your healing should be going.
Often, the judgments about your healing progress are sourced in deeper self-judgments and self-criticisms that could be the result of low self-value, which is a deeper issue and something you may want to explore with us during a group call or session.
Keep in mind, it’s not the exact words that are important, as these are just examples to help you become aware of how you may be thinking similar things, so consider your own experience and words that each example may evoke. The more open self-inquiry that you put in, the more you will benefit.
Judgment, Self-Criticism, and “Shoulds”
Most limiting beliefs are made-up and untrue stories about yourself that can become self-fulfilling prophecies, i.e., beliefs that become your reality. They often result in feeling hopeless and/or getting mad at yourself, life, God, etc.:
“I don’t know what I am doing.”
“This keeps happening, so I don’t make good decisions.”
“I’m going backwards in my healing.”
“There is something wrong with me.”
“Life isn’t happening the way I want, poor me.”
Put effort into challenging these thoughts, e.g., by finding the evidence to the contrary. Then spend time seriously considering that evidence and making statements that are the opposite of the false belief.
What is most often underlying these beliefs is toxic shame; that there is “something wrong with me.” Because many of these beliefs have been held for much of your life, not only will changing them help you move forward in your healing, but doing so is a central part of your healing and so it is part of a deeper issue that is likely negatively affecting your life in other ways.
Even after you identified, and even healed the source of the limiting belief, you will likely need to change your thought habits. This involves catching yourself thinking the self-judging thoughts, then immediately replacing it by saying one of the corrective thoughts below, several times, like rewriting a tape. It’s fine to tweak, use your own words, or make-up your own corrective thoughts, and you’ll know what feels right.
Here are some examples of corrective thoughts and beliefs to keep in mind in order to correct the limiting beliefs mentioned above:
“Life will keep giving me what I need to grow. Difficulties and challenges always include lessons for growth.”
“Just because it’s happening “again” doesn’t mean anything about me, it’s helping me with what I need.”
“Everything is a stepping stone.”
“Healing takes time, it takes support and many different approaches and modalities.”
“Healing is a spiral, not linear, long-held relationship patterns unfold in layers and other patterns over time. There are many layers to address and different aspects of my personality and adaptations.”
*If you can’t shake the pattern and belief, there may be underlying emotional issues that you can work on, there are deeper exercises below to start exploring on your own, and it’s likely that you would benefit from working with us.
I don’t think I can do it:
- Ask yourself, “What do I really need right now? What would I tell my child?”
- Say to yourself, “I am in sync with, and supported by, Life, God, The Universe, Spirit, etc…”
- Say to yourself, “Anything and everything is possible if I believe in myself.”
- Believe in miracles, pay attention to the signs.
- Faith + Action = Grace.
I think I am not doing it right:
- Know you can’t do anything wrong – the only way is your way; trust yourself.
- Deeper Exercise: Connect to your inner child who feels they can’t do anything right, needs to be perfect to be loved, was made wrong, etc. Write and express how that felt.
I care too much about what other people think:
- Accept that you can’t control how others feel and it is usually about how they feel about themselves and their projections, fears and disconnection.
- Deeper Exercise: Tell your inner child what you need to hear.
I expect that I should be totally different:
- Know that your old conditioning and fear-based beliefs will still come up.
- Be mindful of what thoughts and beliefs you are fueling.
- As your ego identities die off, they may briefly get stronger; be the observer.
- You can choose to not believe your thoughts; do what you need to do despite feeling fear and self-doubt. Trust what flows and release what grips.
- The voices can still be there; it doesn’t mean you aren’t progressing.
I want things to be different, want to be better/healed now or I am judging myself with “I should be…”:
- Develop patience and perseverance.
- Use this affirmation: “I trust myself to be patient with the process and learn as I go. I am right where I need to be, healing takes time. I surrender to the journey.”
- Remember that disappointment and struggle come from comparison and wanting things to be different than they are.
I would love to hear how this goes for you, and if you have any questions.
If you feel that you need more support, learn more about the CEH Self Study here.