All we want is to be happy. But innately what we want the most is to feel safe and be okay.

Most of us in order to feel safe, complete, and sane most of the time, we need to heal our wounds.

By healing our wounds I mean that we have to integrate learned behavior and pains of the past that today cause us problems consciously or subconsciously.

That being said, healing is not easy, at all. But we can actually make it more easeful and maybe even remove some bumps off the road.

So we can do that, we need to identify some things that are making our healing journey harder.

5 things that are making your healing journey harder:

1. Not understanding how cycles and patterns work

I believe that awareness is always the first step in our healing journeys. For each lesson that we learn that is the case.

So what happens when we don’t understand the way cycles and patterns work along our healing journey?

The answer my friend is that we keep falling back into them.

Our cycles are toxic dynamics that we get in of either by ourselves or with other people that keep up stuck where we are in life. These cycles are part of our comfort zone as much as our patterns are.

Our patterns are those habits and subconscious things that we have engrained that make us repeat our same mistakes over and over again.

When we understand how our cycles and our patterns are working together we can see more clearly the way we are behaving and what consequences it’s bringing to us (especially within that dynamic).

2. Being consciously aware of your habits but hoping they change themselves

It is not that we actively hope they change by themselves, but that we do things that do the opposite of helping.

It’s like when you can see the red flags more than clearly but you have to fight the biggest battle against yourself in order to avoid them.

We lose that battle frequently sometimes until we become strong enough and actually win.

This doesn’t mean that from then on you will not have to fight again or that you will win all of the battles. This only means that now you get to choose to be strong enough to win the most important battles that will bring you forward.

This means that it will be harder to fall back to your ego thinking and instant gratification mode which will make it easier to lose those habits.

3. Putting responsibilities on other people

Those of us who are very interested in the topic of healing are those of us that tend to fall into the victim mentality.

Before we realized that we need to do something ourselves in order to fix our problems it is probable that we fell into the victim spectrum.

Everything happened to us, everyone was mean to us and everyone treated us wrong.

A theme or topic that is very important in our healing journey is that of energetics.

It allows us to view the energy we put out vs the energy we receive from others. Yes other people are mean, yes bad things may happen to us but blaming others is not going to help us in absolutely any way.

It becomes a control game that we can’t win and eventually, we lose because we allow what other people do to deeply affect our lives.

The only person we have full control over is ourselves. So it is more important to think about what can we do so that we don’t allow situations to repeat themselves.

This brings us to our next point.

4. Boundaries, boundaries boundaries

One thing that we can actually do to have more control over our lives AND make it easier to heal is to have strong boundaries.

As I mentioned in the previous point these allow us to prevent negative interactions with other people, although at first, it may cause more.

When other people are told no, or when you don’t allow them to keep hurting you, people get angry. When boundaries are set, people get angry.

But when we do set them we take away the control from them and we now are the ones that decide how our life goes on.

The most important boundaries that we have to set up, are not with others but with ourselves.

Tying back to our second point this also has to do with changing our habits and moving away from the pleasure chemicals that we get in our brain when we repeat the same patterns.

Don’t allow yourself to do those things that you know will hurt you in the future.

5. Not having a system or container to heal in

In order to do all of the above without losing your mind (because trust me, having to be so self-aware and in touch with yourself gets hard), we need to build systems for ourselves that let us view our healing with a clearer perspective.

Often with trauma, our memory gets worse and it becomes harder to remember all the lessons we have learned and the way people have hurt us in the past.

When you create a system for yourself you need to make sure it includes all of the needs you have in your healing journey.

For example, a place to write a daily journal, somewhere to rant, a way to store your known triggers, knowing where you can find more information about a certain practice, etc.

This allows us to feel safe and sturdy which allows us to sometimes explore more of who we are and what we can do to improve our journey.

To get started you can start by writing the things that trouble you in your healing journey and understand the way you feel about them.

Make sure you are patient with yourself.