Soul Wound: How Will I Know I’ve Healed?

We talk a lot about soul healing, changing our reactions to people and situations to change outcomes, taking back our power and re-framing the past. However, we can become so focussed on the healing process itself – and the symptoms of the soul wounds that caused the pain in the first place, that we can forget to include the all-important information along with soul healing techniques – and that is how to identify when the healing has taken place.

The thing with healing soul wounds is that unlike physical injuries, there is no outer sign that the healing process is complete. So, while some of us may feel a shift in our energy, others may not or the healing process may have been so subtle we have no actual idea whether we have completed it successfully – or not. It’s a valid question to ask ‘How will I know?’ – and anyone on the path to inner healing needs to be aware of the answer – and also the signs that your healing work has had the desired effect.

If we’ve suffered a relationship breakdown for example, we all know how in the immediate aftermath of the break-up we cannot stop thinking about the person and replaying things over and over again in our minds. We hope they come back. We re-live moments together partly out of sentimentality and also partly through a desire to see if we could have done things differently.

As we move through the stages of grief however, we begin to focus on these and also the person less and less. So we find we have gone all day, then a week and soon months without thinking about them at all. At this point we understand we have moved through the process and on to where we have accepted the relationship is over. At this point even if we were to run into them, we would be able to do so without getting upset about it. All this tells us the wound has healed.

This is the key to understanding when the shift has taken place. Let’s say for example that you have been stressed out at work. Your coping mechanism up to now has been to snack while at work and then when you come home at night, attempt to de-stress by eating yet more food and probably having quite a few glasses of wine with that!

You’re not only unhappy at work but deep down you know you are not doing your body any favours either as you’re putting on weight. You then consciously decide to manage the stress in another way – by having healthy snacks to hand at work and by going for a walk or joining a gym afterwards as well as perhaps looking for a new job. While you are in the process of looking however, you know you have in fact healed the wound this has caused once you automatically choose the helpful behaviour – i.e:  eating a healthy snack or going for a walk, instead of reverting to your previous behaviour.

The same goes for people who have caused deep soul wounds in our psyches – we know we are healed and that they no longer have the power to upset us when we are able to react differently to them than we have done in the past. They may try to elicit from us the response they expect – such as us getting upset, angry or hurt, but we now choose not to react that way. We are therefore in charge of our responses and choose to behave differently – again, this tells us we have healed the soul wound.

This doesn’t just apply to relationships – but to any area where feelings of inadequacy, nervousness or self-doubt (these too are soul wounds), hold us back from achieving our goals and full potential. This can be anything from being so nervous in a job interview you cannot do an adequate job in selling yourself properly, to being in a situation where you never get beyond the first date because you tend to give away too much too soon. When you approach any kind of situation differently and start to get a different result, this is how you will know your wound has healed and a permanent shift has taken place.

Remember, soul healing can take time to accomplish but you will know you’ve succeeded not just by your own reactions changing, but to other’s reactions to you mirroring that change.