Tag Archive: emotional healing


Why Can’t She Cry?


Copyright Soul Arcanum LLC, 2011. All rights reserved.  
All rights reserved. :)
 

Dear Soul Arcanum:

My family and I have had a horrendous 10 years. We’ve moved countries and continents, been cheated in business, had to live with family, gotten thrown out on our ears by family, and found it very hard to get by. Business deals that were sure to go through would just not happen at the last minute; this is still happening. There is constant worry about money even though we’re all working. It’s been really horrible and exhausting. I have also been cheated of my inheritance by my own sister because we lived and worked overseas and she looked after our parents. She feels she is entitled to everything they left behind: jewelry, property, everything. She took care to put everything in her name while I was overseas. My question, Soul Arcanum, is why can’t I cry? I have been hurt so badly by my sister plus all the stuff that we’ve been through, yet I can’t seem to cry. Please help.

K.

Dear K.:

I’m sorry to hear of all your heartache. There are a number of possible reasons why you can’t cry.

The most obvious explanation is that you are depressed. When severely depressed, many people experience the same thing you describe: an inability to cry. With severe depression, emotions become so flattened that one is essentially beyond weeping. I encourage you to see your doctor about this possibility. Of course, if you have already seen a doctor and are on anti-depressants, you have your answer: anti-depressants are known to blunt emotions, so many people who take them feel too numb to laugh, cry, or feel much of anything.

Another possible explanation is that you are too overwhelmed to allow yourself the “luxury” of succumbing to tears at this time. It sounds like your struggles are ongoing, which means you are not yet in a place where you can look back on your experiences and begin to heal and release the trauma involved. This is a bit like being in the midst of battle when you are wounded; since you are still in survival mode, you may not even feel the wound until the danger is behind you. Even if you are in pain, however, you know you have to keep going in order to survive, so you ignore the wound and keep on fighting. If you feel like you simply don’t have time to “fall apart” right now, that may explain why you can’t cry.

It’s also possible that you’ve got so much emotional pain bottled up inside that you’re afraid of what may happen (or what you may do) if you started to let it out. When our emotions feel more powerful than we think we can handle, it can feel like if we even crack the door of our hearts open, a tidal wave of emotion will burst through and sweep us away. We may fear experiencing that much pain all at once, or we may fear that if we allow ourselves to feel those feelings, we will lose control and do something we may regret. In either case, the solution is often to just keep our hearts tightly locked shut and keep plugging forward.

It is also possible that your inability to cry goes way back to early childhood or even a past life. Our experience of crying is naturally rooted in our early childhood and our relationships with our caregivers. After all, crying is the only way infants have to communicate that they need something. Those of us whose parents responded to our crying in positive ways tend to find comfort in crying as adults; those of us whose parents ignored us or became angry or upset by our crying tend to have crying issues.

If, when you were a little girl, your parents somehow punished you for crying, you may have difficulty allowing yourself to cry in any situation. Parents who don’t want to be bothered with their children’s complaints tend to say things like, “Stop crying! That’s not worth crying about,” or the ever popular, “If you want something to cry about, I will give you something to cry about!” Some parents even send their children to their rooms and refuse to let them come out until they have stopped crying. Of course, there are other ways parents reject or censor their children when they are upset. Some parents are so uncomfortable seeing their children in distress that they say things like, “Please don’t cry. It breaks my heart to see you so sad,” which tends to make the child feel guilty for crying. Even when they don’t verbally discourage their children from crying, if the parents are uncomfortable, the children may sense it and decide to stifle their tears.

Yours is a perfect problem for hypnotherapy. Since there are many potential causes, hypnotherapy could help you to quickly pinpoint and heal whatever is really going on. If you came to see me for therapy, I would spend our first couple of sessions helping you get comfortable with the therapeutic process and giving you subconscious suggestions to begin to heal and release whatever is troubling you. (This gentle, gradual approach tends to work best with people who may be afraid to feel whatever emotions may come up.) Eventually, I would dialogue with your higher self and ask about the root cause of your inability to cry. If this took us back to a traumatic event in childhood or a past life, I would guide you in re-membering that event and feeling all the feelings involved. Since your presenting problem is an inability to cry, my goal would be get those tears flowing. Once you were sobbing on my couch, I would know we had achieved a breakthrough.

Some therapists believe that reliving the emotions of past events is unnecessarily unpleasant; some believe that it is essential to the healing process; I believe it depends on the client and the situation. I do believe there is great healing power in catharsis, and that it is never wise to deny, repress, block or avoid emotions. Interestingly, recent scientific research has discovered that when we cry in sorrow, our bodies release endorphins and our tears contain toxins; when our eyes are simply watering due to irritation, neither of these is true. This means that crying is in and of itself therapeutic and healing. I think we all know this based on personal experience: who hasn’t succumbed to a good cry after a period of great stress or upset, felt completely spent, and then wiped their tears and decided to get on with things?

In my experience, cathartic sessions tend to produce healing miracles. Let’s take for example the case of a woman who had an inexplicable fear of driving a car. In therapy, a past life in which she had died in a car crash was discovered. Though this awareness alone didn’t produce results, in the last session, she was regressed to relive the accident, during which there was a great outpouring of emotion. That is when a breakthrough was achieved: following that session, her fear of driving completely disappeared.

Of course, it is always helpful to simply have someone loving and understanding to talk to. If you don’t have a friend or relative you feel you can pour your heart out to, you may find traditional counseling helpful. It may take a while to develop the trust and rapport necessary, but if you open up about your troubles to a caring person, eventually those tears should begin to flow. From deep tissue massage to EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), there are many different healing modalities besides talk therapy and hypnotherapy that can release stored emotions, so explore your options. If you pray to Spirit for the answer, I’m sure you will be guided to the perfect healing path for you.

– Soul Arcanum

Healing Karma with Father who Abused Her


Copyright Soul Arcanum LLC. All rights reserved. :)
 

Dear Soul Arcanum:

I “divorced” my father when I was in my late 20s because he was a pedophile who refused to acknowledge the harm he’d done to my siblings and me. I pressed criminal charges against him when I was in my early 30s and he went to jail. My brother kept in contact with him until a few years ago when he took a sexploitation trip through Thailand. I’ve been through 12-step programs for incest survivors and have done a lot of inner work. My children know why they don’t have a second grandfather. I consider myself a full survivor but want to know if there are ways to complete the emotional healing process so I don’t carry unfinished karma into my next incarnation. Thank you for the great work you do through your columns. My friends and family appreciate them too.

Moneca

Dear Moneca:

First I have to commend you for all the inner work you’ve already done to heal from the past and empower yourself for the future. I also applaud your foresight, for you are right in assuming that until this experience is fully healed, it will come up again and again for you, if not in this lifetime, then in future lives.

My sense is that you’ve pretty much made peace with this on a personal level; what’s left is to make peace with your father so you can align with a higher level of experience with him in future lives. On the other hand, you may already be at the point where you can look at the blessings that came from this experience and give thanks for the unique journey that has been yours, which is a sign that you’re at peace and ready to move on.

Before those readers who can’t see how such an experience could possibly involve any sort of blessing start sending me hate mail, let me explain. I’m sure this difficult journey made you question life and become a deeper thinker, that it stretched you to find inner strength you didn’t know you had, and that it led you to develop compassion for everyone who suffers abuse. We tend to view painful experiences as curses, but in my experience, the more life stretches our capacity to endure, the stronger and wiser we grow.

There is a key turning point in the spiritual healing process where one who has been abused begins to find compassion for the abuser. Let me share my own experience to demonstrate that I know what I’m talking about.

When I was a teenager, I was stalked and eventually raped by a crazy guy in his twenties. Though I was too young to fully realize it at the time, I have come to understand that our meeting was destined and that we already had a strong but troubled karmic bond.

His mother cut and styled hair out of her home, which is where we first encountered each other – at least, in this lifetime. When I saw him, every hair on my body stood up at attention. There was a sense of instant recognition I’ve come to associate with reuniting with someone from a past life, only this time, the feeling was far from positive. In fact, I was inexplicably terrified.

Since there was no logical reason to feel this way, I pushed the feelings aside. It’s too long a story to go into in detail here, but this guy must have felt something strong too because he began to stalk me. I would be driving home from work and see him in his car, following me. When I left school for the day, he would be in the parking lot, leaning against his car, just staring at me. He began to call me every night. When I tried to shake him off, he began to threaten to harm my little brother or my friends. I had learned that he had a number of friends who were convicted felons, so I decided to take his threats seriously.

He stalked me for months before he managed to get me alone; that’s when the rape occurred. I guess I was naïve, but I was truly shocked at how violent he became. It was following that experience that I took my power back, shed my fear of him, and took a stand by telling him that if he ever contacted me again, I would go to the police. (I know I should have gone to the police anyway, but I was sure my father would kill him if he found out, and I couldn’t bear the thought of my dad spending the rest of his life in prison.)

The turning point in my healing process came when I realized that I would rather be me and be raped by this man than to be him. As I struggled to understand why he had done what he’d done, I realized that his inner world was a really twisted, ugly place. I only had to live with his ugliness for a while; for him, it was a constant and inescapable prison.

As I had karmic encounters with other people from past lives, I also realized that I must have some history with this guy. I don’t know what happened back then, but I came to understand that we were both unconsciously acting out some old patterns. I also realized that if I didn’t want to keep circling this enemy throughout future lives, I would have to consciously change things for the better.

This is where your own story comes in. While I am in no way suggesting you try to find a way to justify what your father did or equating an attack by a stranger with the profound betrayal of a parent, it’s nevertheless true that in order to fully heal and set yourself free from this for all time, you would be wise to try to find compassion for your father.

Can you imagine what it would be like to be him? There is a lot of wisdom in saying to yourself, There but for the grace of God go I. While people like to tell themselves that they could never be as selfish or cruel as the individuals they most despise, in my view, that sort of thinking is a good way to be born as just such an individual because walking some miles in their shoes may the only way to develop compassion and understanding for them.

On my own quest for healing, it occurred to me that I may have hurt this man really badly at some point. As I pondered the karma between us, I also imagined him being raped or abused in a future lifetime in order to learn some compassion, and that’s when it occurred to me that perhaps this was why I had been attacked – to develop greater kindness and compassion than I had embodied in the past. (To better understand karmic relationships and why we reincarnate with the same people over and over again, you might want to explore the research of Michael Newton, Ph.D.)

If finding compassion for your dad proves too difficult, hypnotherapy may be just what you’re looking for. A gifted therapist can guide you in hearing your higher self so you can determine what needs to be done next in your healing process, help you heal and release any issues that are still sore spots for you, and empower you to move past any beliefs that could be preventing you from fully resolving all of this. For example, if you believe it’s not safe to forgive because you could be hurt again, working with a hypnotherapist can help you reprogram your belief system so you can bless yourself with greater peace and healing.

You will know that you have completed the healing process when you can give thanks for the wisdom, strength, compassion and other benefits you received from this experience, and when you can feel compassion for your father and sincerely hope he finds his way to the same peace you hunger for in your own heart.

Soul Arcanum