Have you ever felt like you’re doing all the “right” things for your emotional wellbeing, but somehow still feel stuck and defeated?
On paper, you might be doing everything “right” – meditating daily, journaling, exercising, talking about your feelings, practicing positive affirmations. Yet something still feels off. You can’t shake the sense that you’re missing a crucial piece of the puzzle.
After working with thousands of people on their emotional healing journeys, I’ve discovered something fascinating: The most profound breakthroughs often come not from working harder at healing, but from understanding how healing actually works – and it’s rarely what we’ve been taught.
The truth is, most of our cultural understanding about emotional healing is backward. We’ve inherited approaches that sound logical but actually work against how our brains and bodies naturally process emotions.
Let’s explore five counterintuitive truths about emotional healing that might completely transform your approach – and finally create the breakthrough you’ve been seeking.
1. Accepting negative emotions makes them less powerful, not more intense
“What you resist, persists. What you accept, transforms.”
Most of us were raised with the idea that negative emotions are problems to be fixed, suppressed, or overcome as quickly as possible. We learn elaborate strategies to avoid feeling sad, angry, anxious, or disappointed.
It might sound strange, but the emotions you’re most afraid to feel are usually the ones most needing your attention. And here’s the paradox: the more you accept these emotions, the less power they have over you.
Think about that for a moment.
When you resist feeling anxiety, the anxiety about feeling anxious creates a compounding effect, amplifying the original emotion. It’s like emotional quicksand – the more you struggle against it, the deeper you sink.
But when you turn toward the emotion with curiosity rather than judgment, something fascinating happens: the emotion begins to shift and transform all on its own.
The bottom line:
Your emotions need acknowledgment, not fixing. They’re messengers, not enemies. When you fight them, the struggle amplifies them. When you welcome them with curiosity, they deliver their message and naturally begin to transform.
2. Your “negative” patterns are actually sophisticated protection mechanisms
Do you ever wonder why you keep repeating patterns you consciously want to change? Why, despite your best intentions and awareness, you fall back into the same old reactions?
Here’s a perspective shift that changes everything: What you perceive as your worst emotional habits are actually your nervous system’s best attempts to keep you safe.
Your brain’s primary job isn’t to make you happy; it’s to keep you alive.
Many of our most frustrating patterns – people-pleasing, perfectionism, avoidance, control issues – developed as protection strategies during times when we had limited options.
Perfectionism, for example, might have been your only reliable strategy to avoid criticism and gain approval. Your nervous system learned that mistakes were dangerous.
By honoring the protective intention behind your patterns rather than fighting them, you can begin a dialogue with these parts of yourself. Instead of trying to force them away, you can acknowledge their service and gradually introduce new, less costly ways of creating safety.
The bottom line:
Healing begins when you stop fighting against your patterns and start understanding what they’ve been trying to do for you. When you recognize even your most frustrating habits as protection mechanisms rather than character flaws, you can engage with them from a place of compassion rather than combat.
3. You can’t just think your way out of emotional problems
Have you ever noticed how you can logically understand something about your emotions, yet still feel stuck in the same patterns? There’s a neurobiological reason for this.
Your emotional responses aren’t just stored in the thinking part of your brain. They live in your body, sometimes in places that don’t respond to logical reasoning.
Trying to solve emotional problems with just your mind is like trying to fix a computer by talking to the screen. You’re not addressing the underlying system where the issue actually resides.
This is why “knowing better” rarely translates to “feeling better” or “doing better.” Your body needs different input than just your mind to create change.
Research in neuroscience confirms this disconnection. Studies using brain imaging show that the regions processing emotional responses (like the amygdala) operate separately from the thinking brain (prefrontal cortex). This explains why you can intellectually know something isn’t a threat while your body still reacts as if it is.
The bottom line:
Emotional healing requires approaches that engage both the body and mind together. When you work with both systems simultaneously, seemingly intractable patterns begin to shift with surprising speed.
4. Comfort isn’t always what leads to healing
We’ve been conditioned to believe that feeling better is always the goal of emotional work. But what if temporary discomfort is sometimes exactly what’s needed for deeper healing?
Here’s a fascinating truth: Growth happens at the edge of your comfort zone, and healing often requires moving toward discomfort rather than away from it.
This doesn’t mean traumatizing yourself or engaging in emotional masochism. Rather, it means developing the capacity to safely feel difficult emotions instead of automatically avoiding them.
The people who make the most profound healing progress aren’t those who avoid all discomfort; they’re the ones who’ve learned to stay present with difficult feelings or experiences while maintaining a sense of safety.
The bottom line:
Healing happens when you face what’s difficult while simultaneously keeping your nervous system regulated. It’s not about forcing yourself into overwhelming situations; it’s about expanding your capacity to be with discomfort while maintaining your center.
5. Healing is cyclical, not linear
We’ve been conditioned to view healing as a linear process: identify problem → apply solution → problem resolved. This works beautifully for fixing a broken pipe or solving a math equation. But emotional healing follows an entirely different pattern.
Emotional healing moves in spirals, not straight lines.
This means you may revisit the same themes and patterns multiple times, but ideally from a higher perspective each time. What feels like regression is often the system bringing up deeper layers of the same issue for processing.
I’ve watched countless people beat themselves up for “still dealing with this issue” when they were actually engaging with it at a deeper level – a sign of progress, not failure.
The bottom line:
What feels like going backward is often healing at a deeper level. The spiral nature of healing means themes will repeat, but this doesn’t mean you haven’t progressed. The key questions become: “How am I responding differently this time?” and “What new understanding is available now that wasn’t before?”
From Knowledge to Transformation
These five counterintuitive truths have profound implications for how we approach emotional healing. Here’s a quick recap of the key points:
- Accept emotions rather than fighting them
- Honor the protective intention behind “negative” patterns
- Engage the body, not just the mind
- Develop capacity for discomfort rather than always seeking comfort
- Recognize the cyclical nature of healing
But here’s the thing… Knowing these truths intellectually is just the beginning.
To experience their transformative power, you need approaches that work with these principles on a deep, profound level.
This is where Tapping (also known as EFT) has proven to be remarkably effective. What makes Tapping unique is how it aligns with all five of these truths simultaneously:
- It creates a context for accepting emotions while providing tools to process them
- It honors protective patterns while gently introducing new possibilities
- It engages the body and mind together for complete processing
- It allows you to face difficult emotions while keeping your nervous system regulated
- It supports the natural, cyclical unfolding of the healing process
In The Tapping Solution App, we have several guided sessions that incorporate these principles, helping you create transformation that goes beyond temporary relief. Here are a few categories of sessions that can help:
- Emotional Freedom Category
- Change Your Thinking
- Support Your Body
- Creating Lasting Change Audiobook
- And so much more!
If you take one thing out of this, let it be this: the most powerful shifts happen when you align your approach with how healing actually works, rather than how you think it should work.
So, what can you do today to put these learnings into practice?
Until next time… Keep Tapping!
Nick Ortner
P.S. Which of these counterintuitive truths resonates most with your experience? Share in the comments—I’d love to hear your perspective!
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