#healing technique

[mtg-cards-hourly]

Healing Technique

Artist: Michele Parisi TCG Player Link Scryfall Link EDHREC Link

[theearthforce]

If you want to increase your emotional distance from an awful past event, instead of labeling it as an event happened to you in this current life, it may be useful to tell yourself that this event happened in a past life. This method works because we tend to associate ourselves less with events from past lives, and associate ourselves more with things from this life. The less association we feel and the less we identify ourselves to an event, the less effect it has on us.

If you find it bizarre to label a past event in this life as an event in past life, consider this: according to spiritual teacher Seth who was channeled by Jane Roberts in the 1960s-80s, for humans, when we sleep, we return to the spiritual realm - just like what we do when we pass on - temporarily, then we come back to the physical world when we wake up. Therefore, we go through a mini cycle of death and rebirth on a daily basis. From this perspective, past events from this life are similar to events from past lives, as every day is a new life and a new beginning for us.

Our powers lie in the present, which also means that we have the powers to choose how we deal with the past. This trick is not intended to encourage you to simply shove away your past and not face it, but to allow you to handle it more effectively. For example, when we are too strongly identified with the past, we can’t easily free ourselves from its energy. By increasing our emotional distance from it, the healing process can be more efficient.

The above is a mini trick that hopefully can help you find more peace with your past. May you be blessed!

[archiveofpainfulshit]

[archiveofpainfulshit]

Shame & Suffering

(Personal anecdote found on reddit)

Learning to love myself.

I had no idea just how traumatized I was. How filled with shame until I learned to love myself.

The thing that worked for me was realizing - you can't think your way out of self hatred. You have to love your way out of self hatred. And I mean this literally.

What complex trauma does is make us hate ourselves. These are thoughts we have. These are emotions we have. And what do we do when they come up?

"When I was having negative thoughts about myself. I wrote them on toilet paper and flushed them to where they belonged." (according to one comment in this thread).

That negative thought is a part of us. It is not something to be rejected. It is something to be loved and cherished.

Several people said Mushrooms. Mushrooms work by basically turning your brain off & on again. According to recent research, they sort of get rid of the less than useful connections between neurons and streamline things. For more information look up the research - they used a modified Rabies virus to track the changes to neurons - google should get you the rest of the way there.

That negative thought you have is a group of neurons - a part of you. And when they come up you reject them. You flush them down the toilet.

The woo woo thing that worked for me was realizing that just being aware of the thought, just noticing the thought wasn't enough. I had to love the thought.

I had to be able to summon the feeling of of love and give love to the part of me that held on to the thought.

"Not really woo woo but my therapist uses somatic therapy (feeling emotions in your body) and DAYUM that has worked the fastest and most intense for me." - u/SuitableWinner7802

I can't think my way out of self hatred. I have to LOVE my way out of self hatred. I have to know what love feels like and be able to give it to myself.

The system I was taught and that worked for me is Self-Compassion.

The three steps are here: https://selfcompassion.web.unc.edu/what-is-self-compassion/the-three-components-of-self-compassion/

In a nutshell it's

Mindfulness - notice that you're having a negative thought.

I think we're all probably pretty good at noticing when we get triggered. But if not, some sort of mindfulness practice can help.

2) Realize that negative thoughts are what we call suffering. Suffering isn't being poor or sick. Suffering is how we feel about ourselves because we think "poor" is something to be ashamed of. And everybody suffers.

The distance between shame and suffering isn't as big as you'd think. If you feel shame, you are suffering. If you ever hear of someone suffering - they're probably suffering from shame. It's not a 1:1 thing - there's a reason we have 2 words, but if you replace the word shame with suffering & suffering with shame in everyday language, your attitude towards shame will change.

3) Give yourself love. Real love. Actual love. Watch your favorite feel-good movie. Remember that feeling & summon it while holding on to that idea.

What works for me is to say "Thank you for holding on to that memory. For protecting me from ever feeling like that again. I know it was painful to hold on to that. I love you." and then giving myself a hug. The hug is the most important part.

If you are suffering due to shame, remember that you are suffering and everyone suffers. And it is possible to love yourself. Really love yourself.

That's the woo woo thing that worked for me.

[archiveofpainfulshit]

Helpful Personal Anecdote I found on Reddit:

I Thought I Had a Personality Disorder. The Truth Was My Body Was Frozen in Time

In an age of endless information, it’s a common reflex to turn to the internet to make sense of our inner turmoil. When we struggle with relationships, work, or a persistent feeling of emptiness, we search for a name for our pain. We find acronyms—ADHD, NPD, BPD—and in them, a sense of order. The label offers a framework, an explanation that promises control over the chaos. It’s a rational attempt to understand a life that feels unmanageable. But what happens when the label we find isn't the answer, but just a more sophisticated hiding place for a deeper truth? This is a story about a forty-year journey through a maze of misdiagnoses—both from others and, most powerfully, from myself—that ended not with a new label, but with a profound and unexpected awakening. It’s about realizing that the person I thought I was, was only the armor I had built to survive.

1. Your Intellect Can Be a Trap, Not a Tool Our intellect is a powerful asset, but it can also become our primary defense against feeling emotional pain.

From the outside, we were a perfect middle-class family. Inside, the home was emotionally rotten. My father was a chaotic storm of charm and terror; my mother orbited him in a dance of histrionic love and silent hatred, hating what she did for us but believing she had to. To survive, I retreated to the only safe place I had: my own mind. I became a cerebral robot, like Number 5 in the movie Short Circuit—a machine observing a world I couldn't feel. This pattern calcified into adulthood. After a particularly painful breakup where I was called a "psychopath," I dove headfirst into online content about personality disorders. I consumed endless videos about Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), particularly from thinkers like Sam Vaknin, who offered unflinchingly precise descriptions of my internal world. This intellectual exploration gave me a name for my pain and a powerful sense of control. I finally settled on a diagnosis: Covert Narcissist. This label made perfect sense of my emptiness, my dysfunctional relationships, and my deep-seated shame. But this intellectual understanding was a trap. By focusing all my energy on analyzing the what—the diagnosis—I was reinforcing the very mechanism that kept me sick: the disconnection from my body and the emotions it held. I was using my thoughts to avoid my feelings, building a more elaborate cage for myself, not a path to freedom.

2. A Breakthrough Isn't the Same as Integration.

My quest for answers led me to a Discord server for "self-aware" people who identified with NPD and were trying to heal. It was the first place I could be completely honest, a community of mirrors where I could play the "joker" and reveal my ugliest parts without being cast out. There, I met Rufus, a Hungarian man who, like me, lived entirely in his head. We bonded, and he came to visit me in Slovakia. Together, we decided to try LSD, not as an act of hedonism, but as a desperate attempt at a cure. The experience was not an escape; it was a collision with everything I had spent my life avoiding. For the first time, I truly cried—a raw, somatic release of sweat, tears, and mucus as I lay on the floor. In that state, the elaborate intellectual "fantasy world" I had built shattered repeatedly. For a fleeting moment, the walls came down. As I later wrote, "...i realized that goodness / love and emotional empathy does exist..." I saw, for the first time, a world beyond the lens of my trauma. It was a breakthrough—a powerful, undeniable glimpse of another reality. But it wasn't the answer. The moment the drug wore off, the cerebral trap snapped shut again. The profound feelings of love and empathy vanished, remaining only as intellectual memories. ...and will never heal because all that is gone again... the feelings that were there remained only in my head, I couldn't evoke them, evoke the feeling of good people and the feeling of love. I had seen the truth, but I couldn't feel it anymore. This taught me one of the most crucial lessons of my journey: a momentary insight is not the same as the long, hard work of embodying that insight. A breakthrough can show you the door, but it doesn't walk you through it.

3. True Change Can Require a Total Collapse Sometimes, the functional life we’ve meticulously constructed must completely fall apart before we can truly heal. After the LSD trip, despite my newfound knowledge, I fell back into old patterns with a vengeance. I entered a new relationship with a woman named Ada. We connected over shared trauma, but soon the dynamic became toxic. I saw my own dysfunctional patterns—my entitlement, my fear of abandonment—mirrored in her. The final break came amidst the noise and crowds of the Colours music festival, a painfully ironic backdrop for a quiet, internal implosion. The pain peaked when I tried to be vulnerable, confessing that I might have BPD. She began to cry, but not for me. As she later admitted, she was crying because she had "found another magor." My attempt at connection was met with the ultimate invalidation. At the same time, my professional life imploded. For years, I had survived in jobs through a "functional freeze"—a state of chronic procrastination and passivity, essentially doing nothing. A previous boss had protected me like a son, but under new management, my lack of performance was no longer tolerated. I was fired from a high-status job, and the shame was immense. This final collapse was devastating, but necessary. It stripped away my last two defenses: the identity I found in a relationship and the status I derived from my career. I was left with nothing but my shame and my emptiness. With nowhere left to run and no intellectual label left to hide behind, the conditions were finally right for a real shift.

4. The Real Awakening Is Felt, Not Thought

The true awakening didn't come from more research, another video, or a new diagnosis. It began quietly, in the aftermath of the collapse, with small acts of self-care and safety. I started taking responsibility for myself, a conscious process of "reparenting." I made myself a proper meal—roasted potatoes, salmon, and tartar sauce—and savored it. I reconnected with an emotionally intelligent friend who provided a safe space where I could be completely honest without judgment. The pivotal moment was preceded by a dream. I woke up one Sunday morning from a vivid scene in which I confronted my father, telling him, "Your mother and father were bad people. This is generational trauma." The dream was the key, unlocking something deep in my psyche. Later that day, after my meal, I did something I hadn't done in four years: I messaged my estranged father. As I hit send, something broke loose. I began to cry with the same intensity as I had on LSD, a deep, somatic release of decades of stored grief, shame, and fear. In that moment, I felt my body for the first time. I felt the anxiety stored in my stomach. I messaged my friend from the Discord server, EOS. "Something is happening," I wrote. "I feel my stomach for the first time. There's anxiety there." She told me I was having a "C-PTSD thaw." My first reaction was skeptical dismissal—more "spiritual nonsense." But as I sat with the experience, and later structured my thoughts through a Socratic dialogue with an AI partner, the truth began to settle in. My life wasn't the result of a fixed personality disorder like NPD or BPD. It was a logical, protective "C-PTSD freeze" response to overwhelming childhood trauma. As I finally typed out, "...and I admit to myself that it wasn't npd but CPTSD freeze, which I've been in since childhood." Healing didn't begin when I found the right label. It began when I stopped trying to figure it out and finally allowed myself to feel it.

Conclusion: From a Frozen Mind to an Embodied Life

My journey has been a slow, painful process of thawing. I am moving from being a cerebral robot trapped by intellectual labels to becoming an embodied person learning to live in the present moment. Healing, for me, isn't about analysis anymore. It's about feeling my posture as I sit at my computer and noticing the defensive, lifelong hunch in my shoulders. It's about taking a walk and consciously feeling my feet on the ground, breathing deliberately, and shaking the tension from my arms. The central message of my story is this: many of the behaviors we label as deep personality flaws are actually sophisticated survival strategies born from trauma. They are the armor a child builds to endure the unendurable. What if the story you tell yourself about who you are is simply the armor you needed to survive? And what might happen if you finally felt safe enough to let it melt away?

[archiveofpainfulshit]

Daily Self-Compassion & Safety Script (2–5 minutes)

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Here’s a short, gentle daily reminder script you can use to reinforce safety, delight, and protective presence — for little you and adult you. It’s trauma-informed and keeps it simple so your nervous system can absorb it without overthinking:

Step 1: Ground Yourself

Sit or stand comfortably.

Feet on the ground. Shoulders relaxed but upright.

Take 2 slow, deep breaths.

Say quietly or in your mind:

“I am here. I am allowed to take up space. I am allowed to feel safe.”

Step 2: Bring Little You Into Awareness

Imagine her sitting nearby. Notice her expression — uncertainty, curiosity, or even a tentative smile.

Silently say:

“I see you. You are safe here. You are wanted. You are allowed to choose closeness.”

Offer a hug or hand-holding only if she moves closer of her own choice.

Reflect delight:

“I enjoy being with you. You make me happy. You are celebrated.”

Step 3: Include Adult You

Turn attention inward. Feel your adult body.

Silently say:

“I enjoy being with myself. I am allowed to take up space. I am allowed to feel safe. I am allowed to delight in myself.”

Optional: Place your hand gently on your chest or shoulder as a grounding cue.

Step 4: Reflect & Close

Take a final slow breath.

Say:

“I am allowed to feel safe. I am allowed to be seen. I am allowed to enjoy closeness. I am allowed to grow.”

Open your eyes if closed. Stretch or move gently to reinforce the sense of presence in your body.

Tips for Use:

Do this daily if possible. Even 2–3 minutes counts.

You can do it in the morning, before bed, or during a quiet moment.

If emotions rise, pause, breathe, and allow tears or feelings — it’s part of healing.

Over time, your nervous system will start associating safety, delight, and choice with both yourself and interactions with others.

[archiveofpainfulshit]

Daily Practice Plan for Rewiring Safety, Delight, and Embodied Confidence

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Total Daily Time: 10–25 minutes (can be broken into chunks)

Part 1: Little-You Visualization (3–7 minutes)

Goal: Provide protective, voluntary, delighting presence to your childhood self.

Steps:

Anchor: Sit or lie in a safe, comfortable space. Feet grounded. Shoulders soft but upright. Take 2–3 slow, deep breaths.

Bring her in: Imagine little you sitting nearby. Notice posture, expression, emotions. Let her exist without judgment.

Offer agency: Ask silently, “Would you like a hug or to sit close?” Wait for her choice. Let her move closer or not.

Mirror delight: If she engages, reflect joy and warmth:“I enjoy being with you. I am glad you are here. You are safe. You are wanted.”

Grief and comfort: Allow yourself to acknowledge what she lacked. Tears are welcome.

Step back: Let her sit safely. Take a slow breath.

Anchor: Silently repeat:“I am allowed to feel safe. I am allowed to enjoy closeness. I am allowed to take up space.”

Part 2: Adult Self-Integration (3–7 minutes)

Goal: Bring the safety, delight, and choice you offered little you into your adult body.

Steps:

Anchor: Sit with eyes open or closed. Feel the body in contact with the ground/chair.

Direct delight inward: Visualize yourself as the adult you are now. Imagine offering the same warmth and protection to your adult body.

Internal dialogue examples:“I enjoy being with you. You are allowed to take up space. You are allowed to feel safe.” “You are allowed to delight in yourself and your presence.”

Optional somatic cue: Place your hand gently on your heart or shoulder to anchor the safety and delight physically.

Notice subtle changes: Slight chest softening, breath expansion, small smile — even fleeting responses are proof of rewiring.

Part 3: Real-World Micro-Exposure (3–10 minutes)

Goal: Collect corrective relational experiences to retrain nervous system expectations.

Steps:

Choose a safe interaction: Neutral, low-stakes, predictable environment (cashier, barista, coworker, friend).

Anchor: Take a deep breath before entering. Repeat:“I am allowed to be here. I am allowed to take up space. I am allowed to enjoy this interaction.”

Observe posture and voice: Soft, upright, and grounded. Speak slowly and clearly.

Allow small presence: Make eye contact for a second longer than usual. Say one thing clearly without over-explaining. Let small gestures of visibility happen naturally.

Reflect: Afterward, ask yourself:“Did I allow myself to be seen safely? Did I notice delight or small positive responses? Did I protect little me inside?”

Celebrate: Even a minor softening of chest, smile, or relaxed posture is proof of progress.

Daily Integration Notes

Duration: Start small. 10 minutes is enough. Build up gradually.

Order flexibility: You can do visualization first thing in the morning and micro-exposure later, or vice versa.

Frequency: Ideally daily, even if only 5–10 minutes total. Consistency rewires the nervous system.

Tracking: Optional: Keep a journal of subtle shifts — posture, tension, smiles, feelings of safety, or delight. Over time, you’ll notice patterns.

Gentle reminders: If grief, fear, or panic emerges, pause, breathe, and return to Part 1 for little-you grounding.

Long-Term Outcome

Little-you safety builds internal validation and protective instinct.

Adult self-integration allows embodied acceptance of closeness, delight, and presence.

Micro-exposure retrains real-world expectations: closeness doesn’t equal coercion or contempt.

Over time, your nervous system begins to encode:“Visibility = safety. Closeness = choice. Delight is allowed.”

That’s the foundation for deep confidence that is not dependent on external validation.

[fancyhunterkunoichi11]

Mystical palm technique