What does it mean to emotionally heal? It means that you know what you are thinking or doing that causes fear, anxiety, depression, guilt, fear, anger, jealousy, and so on, and how to learn from and heal these painful feelings. It means that you no longer turn to addictions to avoid loneliness, heartache, heartbreak, sorrow or grief because you know how to manage and release these painful feelings. It means that you do not feel like a victim of others’ choices and instead operate from a place of personal power, taking loving care of yourself rather than being reactive. It means that you are able to manifest the gifts you have been given and spend your time in what brings you joy. It means that you know how to fill yourself with love and share love with others rather than trying to get love and approval from others.

How Does Healing Occur?

How far can you afford to bend your values to preserve your relationship? How far can you go in giving yourself up to avoid losing your partner? How much of yourself can you afford to sacrifice to not lose someone you love? How do we find the balance between maintaining our integrity and bending our values?

Most relationships require us to bend to a certain extent, but how much can we bend without a sense of loss of self?

There is an inherent paradox in these questions: A truly loving relationship is a relationship where each person accepts and even values the differences between them. If you have to excessively bend your values to preserve the relationship, what are you preserving? You are not preserving a loving relationship since love does not demand that you excessively bend your values.

Rather than look at relationship in terms of bending values to accommodate another person, let’s look at it in terms of each person learning and growing as a result of their differences in values.

For example, Patricia is a highly responsible person with a strong work ethic, while Sam tends to let things go a lot, which results in an imbalance regarding financial responsibility in the relationship. Patricia is not happy about this. Does she just accept these differences to preserve the relationship? No! That is not what a good relationship is really about. Since a good relationship is about each person learning and growing from their differences, rather than one or both people giving themselves up, Sam and Patricia need to engage in open explorations about their differences. They each have beliefs that can be explored, and in this process, new learning occurs that leads to intrinsic change rather than superficial compromise.