The Different Paths to Healing

If you have a powerful, self-negative inner voice, and are ready to see about healing it, there are a number of different paths I have seen people take.

Going it Alone

Some people, after gaining insight into things like where their wounds came from, and how it is affecting them, will decide to “go it alone”. They will enter into a period of quiet self-reflection and inward searching, to try and understand how it all happened and how to move forward from there.

This approach will work well for many people, and help them move forward along the five levels of healing.

It will often take longer because they are unguided, but this is not necessarily a problem. If the wound and its self-negativity do not feel severe, and you feel generally fine and happy with your life, then there is no rush to heal quickly — or perhaps even at all.

Professional Therapy

At the other extreme, some people will feel, with strong conviction, that their wound is quite severe and is causing a dangerous level of disruption in their lives. Broken relationships, career frustration and even self-destructive behavior are all part of the fact pattern, and the best option for this scenario is for the person to seek formal treatment with a trained professional therapist.

Since a person in this situation will also be feeling very strong self-negativity, they may also feel a self-punishing stigma around “needing to get help”, and this is often a barrier to their allowing themselves to get the support they need. Said another way, they know they need help but they are literally ashamed of this fact, and therefore ashamed to actually go and get it. This is a mistake.

One of my goals in speaking publicly about inner conflict and self-negativity is precisely to normalize and destigmatize these things in a person, precisely because they are indeed so normal and so common among so many people.

Good, normal, productive, impressive people — CEOs, university professors, devoted moms, studious teens — all have private self-negativity and inner conflict. And it’s ok.

We all inherited this in one form or another. It’s not our fault, and we can suffer through if we must — but we don’t have to.

If you feel you have a need that may warrant the attention of a professional therapist, please err on the side of caution, and see one.

There is nothing wrong with you if you do.

Finding a Mentor

Besides the two extremes of “going it alone” and “seeking professional therapy”, there is a third type of scenario which is “somewhere in between”.

For people in this scenario, they do feel the pain of their inner conflict and suffer from self-negativity, but do not feel they need “serious professional help”.

However, when they find a mentor who can provide the right combination of support and guidance, they are happy to engage. In other words, they don’t need “help”, but they are always on the lookout for ways to improve their well-being and overall happiness. And finding a way to heal their inner conflict and self-negativity is seen as a tremendous area of upside opportunity in their lives.

In my own work with meditation students, we have seen this scenario a lot — the vast majority of people who are curious about “meditation” are actually looking for a healthier, uncomplicated way to relieve their stress and anxiety, which is being powerfully driven by the self-negative inner voice of “I’m never good enough”, “I’m the wrong kind”, and “People only want me for my (money/body/prestige).”