Healing doesn’t mean that you can be well or thrive in any environment.
Sometimes your anxiety and difficult emotions are guidance telling you to leave.
Healing means becoming more yourself and more in tune with your authentic needs and who you truly are.
So becoming free doesn’t always mean you can do what you wanted to do, or what you thought you would be able to do, before you started doing inner work.
For example, if you experience anxiety in certain situations, healing or discovering what’s truly causing that anxiety doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be able to stay in those situations and be free of anxiety,
Sometimes it does. And that’s wonderful.
Sometimes it’s enough to face those situations and your anxiety in them, step by step, to become free. And then you can be there with more ease and maybe even enjoy being there.
But sometimes your anxiety isn’t just something to overcome. Sometimes it’s guidance telling you that you’re not meant to be there.
An example
You might, for example, be a highly sensitive person or an empath and work in a very hectic corporate environment where people are stressed and negative, and you are pushed to change your schedule within seconds each day if things come up.
Some people may have no problem at all in that workplace. And some extroverted, non-highly sensitive people may even thrive in that environment.
But you don’t.
And no matter how much inner work you do, being in that environment is not healthy for your nervous system.
You can meditate, work on your reactions, push yourself, sit in the bathroom at work and breathe when things become too intense. And you can face your overwhelm or anxiety step-by-step.
It might work to a certain extent. You can absolutely learn to handle some of those situations better.
You might also benefit from learning about high sensitivity and from understanding why you react this way and why your colleagues don’t.
That understanding can be a big breakthrough in and of itself.
There is such relief in understanding yourself, why you react the way you do, and to know that you are not alone, that other people feel this way too.
When your anxiety is healthy
But the truth might be that you can’t be in environments like that, and that, even if a part of you enjoys being there, it’s just too much stress on your nervous system.
You simply cannot work in an environment like that without it harming you.
And that’s why you have so much anxiety there.
In this case, your anxiety is not something to work on more or fix.
It’s guidance.
So, in this case, it’s healthy.
It SHOULD be there, because it’s telling you that something is wrong.
It may take time to process that truth
It may take time to process that truth intellectually and emotionally. Maybe this was the work you had seen yourself doing. Maybe your family always wanted you to do it. Maybe all your friends work in that same environment.
It might be difficult to take in the truth that it doesn’t work for you.
And maybe you need time to grieve the loss of that part of your identity.
That’s completely natural.
And it’s not something to skip over.
You can be sad about it. Really sad.
And yet, relieved at the same time.
Healing means you become more you
Healing doesn’t mean that you will be able to be well or thrive in any environment.
It means that you become more yourself and in tune with your authentic needs and who you truly are.
And sometimes that means letting go of an old version of who you were, or a version you thought you were or should be.
But when you do, you can gradually move toward a life that aligns with you, with who you truly are.
About Hanna Stenefalk
