Intimacy after hurt: Warming the heart
By Sherap Andrea Winn, MEd, Psychotherapist and Meditation Guide
After my March article, “Welcoming the sun, after the cold and darkness of life’s winters,” people have been talking to me about their frozen hearts and how they would like to thaw. Bad relationship break- ups, being raped, or seeing someone we love murdered, name only a handful of the harsh experiences people go through every day on this planet. Statistically every one of us has personally gone through or known someone who has gone through something like this. These harsh experiences don’t happen instantly, but rather we have to walk through them moment by moment, making decisions in the midst of incomprehensible pain, including decisions about whether we can trust ourselves and other people and how we will change to make sure something like that never happens to us in the future. This is how we freeze parts of ourselves in order to protect our vulnerability. It also narrows our ability to feel our hearts, experience our world, and to love others. At some point our spirit will call out to us for more than living frozen, and then the question is how to thaw after possibly many years of being ice.
Relational traumas like those named above shake us to our core, and they are not easy to recover from. Unfortunately many people live with the pain and limitations of the trauma, and they cope by smoking, drinking, doing drugs, etc. However, there are opportunities to experience healing sanctuary, and when we are ready for fuller living and loving, we can actively seek a place to thaw out our hearts.
Trauma leaves devastation, and for new growth to happen we need the protection and warmth of an incubator with firm, protective boundaries and a lot of human warmth and compassion inside those boundaries. This kind of healing sanctuary is a world created separate from the world we live in. The leader(s) of this separate world create an ideal society where people are heard and mindfully cared for, there is a greater sense of justice, there is the space and time for citizens to begin to pull out the pieces of their hearts and slowly make sense of them, and there is support and encouragement.
Creating such a sanctuary requires a great deal of skill. The sanctuary leader(s) must create a space where people can slowly reconnect with who they are and what is important to them. They also need the opportunity to engage with others in the sanctuary and start to have positive experiences of intimacy. These kinds of experiences empower participants to learn healthy ways to listen to and honour themselves in relationship with others.
Such a sanctuary is a transitional tool – it is a place to get support for healing your heart, and when the sanctuary leader sees you growing in strength, s/he will encourage you to bring your learnings into your life. They provide support for your bringing your re-formed, thawed, beating heart out into engaging people in the outside world. This is an important part of the healing process, because no one should live in an incubator forever. The goal is to thaw your wonderful, alive heart and give you support in re-introducing it, with all your learning, back into regular life and its challenges. Creating sanctuary for healing the heart is a method that has been used effectively for many years. This is the kind of healing environment I strive to create in my therapy services, as do many other healers. I invite you to call to discuss how my therapy can help you or come out for one of my programs and experience a caring, responsive place where you can begin to thaw the frozen places in your heart so you can live and love more fully.
To see Sherap’s upcoming programs, visit: www.sheraptherapy.webs.com or contact her directly at sherap@lifecycleswellness.com or by phone at 647-288-7847.
By Sherap Andrea Winn, MEd, Psychotherapist and Meditation Guide
After my March article, “Welcoming the sun, after the cold and darkness of life’s winters,” people have been talking to me about their frozen hearts and how they would like to thaw. Bad relationship break- ups, being raped, or seeing someone we love murdered, name only a handful of the harsh experiences people go through every day on this planet. Statistically every one of us has personally gone through or known someone who has gone through something like this. These harsh experiences don’t happen instantly, but rather we have to walk through them moment by moment, making decisions in the midst of incomprehensible pain, including decisions about whether we can trust ourselves and other people and how we will change to make sure something like that never happens to us in the future. This is how we freeze parts of ourselves in order to protect our vulnerability. It also narrows our ability to feel our hearts, experience our world, and to love others. At some point our spirit will call out to us for more than living frozen, and then the question is how to thaw after possibly many years of being ice.
Relational traumas like those named above shake us to our core, and they are not easy to recover from. Unfortunately many people live with the pain and limitations of the trauma, and they cope by smoking, drinking, doing drugs, etc. However, there are opportunities to experience healing sanctuary, and when we are ready for fuller living and loving, we can actively seek a place to thaw out our hearts.
Trauma leaves devastation, and for new growth to happen we need the protection and warmth of an incubator with firm, protective boundaries and a lot of human warmth and compassion inside those boundaries. This kind of healing sanctuary is a world created separate from the world we live in. The leader(s) of this separate world create an ideal society where people are heard and mindfully cared for, there is a greater sense of justice, there is the space and time for citizens to begin to pull out the pieces of their hearts and slowly make sense of them, and there is support and encouragement.
Creating such a sanctuary requires a great deal of skill. The sanctuary leader(s) must create a space where people can slowly reconnect with who they are and what is important to them. They also need the opportunity to engage with others in the sanctuary and start to have positive experiences of intimacy. These kinds of experiences empower participants to learn healthy ways to listen to and honour themselves in relationship with others.
Such a sanctuary is a transitional tool – it is a place to get support for healing your heart, and when the sanctuary leader sees you growing in strength, s/he will encourage you to bring your learnings into your life. They provide support for your bringing your re-formed, thawed, beating heart out into engaging people in the outside world. This is an important part of the healing process, because no one should live in an incubator forever. The goal is to thaw your wonderful, alive heart and give you support in re-introducing it, with all your learning, back into regular life and its challenges. Creating sanctuary for healing the heart is a method that has been used effectively for many years. This is the kind of healing environment I strive to create in my therapy services, as do many other healers. I invite you to call to discuss how my therapy can help you or come out for one of my programs and experience a caring, responsive place where you can begin to thaw the frozen places in your heart so you can live and love more fully.
To see Sherap’s upcoming programs, visit: www.sheraptherapy.webs.com or contact her directly at sherap@lifecycleswellness.com or by phone at 647-288-7847.
