How to love yourself when you are emotionally wounded

Do you find it hard to love and accept yourself?

Are you aware of any emotional wounds that you are carrying from relationship to relationship?

Emotional wounds are like physical wounds, they need to be looked at to identify the extent of the wound, and to locate the source of the injury in order to heal them. When a physical wound is not taken care of quickly, that wound can worsen and lead to infection spreading to other parts of our body causing more damage.

The same is true for emotional wounds. They need to be taken care of immediately. If they are ignored, they worsen and become more damaging to our sense of self and how we relate to others. Keeping those wounds untreated and hidden can also cause you to stop sharing your true self in your relationships.

We also need to find the source of the wound in order to treat that emotional wound effectively. Some of the types of emotional wounds that can affect our self-esteem and our relationships with others include: rejection issues, abandonment, abuse, and wounds from toxic relationships.

A cycle can occur where the experience of rejection leaves an emotional wound that leads to a drop in your self-esteem. The loss of self-esteem and self-doubt is then carried into your other relationships negatively affecting those relationships.

Have you ignored any emotional wounds from previous relationships?

Some people ignore their emotional wounds because they see it as sign of weakness. Others find it too painful to pay attention to thinking that ignoring the wound will stop the pain. Does ignoring a physical injury stop the pain? Not usually!

Ignoring our emotional wounds lead to them remaining. Wounds need to be addressed and not repressed….

To hear how these wounds can be addressed and treated, click on the listen tab of this website to hear podcast episode #16.

(photo by Annie Spratt)