THE STAGES OF EMOTIONAL HEALING To have a clearer understanding of emotional healing and the process that individuals go through as they recover from their emotional wounding, it is important to have a look at the various stages that they traverse as they try to make sense of their emotional injuries and deal with them in the process of healing. When people experience an emotional devastation such as that of loss through death or divorce, they go through the various stages in the process of healing as they deal with their pain. Although these stages are universal, the sequence may differ from person to person. One may also move back and forth between the stages on the way to recovery and some stages may overlap with each other. They may also happen …show more content…
The focus at this stage is to acquire as much information and knowledge about the injury as possible. Questions such as the following are asked in this exploration phase; - What actually happened? - Why did it happen? - Why did it happen to me - How did I feel then? - What do I wish happened or had not? - What was most hurtful about what happened? The exploration stage hinges mainly on the memory and recall of what happened. Some people experience memory difficulties when they are very upset or when the event was highly hurtful. It is comforting to know that for the healing process, the memory and recall of the hurtful event does not necessarily have to be perfect. One can heal even with minimum recall.