8 Questions About Emotional Wellness

An interview by Genie Joseph, PhD

This is a slightly edited emotional-wellness interview with Genie Joseph, PhD, a relationship expert. While living in Honolulu, Genie created Love Life Radio and The Genie Show on cable TV. These days, she lives in Tucson, Arizona, and directs the Human-Animal Connection. She interviews me about my Grief and Loss retreats.

-Jon Terrell, M.A.

Genie: What is emotional healing work – and why is it important?

Jon: Many people struggle for years with issues that keep them from moving forward. Emotional Healing is often the missing link that helps them work through past pain and conflict relatively quickly.

And all of us have stepped over difficult situations and haven’t fully digested them. We may understand what happened, but still feel hurt, angry, or afraid. So past events can keep affecting us and keep us from fully living in the present moment.

These ghosts from the past haunt us, take up a huge amount of space in our psyche, and keep us from living the life we want. That's why emotional healing matters.

Genie: What is an example of how a past suppressed emotion might be affecting your life today?
Jon: Suppressed emotions are like the unseen parts of an iceberg. We’re only aware of the tiny visible tip and unaware of the power and force below the visibility line. What is below ordinary conscious awareness affects us in unseen ways.

A person might feel very anxious about something happening in their life today, but the intensity of their response is driven by the force of the past. It could be missing an appointment, getting a traffic ticket, or being passed over for a new position at work. Or having a date not go as planned.

While for most of us these experiences, while uncomfortable, are not major traumatic events, sometimes they feel that way, and the effect can linger for days or weeks. At our retreats, these situations often lead us to uncover a deep core of pain that loving awareness can then help resolve.

Unresolved emotional pain from the past can project onto our present situations. The old story overlays the present, making today feel uncomfortable and leaving us feeling small, devitalized, and victimized.

If you have a large amount of suppressed emotion from the past driving your current perception, it's not only hard to see the present clearly, but the iceberg also constantly generates powerful fear. This can create an ongoing anxiety or worry about the present. Talking about the tip doesn’t help much because emotional intensity below awareness fuels it.

Genie: Can positive thinking or positive intentions help with the iceberg?

Jon: Sometimes positive thinking can be useful, but the deep solution is found below the conscious mind, the thinking mind. People spend an enormous amount of time and effort trying to solve these issues mentally, with techniques like positive thinking, making lists of what to do and not do, and all sorts of thought-based behaviors that don’t get to the root of the problem, which lies in the feeling realms, not thinking.

I find that working with our thoughts or perceptions, and trying to change them, has some value, but it’s often slow going. I know people who have invested years in psychotherapy who are perhaps better at coping with life, but still are plagued by deep fears, anger, depression, anxiety, and so on…all affecting them and encroaching on their present life moments. These methods are more effective after emotional healing, to help integrate the changes into daily life.

Emotional healing means using the right tool for the job, and positive thinking and positive intentions aren't enough when the problem comes from deeper emotions. You need an emotional tool to handle emotional distress. You can’t just think your way out of emotional wounding or crises. The undertow, caused by the solidity of the emotional iceberg, will eventually undermine positive thinking, which is why many people get frustrated when they rely exclusively on those types of techniques.

Genie: How long does it take to heal an iceberg? Even one from infancy or childhood?

Jon: Of course there is no one-size-fits-all answer, but at my emotional healing retreats, the Grief and Loss Retreats and the Shalom retreats, I've found that after one weekend, almost everyone sees significant results and transformation. Most participants report a huge shift. Some people find they need to do the work in layers and may return for more retreats over months to handle the next layer.

We usually recommend 3 retreats within a short period. For example, one woman, who was always the nicest person to everyone, discovered she had a lot of suppressed anger. After one weekend retreat, she got her power and passion back, which hidden anger had stolen. Anger kept coming back through other people’s anger toward her, keeping her boxed in and ungrounded.

Boy, was she grounded and alive at the end of that retreat. Then a few months later, she continued her emotional healing journey. She was ready to tackle the deeper layer of grief she had suppressed. Grief over not having lived the full life she wanted. She had given away her aliveness and had to grieve that she had been boxed up for so long. But almost everyone benefits tremendously from participating in even one retreat.

Genie: What is it about retreats that allow people to handle emotions they weren’t able to handle on their own?

Jon: These events are done in a group setting for a very valuable reason…it just can’t be done one-on-one. A safe, loving community is really important for deep emotional healing. One reason people don’t want to deal with old emotions on their own is that it isn’t comfortable – and they’re afraid they’ll get stuck in pain.
At the retreat, we help people feel safe and loved enough to go back and recover lost memories and emotions. We make sure people get all the way through the tunnel and don’t stop the process halfway.

Creating a sense of safety is essential to the depth this work reaches. Especially if a person doesn’t feel safe in other areas of their life, creating a safe space is very therapeutic. This allows the person to fully face the experiences they couldn’t handle as a baby or young child.

As a young person, emotional or physical pain can sometimes be too intense for their sense of self to hold it and assimilate it. The death of a parent, for example, may just be too much to handle without splitting or spinning out of their bodies into the mental realms. Stories, and there are many valuable ones, can help a child make sense of pain.

As an adult, in a safe enough environment, you can actually metabolize trauma and pain and thus release the old sorrow and associated feelings. With loving support and healing as an adult, you can heal the inner child and come into your own body, perhaps at a deeper level than you ever could before. This brings you more completely into the present moment.

Deep, enduring transformation happens when that occurs. It’s exciting to witness this change energetically, physically, in the eyes, even in the skin. Emotionally, they can receive and express love more fully. We see a beautiful confidence and presence emerge that hasn’t been there in a long while, or ever before.

Genie: Can your emotional healing help people who are depressed?

Jon: Yes, this could be helpful, even for chronic depression, but it has to be assessed carefully. Some people have biochemical depression and need medication. On the other hand, if you haven’t dealt with your grief and you don’t know how to safely let your anger out, it can turn into a feeling of numbness, leading to a depressed life. Through the emotional healing work we do, people can free up their life force, which got stuck in old emotions. Old, stuck feelings can be like an iceberg of frozen emotions. As we go into them with group support, they begin to melt quickly…the waters of life flowing again. 

Genie: What kind of healing can people expect on a retreat?

Jon: I see miracles on every single retreat. People arrive stuck with difficult emotions such as grief over death or loss of someone, a tragic accident, loss of a parent – issues that have affected them their whole lives. Then after the emotional healing work, they look and feel completely different. It just feels good to free all that stuck energy and get the passion back.

For a lot of people, when they begin to feel more alive, they are ready to do some more work, so they do a series of retreats.

Genie: How fast can people really change from deep emotional wounds?

Jon: One of the things I’ve learned about emotional healing is that every emotion has its own speed, time, texture, rhythm for when it wants to heal. Grief is slow, heavy, tiring. People need to slow down to digest it, take it in, be with it, as it transforms.

Anger, on the other hand, is big, fast, and full of energy; it can scare many of us, so we often suppress it. This can lead to someone being caught in a victim story their whole life! But if we let our old anger in, it transforms, and we quickly regain its vitality, power, and aliveness. We stand up with a new strength. It's amazing to see this transformation, years of stuckness evaporating!

Fear can be paralyzing, but in a short while, it can shift from stop to go, bringing unexpected joy and excitement to living.

So in a long weekend, a lot can happen. Often, there's a moment of divine intervention, a jaw-dropping shift where the old story drops away like a veil, and wow…everything opens up. We see it at every retreat. I have really learned to trust the process of it, the process of healing. I am inspired by the work every day.

Genie: Thank you, Jon!

Thank you, Genie!

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