Heal The Past

By Jon Terrell

How Our Retreats Heal The Past
So We Can Have Healthy Relationships

Most people attend our emotional healing retreats because they are in pain––the death of a loved one, the end of a relationship, multiple losses. Others attend because of suppressed feelings that lead them to feel depressed, angry, anxious, or sad. They want to heal the past so they can live a fulfilling, joyful life.

Our retreats often reveal an emotional hole that we've been unsuccessfully trying to fill with all sorts of coping behaviors. In many cases, that hole is rooted in our childhood experiences. 

When we are young, we need our parents to care for us. Without our caregivers, we would die. We need food and protection to survive physically. But life is more than physical survival. To thrive in this world, we need healthy parenting, which nurtures and protects us. 

Many of us weren't sufficiently cared for, or were traumatized in different ways, at that crucial time when we were building our brain’s neural networks for safety, competence, and relational intelligence. 

The Wounding Template

This wounding became a template for how we live in the world, affecting all our romantic and close personal relationships. We replay old patterns of relating and relive old stories. In a way, as Harville Hendrix and others have pointed out, we try to work through past lack of nurturing and caring in our present close, intimate relationships, but often end up replaying the old patterns. 

These patterns often occur below our ordinary awareness. Without realizing the cause, we can end up blaming others or the world for our problems, or blaming ourselves. The root cause lies in that early survival template.

We keep playing this out until we learn to take care of ourselves, love and nurture ourselves, and believe in ourselves. Change the "old story," and you change your world! That is how to heal the past.

Ways We Try To Heal The Past
Healthy and Unhealthy!

Most healthy methods of trying to heal the past can be slow, difficult and partial.

• Psychotherapy is often helpful, but can take years and may not lead beyond mental insights into our lives.
• Putting positive thoughts (affirmations, hypnotic suggestions, etc.) on top of the old pattering only has a temporary effect.
• A healthy diet and exercise can both help, but they don't reach the deeper issues, the undigested emotional pain.
• Meditation can help, but only a few practitioners go deep enough to face and heal the core wounding.

Many of us turn to unhealthy ways to avoid emotional pain and try to feel better. These can include numerous forms of addiction–alcohol, food, gambling, tobacco, etc. And there are very common and more subtle addictions such as habitually checking our emails and social media pages,

All of these addictive patterns are our attempts to feel better. And they work for a short while, until we need another dose! But they keep us from the true connections with others we both crave and fear.

What Works To Heal The Past

These behaviors are substitutes for genuine, loving human relating. Genuine relationships give us a rich sense of belonging and human connectedness, which many of us never experienced often enough as children.

We need to go deep to change the core template we formed when we were young, the one that tells us who we are in the world and whether the world is friendly and safe.

To rewire our brains and transform our state of being, we need to return to our old story of who we are and how the world is, and transform it, or, as they say at Shalom Mountain, "live it through to a new conclusion."

Studies show this works best in a group setting, where deep social relationships help us re-pattern and heal the past. Our original wounding was relational (you and your relationship with your caregivers), and healing is relational.

Deep down, we all yearn to belong. Loving relationships heal our brains, our hearts, and each other. It is the most potent medicine in the universe.

This “positive limbic remodeling” takes place at our retreats. It is one of the essential elements that make our retreats effective and why the group setting is so helpful. New clients often ask if they can do this work privately with me, and I try to explain the vital role of social connection in healing core pain. Our wounding from past relationships hurts, and we want to avoid the exposure. Many of us carry shame from our childhood, which keeps us in hiding. Yet social connection is the perfect cure for hiding.

At the retreats, we get that experience of belonging that is key to our healing. We come out of exile and rejoin the human race. For many, that is a huge relief..

Other elements of each retreat are essential as well. We need enough safety to allow us to enter our old, vulnerable stories. We spend almost a day at the beginning of each retreat building a safe and supportive community.

Unconditional Love

The most important element in healing is an abundance of unconditional love. We teach and practice the Skills of Loving (formulated by Gerald and Elizabeth Jud) to help us dissolve old stuck pain.

Love is the universal solvent of healing. 

Each retreat is a new beginning, a new start to our lives. 

Click here to see our current retreat schedule.

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