One day, I woke with a lot of pain in my neck and limited mobility. Initially, I assumed it was from working at my computer, but that didn’t really fit because I wasn’t working more than I usually did.
I strongly believe our bodies hold unprocessed emotions and wounds from the past, and that stuck emotions can cause physical disturbances and ailments. So, when the pain was still there a day later, I contacted my healer, Safah Roberts, who had recently worked on me to see if she had any insights. Based on the work she had done on me, it made sense where I was feeling pain, and she offered some suggestions around what it was connected to.
She suspected it was from a difficult moment in my past and while I had already done a lot of processing around this event, it seemed it was time to go a layer deeper.
So, I got a pen and paper and used a method, called ‘The Love Letter’, that I received from my coaching training with John Gray to guide my writing. Forty-five minutes and 6 pages later, I had moved through the deeper layers of the emotions around this situation.
Fifteen minutes after I completed the letter, full movement returned to my neck, and the pain was completely gone.
In this article, you will learn:
Most of the time people stay on the surface level of their problems and triggers. They focus on their anger, frustration, and blame and don’t dig deeper into the more vulnerable emotions or their own wounding. Thus they remain a victim of their life and circumstances and miss the opportunity for deeper healing.
Without this deeper work, people experience the same problems, triggers, and fights over and over again.
Dealing with the surface layer creates a temporary solution, but the same issues continue to appear. This is a key part of the work that I do with my clients and why they experience freedom from their relentless repetitive problems.
The ‘Love Letter’ is a powerful strategy for working with emotions and getting to what’s beneath that initial layer of anger that often conceals the deeper truth. It takes you through the sadness, fear, and shame and delivers you to love. Multiple emotions can exist at the same time around a given situation or trigger.
Sometimes people stay on the surface and don’t access the deeper emotions. And other times, people confuse emotions – often anger and sadness, meaning they feel sadness when most people would feel anger or the other way around.
Depending on how someone was raised, they might have developed an aversion to either anger or sadness. For example, if they learned early on that expressing sadness was weak, they were more likely to default to anger. Or if they were taught that anger was wrong, then sadness became their go-to emotion when things got tough.
The Love Letter helps people to look beyond their default emotions and get in touch with the layers of emotions that are alive inside of them. Writing a love letter is an extremely powerful exercise, and can deliver fast results and facilitate profound clearing.
When you want to process the layers of emotions around a certain situation or person, take time to write out how you are feeling around each emotion. Work your way through the following emotions:
When writing a Love Letter: be authentic, let your emotions have their voice, and don’t try to be rational. Pay attention to what is happening in your body as you process each emotion.
Complete the whole process. If need to take a break, make sure you come back and complete all levels. When writing the Love Letter, try to have each of the sections be similar in length.
After you’ve finished, you can read back over it and save it for later. It can be a helpful reference when a similar trigger comes. It is also something that you can look back over it a year or two later to see how far you have come.
This is a great tool to use when you get triggered in your relationship as it helps you to get clear on what has upset you, the part that you played in it, and reconnects you to the love that you feel for your partner.
If you feel like sharing it with your partner, ask if they are interested in hearing/reading it. You can read it to them, have them read it, or have them read it out loud. Make sure to get consent and not to push it on your partner.
I hope you experience as much opening and healing as I have from this amazing tool.
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Understand what’s blocking you from receiving, so you can get your needs met without always having to do all the work and have your partner feel successful, competent, and excited about providing and taking care of you.
Understand what’s blocking you from receiving, so you can get your needs met without always having to do all the work and have your partner feel successful, competent, and excited about providing and taking care of you.
© 2022 Justine Baruch All rights reserved.
