No matter how many relationships you’ve had…
No matter how much you’ve tried to work on yourself…
It’s hard to feel like you’re loved deep down to your toes.
You can’t believe in love even when it’s offered to you.
The love you give yourself feels shallow and unconvincing.
Are you ever going to feel loved the way you always wanted?
The answers lies in an unlikely place…
In your emotional wounds.
None of us like to think about the times we were hurt. But those experiences hold the key to personal transformation.
When you acknowledge and grieve what happened to you, you release that emotional charge. You free yourself to attract healthy, wonderful relationships that meet your needs before you even ask.
In this week’s YBTV interview, we talk to spiritual guide and intuitive healer Melany Oliver about how to heal our emotional wounds so we can feel loved.
You’ll learn why you never feel entirely secure in relationships and why it feels like your partner never meets your needs. You’ll learn how you can inherit emotional wounds from your parents and why acknowledging your pain doesn’t make you a victim. You’ll also find out why healing is simpler than you think…
Get a Free “Healing Emotional Wounds” Video Training
What You’ll Learn
We’re here to learn how to love and how to receive love … and our first teachers are our parents.”
We’re here on this planet to learn about love.
But many of us start off with a disadvantage.
We don’t know what it feels like to truly be loved.
For heart healer Melany Oliver, that is the core of our emotional wound. “When you don’t feel loved, you don’t feel heard, you don’t feel seen, you don’t feel acknowledged.” Sound familiar?
Surely, if you don’t feel loved, the problem is who you’re with. You need to find someone else who can love you better.
But that’s the wrong place to look, according to Melany.
The reason we feel unloved has less to do with who we’re with and more to do with emotional wounds we’re still carrying.
“An emotional wound is basically when you don’t feel a connection heart-to-heart, when you don’t feel loved,” Melany explains.
It’s not something shameful. “I believe that the world is wounded,” she says. “I think everybody is wounded to some extent emotionally.”
That wound goes back before your worst breakup. It goes back earlier than your first betrayal.
It goes back to when you were born.
How We Became Wounded
None of us were born to perfect parents. Our parents did the best they could, but they were only human.
We learned to love based on how they treated us and how they related to each other. Without realizing it, we began to treat ourselves the way we were treated.
“A lot of people think that they were loved because they had a good upbringing, they went to the best schools, their parents gave them everything,” Melany says.
“On the outside, it looks like they were loved, but on an emotional level, they didn’t feel connected to their parents’ hearts.”
That’s not because their parents deliberately withheld love. It may be that they didn’t get the love they needed as kids, so they couldn’t give it.
So how do you know if you were loved in the way you needed to be as a kid?
“When you feel loved, you feel safe,” Melany says. “You feel safe to be who you are. You feel happy; you feel joy. You feel comfortable being you.” You’re able to “naturally attract things that your heart truly desires.”
But if you didn’t grow up with that emotional foundation, you don’t feel safe.
“You feel insecure. You don’t trust yourself. You don’t love yourself.” You self-sabotage and are self-critical. “You search unconsciously for toxic relationships to prove that you are lovable.”
This plays out not just in relationships but also in other areas of your life, like career and health.
Healing Our Emotional Wounds
Surely you grow out of it, though?
You’re no longer a child. You’re an adult now, and responsible for your own life.
But, in Melany’s experience, it’s only over once you have healed your emotional wounds.
You know you’ve truly healed “when you no longer react emotionally to a situation or a person or circumstances, and you feel that peace with your past.”
Healing starts with bringing awareness to that old pain, not analyzing your childhood or assigning blame.
“It’s more about perspective,” Melany explains.
She helps guide her clients “to see where they actually feel hurt, because they’re so disconnected from their wounds. When you disconnect from your wound, you don’t feel that wound, and therefore you think that you’re over it; you think it’s not an issue.”
Acknowledging and understanding where your wounds come from doesn’t mean playing the victim, either.
When you really grieve from your heart, from a place of true acceptance and healing, you’re not a victim. You’re just accepting the reality of what happened. You’re accepting the truth, but you’re not blaming anyone either.”
It can feel uncomfortable to think critically about your relationship with your parents, especially if your parents aren’t open to this kind of conversation.
And that’s okay. “You can’t force anybody to change or heal,” Melany says.
Besides, healing is about you, not them.
“You don’t necessarily have to have your parents to love you and heal that relationship in order to heal the pattern,” Melany says. “You can still love your parents from a distance, if they’re no longer in your life or even if they have passed. But at least you healed it from your side.”
She adds that “healing is a choice, and a lot of people choose not to heal. They choose to remain wounded. And that’s their choice. The most loving thing for you to do is to allow them to be who they are.”
But you need to heal.
If you don’t, you can reinforce the emotional wound. “The wound actually gets bigger,” Melany says. “You can create relationships based on wounds: co-dependent relationships and toxic relationships. Obviously, that’s not love.”
What You Can Do
Healing can take time.
“A lot of the time, when people come to healing, they feel overwhelmed, because you have to go through all of the layers and really break down that belief,” Melany adds.
But she urges us to “believe in love and see your healing as a journey—a journey to grow in love.”
Are you ready to get started on your healing journey?
Then sign up for Melany’s free “Healing Emotional Wounds” video training.
Jump to Topics of Interest
1:52 Our first teachers about love are our parents
3:06 Were your parents able to love you the way you needed to be loved?
4:05 How it feels to know you’re loved and lovable
4:52 How it feels if you didn’t have that
6:11 You don’t outgrow it
7:10 Healing is an inside job
9:06 Getting your needs met in a relationship
10:36 What is an emotional wound?
11:35 Healing starts with awareness
13:38 You’re not a victim
15:17 Break the pattern
More by Melany
We’re honored to have Melany as one of our expert authors here at Your Brilliance. Check out her articles for us.
About Melany Oliver
Melany is a spiritual guide and intuitive healer. Her mission is to educate people on emotional wellbeing and guide them to process their deep emotional wounds so that they can open their hearts to more joy and love in their life. She offers soul readings, heart and soul coaching, self-study programs, and retreats. Find out how you can work with Melany.
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