"Coming up for Healing"

A New Lens for Hard Feelings

Hello ♡,

My therapist had this saying when hard feelings would come up for me in life, or in a therapy session. She’d gently say, surrounded by her baubles collected from around the world in her cozy office with the red couch, “This must be coming up for healing.” She’d slowly flip her hand from palm down to palm up, acting out the idea.

Photo by Billy Pasco on Unsplash

It was a gentle way to acknowledge the emergence of something, a perhaps unwanted something, that felt welcoming instead of shaming. It made this feeling, or struggle, less scary. It made it feel more like an invitation. It was a quietly powerful way to steer towards curiosity and looking at the pain, rather than avoidance. And most importantly? It colored the emergence of this thing in hope, rather than failure.

And I often say this same thing to my clients, “This may be coming up for healing.”

You see, you can’t heal what you don’t feel (from the popular phrase “you have to feel it to heal it.) It’s just true, you can’t. I have yet to find that shortcut.

And you can’t heal what isn’t revealed.

I know this from experience personally, and from countless moments of being a sacred witness to this in the lives of others.

But we are all mixed up in popular, and self-help, culture. We think we are supposed to feel good all the time to be “doing well.” We shy away from “bad feelings,” and we certainly over-pathologize them.

But I wonder, how will we know what needs to heal if we don’t feel the pain?

I’m reading a novel right now that has stories of people struggling with leprosy. You know this popular analogy already to emotional healing, but humor me. Those living with leprosy disease get injured by the deadening of their nerves. Their nerves can no longer feel pain, and therefore no longer protect them from injury. They can’t feel the pain. And so, they can hurt themselves terribly without even knowing or feeling it. We may multiply our own emotional injuries when we are unable to feel, recognize, or acknowledge and honor, the pain we are feeling.

Pain is a gift.

Yes, most often an unwanted gift.

But without it we could continue to be injured without knowing. Pain is an internal alarm system telling us something needs our attention. And in the hopeful light cast by healing work, it is telling us something is coming up for attention and healing. And so listening to the pain becomes less of a failure, but more of an opportunity.

And that is what I often call it in session too. A term I have come to use is “awful opportunity.” An awful opportunity is a chance to learn and heal in a way you never planned, or lets be honest, wanted to. It is often awful because something hard is involved. It is often an opportunity because you are now at a choice point, a fork in the road, where you are forced to heal and grow in ways you didn’t want or plan.

The reality is, we all will have pain. The truth is not every pain can be healed, some must be weathered. But the hope here is that when pain comes up, it doesn’t have to mean (as old ways of thinking suggest) that you are missing a mark or failing. It may instead be a beckoning to a new way of being, thinking, feeling, or yes, even healing. Pain can be an invitation. And if you are feeling emotional pain today, I pray this can feel like a welcome mat for your tender hurting heart.

Perhaps what is coming up is ready for some attending to and some care. Healing isn’t always the fixing of a pain. Sometimes it is as simple as being with yourself and the pain in ways you were never offered, provided, or shown before. That is what re-parenting work in therapy often is. You can’t undo your past, but you can attend to it, and yourself in it, in ways you were never offered before. This too is healing.

Sometimes what is coming up for healing is an old narrative that has been clanging around in there without you even realizing it. Like the white noise on an airplane, you have become so accustomed to it your don’t even notice it anymore. Until, that is, something happens and you hear it, and can’t unhear it anymore. Those old narratives, pain wrote about you, may be coming up for healing. It may be time to listen in so that you can correct them. Take the invitation to pay attention so that you can bring hope to what has been hurting.

So what is it for you today?

Is there a pain that needs your attention? Is there an invitation for healing and loving attention you have been looking instead at as a failure?

Photo by Ramiro Pianarosa on Unsplash

Slowly flip your hand from palm down to palm up with me as we consider, perhaps it is coming up for healing?

With you,

Monica

---

Book Update!

My book will officially be in the world this year! May 13, 2025!! If you liked this week’s newsletter, then you will love my book. We are going to walk towards pain together, and bring the warmth of light, care, and truth to what has been hurting.