5 Modalities for Your Healing Journey

I’ve talked a ton about my healing journey on my blog and on social media for years now, but I realized that I’ve never really gone into much detail about my process. Facing your trauma, healing, and working on yourself is the best thing you could ever do for yourself. If we don’t heal, then we’ll just keep repeating the same unhealthy patterns and operating in a way that is preventing us from really reaching our highest potential.

Why does this matter?

I guess it’s relative. Many people are truly afraid of facing themselves. They don’t want to put in the work. Or they’re just so completely unaware of how their issues impact their lives that healing or working on themselves never occurs to them.

Choosing to do the work means a higher chance at true joy and contentment in life. When you change, grow, and heal, the way you view yourself and the world changes. When these perspectives shift, so does your energy.

We can look at this in two ways:

When you’re operating at a different frequency, you attract different types of people, different situations. It sounds woo-woo, but it’s really science. There have been studies shown that when people believe in themselves, when they value themselves and set boundaries, when they are generally more positive and opportunistic, things work out better for them. Not because they are better or because they deserve it more than the next person; it’s because their energy shapes their reality.

The other way to look at it is from a spiritual perspective. I’m living proof that healing from my trauma has made me ready for the better things in life God has in store for me. I’ve surrendered to the process of healing, and have trusted God to heal me, and guide me through the work that I’ve had to do here in the physical world. As I’ve let go of hurts, trauma, unhealthy habits, negative thinking patterns, and much more, it’s created space within myself to become a more aligned version of myself. One that has more capacity for the things God is calling me to, like moving to a foreign country for example.

No matter the angle you’re looking at it from, there are deep benefits to healing. But it can be hard to know where to start. The options are overwhelming. I think it’s important to listen to your intuition, because what works for one person doesn’t always work for the other. If you have trouble tuning into yourself, I’d say start with either journaling or therapy. We’ll dive deeper into each one of those in a moment, but these two forms of healing are great for becoming more self-aware which is key for true change.

Journaling

First up we have journaling. This is a great place to start if the idea of spilling all your secrets to a stranger makes you uncomfortable. Journaling is a great tool because it allows you to create a map of your life. You can learn about your habits, your personality, your fears, your dreams and goals – the list goes on. Try journaling for a few minutes, three times a week.

Write down any significant events that happened and how you felt. Record situations that made you react in a negative way. Talk about things that bothered you, problems you’re facing, and how you’re handling them. These life situations are breadcrumbs to discovering the patterns of our habits, thoughts, and actions.

Journaling was the first step in my healing journey. I didn’t even recognize it as a “healing” tool. I just realized it made me feel better to move the emotional energy out of my body and onto paper. For example, over time, I started to recognize the pattern I had of always attracting the same toxic type of man. I asked myself why that was, and it kicked off a whole journey of self-discovery, learning my flaws, facing my trauma, and ultimately changing the way I saw myself, which shifted the kind of man I was attracting.

I highly recommend starting off your healing journey with this step. You can use a physical, hand-written notebook or a digital journal (aka Word doc). If you don’t like writing, try recording voice notes. It’s all about becoming more self-aware and understanding the way you operate as a person.

As children we’re not taught these things, and many people go their entire lives not realizing the problems they have, nor do they reach their full potential.

Therapy – Talk

Next up is talk therapy, the OG.

Sometimes you just need someone to sit across from you, look you in the eyes, and say, “That makes total sense,” or “That shouldn’t have happened to you.” Therapists are great because they are professionals in psychology. They can help you discover deeper layers to yourself, give you tools for coping with stress and how to handle being triggered. Having an unbiased person weigh in on your situation might feel intimidating, and it’s important you find a therapist that you align with, but therapy is such a powerful tool.

Talk therapy gives you space to process out loud—to name your patterns, connect the dots, and hear yourself clearly. It’s where you start to understand your behaviors instead of constantly shaming yourself for them.

It’s not always comfortable, but it’s like finally cleaning out a cluttered closet: overwhelming at first, but deeply freeing once the air starts to clear.

Therapy has become extremely popular in the last decade or so, and it pleases me to see my generation taking control of their healing in this way.

Talk therapy has helped me personally with the shame surrounding my trauma. Putting a voice to it, putting it out there for another person to hear, and essentially dissect, can be terrifying, but it’s also an incredibly freeing experience.

EMDR Therapy (Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing)

This one sounds like sci-fi at first, but trust me—magic.

EMDR is designed to help your brain reprocess traumatic memories so they stop hijacking your nervous system. It’s wild how stuff that used to make your body freak out suddenly… just doesn’t.

How EMDR works

Your eyes will follow a moving target (such as a dot on a screen or your therapist’s fingers) in a left-right-left-right motion, which creates bi-lateral brain stimulation. When both sides of the brain are working at the same time to process information, it’s like discovering your computer has a bigger, better hard drive.

In my own experience, EMDR has had almost a hypnosis effect, enabling me to see past traumatic situations from an entirely new perspective, where I’ve been able to see the bigger picture, let go of the hurt, and choose to move forward.

EMDR helped me take painful memories that once felt like open wounds and file them away as just memories. No more spiraling. No more panic. Just peace. (EMDR has been proven to especially help people suffering with PTSD.)

Somatic Healing

Your body keeps the score—and somatic work helps you rewrite it. While journaling, talk therapy, and EMDR are great steps for healing, they are primarily focused on the mind. I think that approaching healing from a logical perspective is the place you should start, but it can only get you so far.

Trauma doesn’t just live in your mind; it gets stored in your body. That tight chest, the lump in your throat, the frozen or fawning responses? All clues from your nervous system. Somatic healing helps you learn your body’s language so you can release what’s been trapped inside for years.

I felt like I unlocked another layer to my healing when I discovered somatic therapy. It takes the logic out of healing – you can’t think your way through it. You simply let your body guide you.

Learning how to become more in tune with my body and the process of allowing trauma to be released from my body hasn’t always been easy, but I’ve experienced a deeper level of healing from this.

This can look different for everyone, but I found guided meditations where I learned how to drop my awareness into my body, and where I learned how to listen to emotional cues within my body very helpful. I’ve enjoyed breathwork, movement such as dance and rocking, and energetic practices. It’s less talking, more feeling. Less analyzing, more releasing. It’s powerful stuff.

Shadow Work

Let’s talk about the parts of ourselves we like to pretend don’t exist.

Shadow work is about turning toward your pain instead of running from it. It’s about sitting with your anger, jealousy, fear, and grief—not to judge or fix them, but to understand them. To love them.

Because here’s the truth: those “ugly” parts of you are actually your most wounded parts—and when you give them a voice instead of silencing them, you finally start to feel whole.

Healing your shadow is how you stop self-sabotaging. It’s how you call your power back. It’s how you become you again. With shadow work, you stop focusing on “fixing” or “healing” yourself and instead learn how to love all parts of yourself.

It sounds sort of contradictory to everything I’ve been saying in this post, but believe me, it’s the perfect next step in your healing journey. I wrote an entire blog post on how shadow work enabled me to fully let go of certain unhealthy habits, beliefs, narratives, and thought patterns. By letting go of these traits, I discovered my true self, who was hiding underneath.

The other healing modalities are more about true healing from trauma and things that have shaped you in negative ways. Shadow work is about discovering who you are underneath all of that.

Final Thoughts

Healing isn’t linear. I’ve had seasons where I prioritized my healing, and other times where I avoided it and flat out ran from it. It’s not clean or easy or always Instagram-pretty. But it is worth it.

Every step you take toward letting go of what isn’t yours—every time you choose curiosity over judgment, presence over avoidance, softness over shame—you come a little closer to the version of yourself that’s been waiting all along.

If you’re afraid to face yourself, friend, I feel you. If you’re scared of what might happen if you process the trauma, I get it. What I’ve learned in my healing journey is that nothing is as painful as it is the first time, and if I lived through it the first time then I could definitely go back and work through it a second time. (If you suffer from PTSD, things will be a bit different for you and I encourage you to seek a therapist or professional who specializes in PTSD.)

I’ve been on a healing journey for years, and there have been some incredibly tough times. It hasn’t been fun to work on myself or face parts of myself that I don’t like, but it’s so worth it. Why? Because I’m becoming the true version of myself. My energy is changing, and I have more capacity to hold the blessings that God has for me, and I have the tools needed to get through the difficult times.

The happiest, most grounded, most magnetic version of you? They’re not “out there.”

They are already here.

And they are ready when you are.