Neve’s Reviews > How to Do the Work: Recognize Your Patterns, Heal from Your Past, and Create Your Self > Status Update

This is what healing is about: developing choice and trust in the tools we use to truly live our impermanent life, no matter what may come.

Soothing is the preferred way to deal with discomfort … I benefit from moving my body. That means when I’m feeling challenged, I take a walk. I do the dishes. I get my body moving. When I try to ease my feelings by relaxing - reading a book or taking a bath - it actually puts me more on edge.

Emotional maturity allows us the opportunity to choose how to respond to the external world. This then helps us to travel back up the polyvagal ladder and return to the safe baseline of social engagement, where we feel safe and secure with ourselves and within our connections with others.

Your reality is valid because you’ve experienced it, not because someone or something has said so.

Distressing emotions often feel as though they last longer and are more intense than positive emotions are. Studies have even shown that during moments of emotional intensity, our sense of time is skewed - sometimes seemingly running faster and sometimes slowing down.

When you replay distressing thoughts, you active your nervous system response as if you’re experiencing the distressing event over and over. Your body can’t tell the difference between what was in the past and what is happening in the present - it’s all threatening.

When our needs aren’t being met or are being actively infringed upon, we cannot point a finger at another person and say, ‘you have to change’. A better question to ask is: what do I need to do to make sure that my needs are better met?

Having never developed a trust in my own reality, I found myself believing others.

The ego views everything within the context of a rigid dichotomous: good vs bad or right vs wrong. It is staunchly attached to its opinions and believes that we are our opinions.
When we are in an egoic state, our beliefs and thoughts are who we are.

The predictable, feels safer than the uncertainty of the unknown.