When an emotional experience surfaces you have to decide: does this go in the healing box, or the truth box?
What are the Healing Box and Truth Box?
The healing box is the category for pains and issues that perhaps reflect an old experience, an old “truth” but that is not about your life right now.
Perhaps you were terrified at 4 years old. You hid this terror deeply. Then one day, as you have grown in your healing journey, that terror surfaces at full force. In that moment you need to figure out: is this terror trying to tell me about a huge threat to my existence now? (=Truth Box) Or is this something old or some kind of misalignment that needs working through? (= Healing Box)
Whether you put something into your healing box or your truth box matters a lot. We’ve all seen what happens when big groups of people put fear into their “this is the truth about reality” box. Most of the time, it brings out the worst in people.
Collective panic – when there is no massive threat, but people’s own deeper fears are being stirred up and mistaken for “this is about what’s happening right now” – leads to all kinds of extreme survival reactions.
In our own life, we constantly need to decide: is this thing I’m feeling telling me something about my current truth? Or is it something requiring healing?
The Impact of Mislabeling
In toxic relationships, it’s easy to label things the wrong way. Every time you feel panicky and unsafe, you might decide that has to go in the healing box. As in: “oh, that’s just me overreacting. I need to work on myself and get more even keeled!” When in fact, your panic is warning you that you’re constantly being used and that your partner does not have your best interests at heart, at all.
It’s not always easy – at all – to correctly assign things to the right box. Yet, which box you put things in matters a lot.
If you put old things that require healing into your truth box, then you will expect doom and gloom in your life everywhere. Whereas, if you intuit that these are old issues surfacing, you will be able to set aside the time needed to heal, but you won’t confuse those awful feelings with reality. This means that you can work through deep, dark feelings while still spending much of your time being focused on everything you love about your life right now.
When you get that balance right, the joy of your current life, will help you work through issues of your past, without making those issues your new reality.
This is how you can stay focused on the good things in your life, without ignoring issues coming up for healing.
Many people don’t know how to do this, so they desperately cling to all “positivity” in an attempt to try and drown out and ignore old hurts. All this does is make the hurts grow bigger in the dark.
When “You” Get Shoved into the Wrong Box
There are also people out there who when they get triggered, confuse the past with the present. They lash out at you because what you said or did or reminded them of something awful in their past. You didn’t do anything awful, but the awful thing came up for healing for them. However, since they put everything in their truth box, they assume that all their triggered pain is about the here and now, about you.
Lastly, plenty of folks will oversimplify things based on their own fantasies. They decide: “If I like an experience, then that goes in my truth box! And if I don’t like an experience, it goes into my healing box…” Then they usually shove their healing box into a deep dark cellar and talk “over” it with positive affirmations. They end up dissociating from part of their truth in an attempt to avoid all pain. This creates a narcissistic fantasy life where real issues don’t get addressed.
Making sense of what is what on the inside is a big and important deal. You can’t move forward if you’re constantly misassigning issues or don’t know what to do with any of it.
This is why an effective healing practice is not just about healing tools, but also about ways to figure out what needs to go in the truth box and what in the healing box.
Not sure whether what you’re dealing with belongs in your truth box, or healing box? Let me help you figure it out in a Clarity Call.
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