Becoming Well With Liz Tafadzwa

Hello, BW tribe. How has your week been? If it hasn’t been great, be encouraged to know that this too shall pass. If it’s going well, be fully present for all of it. To my new readers, welcome! You are already loved here. To the regulars, welcome back, tribe.

 If you are on your healing journey or considering embarking on your healing journey, you may have heard the phrase “do the work” many times. What does that mean, and what does it look like practically? I wrestled with this last year as I was overwhelmed with “healing.” It’s a word used so much in today’s society that I hope it does not lose it’s significance. My goal in today’s post is to help you uncover a few ways to activate the work needed to become holistically well. 

Google defines work as “an activity involving mental or physical effort done to achieve a purpose result.” It’s a term we are familiar with because, in one way or another, we have worked somewhere. Some jobs demand more out of us physically and some have us glued to a desk the entire day, but by the end of the day, we are mentally depleted and physically worn out. Despite the job structure, all jobs truly require physical and mental effort. The same is true as you travel through your wellness journey. If you are doing it right, the work will feel physically, mentally, and often emotionally tiring. That is not your cue to give up, but an indication that you are putting in the work. 

So, what does it look like on a practical level? You may be unwell mentally, emotionally, spiritually, or relationally. If you have reached the point of accepting and admitting that you are not healthy you are already a step ahead in your wellness journey. I say this because for many of us, what kept us in a state of dysfunction for such a long time(months, years, or decades) is that we couldn’t admit we were sick. Denial was more comfortable and validated your victim mentality so you settled for being stuck. Sitting with yourself and thinking about how you got to where you are and taking full responsibility is part of the work. You have to let go of the norm of blaming other people and kiss goodbye the pattern of demanding everyone to change so you can stay toxic. It’s very hard to get to that place and unfortunately, most people never get past this point and spend the rest of their lives blaming someone else. 

Don’t get me wrong, what broke you was most likely something done to you and you didn’t ask for it. Yes, you experienced trauma, yes they did abuse you, yes those are the coping mechanisms you only knew to run to to soothe and cope with the chaos you were living in, yes they did reject you, yes they did look down upon you, yes you were the scapegoat of the family, yes you were betrayed. You didn’t deserve it and yes they were wrong about what they did. But, when you hold onto to the pain, anger, and bitterness towards them forever, it robs you of the chance to see how your pain can be used for purpose and how releasing the anger can usher in an answer you wouldn’t get when you are perpetually mad. 

If you are a Christian forgiveness should at some point cross paths with you because God promises to take care of the vengeance if you release the need to do it yourself. Letting the person off your hook puts them on God’s hook so you can focus on getting well and functioning in your purpose. Make no mistake that God won’t let them get away with it. He will deal with the person better than you can, so how about you trust him? 

You can’t simultaneously be bitter and also have peace. I know it’s hard to hear because I remember a few years ago when I couldn’t receive this. I felt like people didn’t understand the pain I had endured for over two decades. I believed and felt the person would get away with it, but I saw how releasing it in God’s hands freed me.

Forgiveness is another practical act of “working to be well.” I get concerned when wellness advocates give 10 steps to get healed and 7 to-do’s on finding peace from trauma etc and none of them ever address forgiveness. It’s impossible to get fully healed and whole without forgiveness. That much I know to be true. I don’t care how much money you have, what you believe in, and who you are willing to pay lots of money to give you the one pill that will give you the peace that you have been looking for. If you don’t courageously walk across the bridge of forgiveness you are 100% not going to get healed and whole. I love you and I say this with the utmost truth and grace and desire for you to be fully set free.

For years I thought I could heal and not forgive and that led me to years of turning around in circles. It’s like getting involved in an accident you didn’t cause and taking pain medication that provides temporary relief for a broken leg that you keep using without going in for surgery. From the outside, you look fine and perhaps even fit. No one suspects you have a broken leg because you are still fighting to function normally. However, as the days go by, the pain increases as you exert tension and weight on the broken bone and your body eventually becomes immune to the pain meds. You could do it for a while, but at some point, you will wake up and can’t move. The pain is so intense and the leg is so swollen that you have to go for an emergency surgery. For some, it will be too late and the leg has to be amputated. This is a real-life story that happened to my grandpa from my mother’s side of the family. Had he accepted early that his leg was severely injured after a tragic accident he was involved in and acknowledged that it needed to be worked on right away, he wouldn’t have lost his leg after years of living in denial.

This is how it often looks like for a lot of people. They didn’t cause the injury, but it was now their responsibility to get well and they refused to take that responsibility. They got stuck blaming who caused their injury to the point that they prolonged their time to get to the hospital to get the help they needed. Something valuable ended up getting amputated. 

You may have lost your long-term relationship or marriage because you refused to get well. They had to let you go at a job you knew you were good at because you couldn’t get your anger under control. That friend whom you thought was a lifetime connection had to end it because you didn’t want to unlearn the habit of invalidating, manipulating, and gaslighting them. If you trust God he can still use those mistakes and losses for your good, but at some point, you have to look yourself in the mirror and say “I may not have injured myself, but it is now my responsibility to get well. I have no one else to blame, but me if I am still in the same place 5 years from now.” That is the work my beloveds. Taking full ownership of your dysfunction is work, but at least it’s work that will give you positive not negative results.

Mentally sick people could put in the work like finding and memorizing Scriptures that dispel the lies they have believed in their head and say them out and think about them for a long time until they believe them. It will also look like training your mind to focus your thoughts on things that are true, right, and positive and questioning destructive thoughts. To begin by saying, “Am I unworthy? Am I really ugly? Am I dumb? Am I not good enough? Who said I am not capable?  Is it true that I’m not deserving of safe and healthy love? Is it true that I’m too far gone to be forgiven? Is it true that I’m too broken to be redeemed? Will I always struggle with this addiction” To consistently do that for a long period. It will be hard in the first few months because you are used to allowing those damaging thoughts to detect how you feel and behave and disrupting that flow is where work is. It will get easier and eventually normal if you stay the course long enough.

The work of emotionally dysregulated people largely ties in with what I just talked about, but there are more specific ways one can put in the work. Implementing 10 minutes of daily breathwork( there are thousands of books and videos on the internet you can choose from). No, it’s not spooky or demonic if you are doing it to calm your nervous system down. Learning to sit and feel all the heavy emotions when they come. Most disassociated people have learned to run away and suppress hard emotions. Instead of feeling them, they push them down. I was that way too and some days I still fall back into that habit. However, emotions are like an intense flow of energy that comes in at different times. When they come in, they are to be fully felt so they can flow through you and out of you. When we stuff them down, we block the flow and that’s when we become explosive. You won’t feel angry for an entire week and neither will you be happy for a straight year. They are fleeting and that’s the gift of emotions. Trauma causes your emotions to weaponize you, but healing reignites the gift. 

If you have an eating disorder, for instance, your work could look like learning to intuitively eat and having a healthy relationship with food. If you tend to binge or starve yourself when you are stressed, the work could then be setting alarms to either eat or take a walk, do breathwork, or whatever healthy coping mechanisms work best for you instead of stuffing yourself with food. The one who struggles with a porn addiction, shopping addiction, smoking, gambling, or sucking their thumb as an adult is not different. What they truly want is not the thing they keep going back to, but a means of soothing and comfort. They were neglected and ignored as children so they turned to those voices to get those needs to be met. There is nothing shameful about having an addiction, disorder, or dysfunction. It shows you that you are a human being whose inherent needs were left unmet long enough that you had to find a means of coping. What’s unfortunate is when people believe that they are their struggle and they will never be able to get well. That is the lie is from the pit of hell. You can get well despite what happened to you or how much it has hurt. All I require for you is to make peace that it will be tough, but you will still do the work regardless. 

There is so much more I could have unpacked and I am positive I will do more posts in the future because healing is complex. I gave you enough to chew on and act on what you know now. More than anything I want you to know that God is always in the business of healing every broken part of your soul. You and him have a part to play in total healing. I want you holistically well BW tribe. I love you and I will see you on the next one.