One of the most damaging forms of heart trauma I work with is verbal abuse.
Sexual abuse and domestic violence in my life and in the lives of many of my clients has caused great heart trauma; like bullets and shards of glass rammed straight into the heart muscle. However, the most difficult form of abuse to overcome I have found in my own life and for many clients has been verbal abuse or what I call … CACTUS WORDS.
Those fine almost invisible CACTUS WORD splinters left in our heart are caused through years of prickly critical words needled directly in our heart’s core. It only takes another person to repeat the phrase or word years later and our heart splinter is knocked again, causing tremendous private pain. It makes us feel crazy because it seems … it is just a word, the splinter is invisible to others, but oh so painful for us.
Great news, the fine tweezers of emotional self-care can remove our heart CACTUS splinters so we can start to heal.
Awareness is our first step.
Uncover, discover and recover.
I am living proof as are many others I have worked with over the past few decades that CACTUS WORDS in our heart can become CACTUS … you know … history that no longer cripples us with invisible pain. The emotional mobility and fitness we recover once the splinters are removed is a thrill! Like a blind person given sight our wounded heart gets to smile and dance. For some of us it is for the first time!
It is our birthright to live happily ever after in our own skin, prickle free and have access to all areas of our beautiful heart.
So if we encounter sharp words in our own dialogue or from others, let us remember the best verbal tweezers are the words …
“I’m so sorry”.
We may never hear them from others, it does not matter, we can say this powerful “tweezer phrase” to ourselves any time we feel a splinter is touched. This is not an act of victimhood nor self-pity, but private self-compassion that as adults too many of us deprive ourselves of. In time these gentle words of self-respect do remove the CACTUS splinters we have neglected to address over the years, and our tender heart will heal.
The best is yet to come once we learn about CACTUS WORDS and master the use of our own portable emotional tweezers!
Lotsa love Cynthia xxx
© Copyright 2016 Cynthia J. Morton Emotional Fitness™
