11/01/2026
When I say the emotional work works, I mean it works and I am living proof.
We gotta do the emotional work, y’all.
It is the hardest layer of healing, I know.
People will avoid it AT ALL COSTS.
It’s usually the LAST thing people do, if they ever do it.
But living the opposite, not doing the emotional work and all of the pain that brings, is even harder.
Ten years ago this month, in October 2016, I walked into a six day intensive hypnotherapy training in Fort Lauderdale that was not just any hypnotherapy training.
It was Heart-Centered Hypnotherapy through the Wellness Institute (Seattle area), and it was the beginning of what I call my 2nd Awakening.
I had already been “doing the work” for 20 years, at least a lot of the “mindset” work, beginning with being arrested at 17, as a trauma-ridden, high school dropout. That was what I call my 1st Awakening.
I thought I had already done the work when arriving in Ft Lauderdale for this training.
And while all of the work I had done prior was super valuable, and it was what had led me there, actually preparing me to go deeper, what I didn’t understand was that I had mostly done the mindset work, and not the deeper SOMATIC (body), energetic, and EMOTIONAL work. What a huge difference in these.
And that deeper work was about to crack me and my heart WIDE OPEN.
I thought I was going there for my patients.
I was a nurse practitioner who wanted to do more than prescribe medications.
I wanted to help people get to the root of their suffering. I wanted to help them understand and heal the underlying childhood trauma, the emotional wounds, and the things that medication alone couldn’t reach.
I thought I was going there to learn how to help THEM heal.
Little did I know, I was actually going there to heal ME first.
I came face-to-face with my own inner child and the decades of repressed emotions, unresolved trauma, and pain I had been carrying in my body without even realizing it. Especially grief, rage, and shame.
I had spent so much of my life trying to think my way through my pain, understand it, manage it, and move beyond it.
But there were layers of pain that I had never truly allowed myself to FEEL.
(Continued in Substack here: https://lizburkholder.substack.com/p/the-emotional-work-works?r=111okj&utm_medium=ios)
