My Favourite Essential Oils for Healing Trauma
& Emotional Wounds
If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know I always say that healing is not about tools or techniques but about how much truth you can accept emotionally in your heart. But as you probably very well know, the healing journey is hard sometimes and every now and then we need a little extra support – trust me, I get it 🙂
One of my absolute favourite tools to use when doing emotional inner work are essential oils, in particular, the Young Living essential oils and blends. I have tried so many different essential oil brands but honestly, I can say, with my hand on my heart, you can’t beat the Young Living blends, especially for doing emotional processing and trauma work as well as for your overall mental health and emotional well-being.
I’ve had so many friends and people roll their eyes at me with my Young Living oils (because you know, people think it’s a cult or pyramid scheme) but once they inhale and experience the power of these oils, their eyes light up and they were all just as mesmerized as I was the first time I experienced the immediate effects of these incredible gift from nature. When you experience it, you just can’t deny it.
A Quick Note on Quality of Essential Oils
I’m not here to try to convince you to buy the Young Living essential oils, I’m just sharing what worked for me in particular when it comes to doing trauma work and processing deep emotional wounds. The only thing I’ll say is that the essential oil industry is not regulated, so please don’t buy cheap synthetic oils from the supermarket or any old pharmacy – don’t do that. Even the oils claiming to be “organic” as you only need 5% essential oil to legally call it “organic” so please do your research on the company you’re buying from. If only 5% is essential oils this means the rest is often synthetic and filled with toxic chemicals you don’t even know. Just to give you an idea whenever you see the word “fragrance” in the ingredients that can include up to 100 different chemicals! You won’t be getting any of the healing properties or therapeutic benefits from these cheap synthetic essential oils – in fact, it will probably just give you a headache or cause some sort of skin rash. You and your health are worth paying a little extra for purity and quality, trust me.
Young living on the other hand are pure therapeutic grade essential oils. I’ve been using them for about 6 years now and I haven’t looked back. I love the company and their mission, all their products I’ve tried and used are fantastic. If you’re interested to learn more and you’d like to be guided on your essential oil journey, you can read more about it here. I wouldn’t be sharing this with you if I didn’t wholeheartedly believe in these oils or use them myself.
Essential Oils for Health & Emotional Wellbeing
Essential oils have been used for centuries for treating physical conditions, making products such as creams, ointments, toothpaste, perfume, beauty and self-care rituals of all sorts.
The use of essential oils for mental health is only now getting particularly popular, with an increasing number of people turning to them for stress relief, mental fatigue, anxiety, depression, and their overall emotional health as well as other mental health issues. I feel this is also due to the fact that they are natural remedies and people are looking to move away from being dependent on medications that often have lots of negative side effects. People are looking for healthier and more natural solutions even for medical conditions.
From aromatherapy and diffusing, internal use to topical application, there are various ways to incorporate essential oils into your self-care routine for mental health, emotional wellbeing and, what I want to focus on with this blog, healing emotional wounds. When using essential oils for emotions, you can use these oils topically on the chakra centers, on specific acupressure or acupuncture points or simply where you intuitively feel you’re holding certain emotions like perhaps your neck and shoulder, stomach etc.
Alternatively you can create a tailor-made massage blend for your needs, which is often diluted with a base oil, and use it daily after your shower.
Or the way I personally do it, which feel is the easiest and I’ve also found it to be the most powerful when doing inner work is to simply place one drop on the palm of your hands (make sure the oils are safe to be used topically – I’m referring to the blends below which I know it’s safe to be used this way), rub your hands together and simply take a few minutes to do some deep breathing while connecting to the essence or I should say the spirit of the oil and set your intention.
Essential Oil Safety
It is important to use essential oils safely when incorporating them into your self-care routine as well as for your emotional health. Always read the label and check if the oil is suitable for internal, topical or aromatherapy use. Start out with a small dilution rate, especially if you have sensitive skin. If you’re not sure and want to be really careful, never put essential oils directly onto your skin without diluting them in a carrier oil such as jojoba or coconut oil first. Furthermore, it’s always best to test on a small patch of skin before applying widely over larger areas of the body. When diffusing, make sure you don’t leave them on constantly for more than an hour at a time and never leave children unattended with essential oils or near an essential oil diffuser. Lastly, make sure to store your essential oils away from direct sunlight and in a cool dark place as this will help preserve their therapeutic properties longer.
How Essential Oils Work with the Brain
Our sense of smell is the only sense that is directly linked to the limbic system part of the brain, including the amygdala and the hippocampus. Once inhaled, essential oils work by targeting the limbic system, a part of the brain that plays a key role in our emotions and behavior, hence why it’s often called the “emotional brain”. This system is responsible for processing emotions, experiences and scents. It can impact our feelings in both positive or negative ways depending on the scent we inhale and our association with that scent.This is why essential oils are so powerful when it comes to using them for emotional wellbeing and doing trauma work.
Essential Oils & Spirituality
On the more spiritual side, Shamans believe essential oils are the spirit of the plant. If you connect and ask from your heart for their support, they will share with you their wisdom and healing properties in ways you’ll be astonished. And let me tell you, this has been my very experience working with essential oils. They are magical and I always feel there is something sacred about them. I guess because I really feel and believe they are God’s gift to us. If it’s your first time using essential oils, I would recommend you treat the oils with respect and to keep an open heart.
Ok, enough said…
Here are my top 5 Essential Oil Blends to Help You Process Emotions & Support Your Mental Health:
This is one of my regular go-to essential oil blend for processing emotions in general. I also use it a lot when doing in-person sessions with clients.
This little bad boy can support you in releasing anger, frustration and generally the emotion you use to avoid getting to the core. In other words, the top layer resisting emotion.
The first time I used Release™ I was stuck for two days trying to process an emotional wound but I had lots of resistance and ended up just getting frustrated with myself and the process.
I intentionally used Release™ by placing just one drop in the palm of my hand, rubbed my hands together and then took some deep breaths, setting my sincere desire from my heart…
And BOOM within 10 minutes I was grieving and RELEASING.
It seems that I just needed a little push and this beautiful Release™ Essential Oil Blend from Young Living did the job.
The Release™ Essential Oil Blend gently prepares you to bring up your emotional baggage and it does so with a sense of calm and comfort so you know it’s safe to feel, knowing that you can cope and handle any emotions that’s coming up.
I’ve used it again recently after not having done so for a while and literally within minutes I was grieving after resisting to sit with the one emotion for days. The power of essential oils takes me by surprise every single time.
Oh my, I cannot recommend this oil enough!
This powerful essential oil blend has supported me many times in processing DEEP emotional wounds.
All you need is 1-2 drops on the palm of your hand and inhale…
Set a heartfelt intention and let this exquisite essence do its work & support you in going to some of those dark & uncomfortable places that perhaps you don’t want to go.
The first time I used this was for processing a very traumatic experience of being raped when I was 14 years old. I had already done some work on this trauma but I felt there was something stuck sooo deep that I would never be able to truly heal. I intuitively reached out to Trauma Life™ and within twenty minutes… tears, realizations and even a poem started to flow. You can read it here, it’s called Virginity. This experience just blew my mind. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for this oil in particular.
This exceptional essential oil blend is specifically designed to support you in releasing difficult emotions from traumatic experiences, hence the name.
Trauma Life™ Essential Oil blend is not for the faint-hearted, it’s for the heart warriors wanting to do the heart-core trauma work. It’s intense, profound and will most certainly guide you and hold the space for you while you process those traumatic experiences.
It also helps calm the body, relieve stress and anxiety, ease restlessness and simply support you in times of severe emotional distress.
If you’re struggling to access your inner child, you need this essential oil blend in your life.
This sweet and nurturing essential oil blend supports you in connecting with your wounded, or perhaps scared, inner child so that you can heal those childhood emotional wounds and allow your authentic self to emerge.
Very often, our inner child is afraid and needs some reassurance and comfort to come out so we can start to heal – and this essential oil blend does just that.
I remember a client I was working with who was having a very hard time connecting with her inner child. She couldn’t visualize her, had so much unconscious and internalized judgment towards her own inner child because of her mother wound. She said she was just so disconnected and didn’t feel any compassion or desire to connect to her inner child. So naturally, I took the Inner Child blend and used just one drop on the palm of her hand, asked her to rub her hands together and inhale 3-5 deep slow breaths. I proceeded to guide her through an inner child visualization exercise and within 5 mins she was balling. After the exercise she opened her eyes and looked at me and said “Wow these oils are incredible, what was that you gave me?” LOL
This lovely Inner Child Essential Oil Blend supported me in nurturing my inner child as this is also something I struggled with for a long time. I love to use this when I’m doing any inner healing child meditation or when I’ve found it hard to connect with my inner child.
As always it’s important you use these essential oil gifts from nature with respect and heartfelt intention.
Are you holding onto old emotional wounds of betrayal, hurt and heartache?
Forgiveness is essential in your healing process but it does not mean reconciliation. Most people get stuck with forgiveness because we want the other person to feel the hurt they have caused us. We justify holding on to emotions such as anger because we think it will protect us from getting hurt again, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. This is just the wounded ego’s protection mechanism.
Forgiveness™ Essential Oil Blend will help you release emotions of betrayal, hurt, heartache, jealousy, bitterness, anger, resentment, rejection as well as support you in healing regret, guilt or simply a heavy heart.
Whether you’re forgiving yourself or someone who has hurt you, using the Forgiveness™ Essential Oil Blend will support you in raising your vibration and holding a safe sacred space for you to truly forgive, so you can open your heart again to love.
This powerful blend contains 15 essential oils. Because of all these wonderful therapeutic grade essential oils combined, the frequency of Forgiveness™ oil is 192 MHz, which is considered extremely high for an essential oil blend. To give you an idea the human brain is 72-90 MHz and the body is 62-68 MHz.
My story with Forgiveness™ essential oil was when several years ago, I became aware that I had to repent and forgive myself for everything I had done to hurt my younger sister when we were growing up. Although I knew I had hurt her at times, I felt very disconnected because it had already been over 10 years. I had an intellectual awareness but wasn’t able to feel the hurt I had caused her yet.
I didn’t know it then but I was just handing out what my mother was doing onto me, which is not an excuse because abuse is abuse. So I took out Forgiveness™ essential oil and worked with it. Low and behold, these phenomenal essential oils did it again. I grieved and grieved for hours on end, remembering all the times I hurt her emotionally, all the times I rejected her and pushed her away because of my own traumas and inner demons. This experience was intense, I really felt her emotional pain in my heart and how this has affected our relationship now. After I was done processing, I sent her a message and shared how much I regret it now, owned up to my mistakes as her older sister and asked for her forgiveness. She wrote me a lovely message back a few hours later saying she hasn’t carried any of that with her and that she forgives me, bless her heart. But doing the trauma work I do now,
I know it has had some impact on her. I just hope she reaches out when she’s ready to heal emotionally so I can support her through it.
Needless to say, I love this blend.
I remember my father once telling me “Mel, if you can’t accept change then you’ll never be happy.”
Happiness can only exist in acceptance, acceptance of what is and what was.
Acceptance is the first step in overcoming blocks, resistance and any challenging circumstances you are faced with. Without acceptance, you are in essence emotionally fighting reality and this is crazy-making.
Acceptance™ Essential Oil Blend is great if you are going through a life transition, moving countries, changing jobs, empty nest syndrome, retiring etc. It supports you in embracing change since acceptance is the first step to change or transforming anything.
Just to be clear, acceptance does not mean you accept abuse, bad habits or agree with something that goes against your values. Acceptance simply means you accept what is, the reality of what you are experiencing. In the case of a disagreement, for example, accepting it means recognizing that you and another person are indeed disagreeing. You’re not in denial, thinking that they don’t really believe or mean what they’re saying, or belittling them, not taking them seriously. You consider your next words or actions in the light of this reality.
This delightful essential oil blend gently holds you through challenges, difficult circumstances and situations, so that you can face and embrace them. This way, the transition period becomes smoother and easier rather than meeting it with resistance.
When it comes to emotions, the Acceptance™ Young Living blend basically supports you in accepting, in other words feeling/processing your emotions about the situations and circumstances. Incidentally, this is also exactly what you want to do for healing emotional wounds and to break negative life patterns. Whether it is abandonment, addictions, shame, betrayal, frustration, despair or stress, the Acceptance™ Essential Oil Blend will hold a safe space for you to fully process these emotions and get to the core so you can heal.
I have found this oil to be very soft energetically. From my experience, it has a gradual approach to working with your perception and before you know it, you’re already seeing things from a more empowered and accepting perspective.
In Conclusion
Finally, I will say that a lot of people fear feeling their emotions because they believe it will be painful or that they will never get out of it and this is not true when using essential oils (unless you’ve been diagnosed with a psychotic disorder or severe mental health issues). Using essential oils to help you process emotions will make it feel like a breeze as the frequency of these essential oils are so high, it will feel like you’re being held throughout the whole process and this is very comforting.
If you’re already a Young Living fanatic like me, I’d love to learn about your experiences with these incredible oils, feel free to share them in the comments below.
And if you’re interested in joining my Young Living family and starting your chemical free living & emotional healing journey with essential oils, get in touch or read more about it here x
All techniques and information I share are considered coaching, self-help or complementary therapies. I am not a licensed psychologist, psychiatrist or medical doctor, I have a degree in Health Sciences in Holistic & Complementary Therapies. Everything I write and talk about comes mainly from my own experience in healing myself and the tools, techniques, and resources I learned throughout my own inner journey.
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