Healing

If you’ve been around trauma-recovery circles for any length of time, you’ve heard people use the term “healing.” Before I had any experience in this realm, I didn’t know what that meant. What I’m learning is that it is actually a term with no solid definition.

We think of healing as getting over, getting past, so that the thing being healed from is no longer there, not affecting us, a forgotten happening. It’s like healing from the flu I had in 1979. It’s done, over with, no longer part of my life or my thinking. It’s such a faint memory I go literally years without remembering it.

But trying to heal from trauma is more like losing a loved one. You don’t just get over them. You don’t ever stop grieving. You don’t ever not remember them and how they impacted your life. The memory of them will always be there, always clear in your mind. You will always wish their loss had never happened. There will always be a hole.

When I was hit head-on and thought I was crazy and losing my mind and never going to be “normal” again, I prayed for healing. I begged for it. When I went for my first visit with a therapist, Ben went with me and I can remember him saying, “I just want my old wife back.” The therapist replied, “But what if she could be better?”

I remember thinking that sounded like such a good, therapist-y answer and heck, yes, I would like to be better, but I had not one clue what she was talking about. In my mind I wanted to be healed. Poof, zing, all better, no more crazy-town, no panic, no intrusive thoughts, no anxiety, no getting scared by other drivers or change falling out of pockets or a leaf falling in my peripheral vision, and definitely no more ridiculous fear of spiders. I’ve had enough of all that, thank you very much. Praise the Lord, I was finally on the road to this “healing” I’d heard so much about.

I tried to keep in mind all the other things I’d heard about healing from trauma: that it is not linear, that it is like climbing a sand dune—take a step forward and slide back a little (or sometimes a lot), that it is hard work, that it isn’t a nice, neat little package, that it isn’t a place you one day arrive and cross the finish line, never to look back.

But the truth is I wanted it to be easy. I wanted to know how many visits it would take. I wanted it to be quantifiable, as in, take this weekly pill and in 52 weeks you will be through. I hadn’t even started and I wanted to be done.

I wanted to get to the point where I forgot about the trauma, where it was such a distant memory that I could go years without thinking about it, like my teenage flu. I wanted to not have all the symptoms that were filling me with shame and disrupting my life so intensely. I wanted to be healed.

So I went to therapy. I blocked all the negativity I could. I unfollowed. I deleted. I spent more time than ever in the Bible. I filled my mind with God-honoring music. I listened to podcasts and read books. I took adaptogenic herbs. I made exercise a priority. I followed Christians who were also talking about trauma healing from a godly perspective. I did everything I could think of to facilitate the healing I so desperately wanted, and I kept waiting for it to come.

It did not.

Today, almost five years after my accident and the tapping of a deep well of other, previous trauma, I was startled down to my fingertips and toes by a UPS truck coming out of someone’s driveway. Four days ago during a day trip to the beach I suffered high anxiety. (In my defense, Portsmouth’s downtown tunnel could do that to anyone.) Yesterday I struggled more than usual with intrusive thoughts. Last week I had a short bout with depression.

I am not healed in the way I thought I would be or should be by now. The process is not at all going according to my plan or my timeline. I have things to do and I’m tired of wasting time on this nonsense. I want to get on with my life and stop thinking about trauma and healing and whatever progress I think I’m supposed to be making. I just want to stop dealing with it. I want it to go away already.

Then I saw this, posted by Lea Turner, on Instagram:

I read this and stopped after the first sentence, just about mad.

When I speak of healing, it’s not an end goal.

What do you mean, it’s not an end goal? This isn’t what I signed up for. In my mind, an end goal is exactly what it is. Where is the graph that shows where I am on the “healing journey” they talk about, the one that’s a straight line moving ever upward? One of my greatest fears and griefs has been that this is my “new normal,” that my life has been forever changed and I will always have to deal with these things that are so hard, so inconvenient, and this statement—that healing is not an end goal—makes me feel like that’s exactly my reality. It’s not what I want. I want a life do-over.

It’s not a completed process where we no longer express emotions.

Ouch. This is so me. I spent the better part of my life—almost 60 years—stuffing emotions down as deeply as possible so they wouldn’t have to be dealt with, wouldn’t disrupt my life or my peace. I am the champion of living in denial. I put on a calm exterior but inside I am a churning, jumbled mass of unacknowledged feelings. Hidden emotional spaghetti brain.

It’s a place where we can feel all the feelings without guilt or shame …

This I am learning—the “feel all the feelings” piece. It’s always been a curiosity to me that my tough-exterior husband has been more willing to feel feelings than I am. As an enneagram nine, feelings are just too much. They make waves and cause conflict and upheaval and that’s more than a nine can take. Raise your hand if you relate.

At one of my first therapy visits, it was obvious I did not even know what emotion I was feeling. Ellie, my counselor, gave me a piece of paper—a list of words that describe feelings. When she would ask me how I felt about something, my instinct was to say, “I don’t know” and end the conversation. But Ellie is good at gently pushing me out of my comfort zone of feelinglessness, and she would wait until I chose a word or two that described how I was feeling. I am still learning to stop short of “I don’t know” and search for the right word. I am learning to feel all the feelings and name them, and if you don’t think this is hard, you’ve never been me.

… where we extend compassion to ourselves.

And this, I am learning, is the crux of healing. It’s not getting “better.” It’s not having no more bothersome symptoms or never feeling crazy or never being startled or anxious or panicky. It’s not about never remembering what happened to make me this way. I will always and forever see that little black car skidding right at me.

Healing is learning to put my hand on my heart and say, “It’s okay to be startled. You’re doing the best you can with what you’ve been through. You’re doing great. I’m proud of how far you’ve come.”

Does this sound ridiculous to you? Try it. Next time you do something “dumb” and you wonder “what is wrong with me?” try showing yourself compassion. Say it out loud. Shush your inner critic and give your inner friend permission to speak words of kindness over you. We all need support and encouragement and they need to come from somewhere. Let them come from ourselves.

If you have experienced trauma, may I suggest that you stop looking for “healing” as if it is the end of the journey? Healing is not a place or an endpoint. It is not a goal to be reached. It is learning to have compassion for yourself, for what you’ve been through and how it has changed you, for what you have to deal with daily. It is understanding that your brain is doing its best to keep you safe in what feels like a very unsafe world. It is learning a different way to treat yourself, as you would a close friend.

As always when I talk about trauma recovery, I want to remind you that if you struggle with any of the things I describe, know that it’s not just you. Every person who has ever suffered a trauma of any kind is feeling the exact same things.

You’re not the only one.

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(You can find Lea Turner on Instagram and at her website, where she writes and speaks on finding hope in grief and trauma. She’s been a great encouragement to me, and she doesn’t even know it.)