Healing, part 2
we keep talking about it's an endless journey
If you’ve been anywhere on the internet in the last few years, you’ve likely heard people use the term healing or healing journey.
When I was a child, I thought healing was what happened to cuts and bruises. One day they were there, a week later they were not. Gone. Poof. Disappeared. Life was so simple in the 1960s and ’70s. Now in the 2020s, when you hear about healing, there’s a good chance the speaker or writer is referring to a path to better mental health. I never used it that way until I found myself holding a piece of paper that said I’d been diagnosed with PTSD, and later c-PTSD. And here I am, finding my own way along the road I didn’t want to be on.
I’ve heard it said that God is a God of healing, as if that should be the end of it. And certainly God does heal, but it is not a one-and-done, tie-it-up-with-a-red-ribbon event. Healing is a messy process whether we like it or not.
I’ve written about healing before, almost two years ago, and what I said in the first paragraph still holds true: it is actually a term with no solid definition. I can see that this is more true now than it was just 22 months ago.
I recently began keeping a list of things people say about healing, and I have some thoughts about them.
Becoming Your Best Self Isn’t the Same as Healing (Here’s Why)
Somewhere along the way, healing became a performance.
The perfect morning routine:
The green smoothies.
The yoga mat.
The glowing skin
The “I only surround myself with high-vibe people” energy.
But healing? Real healing? It’s messier than that.
It’s crying over things you thought you “should be over by now.”
It’s setting boundaries that make people uncomfortable.
It’s saying, “No more,” even when your voice shakes.
It’s waking up and choosing to be on your own side, for once.
Healing isn’t fixing yourself.
It’s unlearning the lie that you needed fixing in the first place.
You weren’t broken.
You adapted.
You survived the best way you knew how.
. . .
So now, when you’re gentle with yourself,
knowing you were doing the best you could,
you’re not becoming someone new.
You’re finally returning to who you were,
before the world taught you to doubt your own worth.
That’s healing.
There is so much focus in the mental health realm on becoming a better you, which is exactly what Old Man Talks says: it has become a performance, even for myself. When am I going to be healed? When will I cross the finish line and get my medal? When can I say I am finished and be proud of my accomplishment?
The answer is never. It is a process that will take the rest of my life, but what else do I have to do?
Sometimes, healing doesn’t look like transformation.
Sometimes, it looks like getting through the day without spiraling.
Getting out of bed when everything feels heavy.
Taking a deep breath before reacting.
Noticing the pattern—and choosing differently.
That is healing.
I used to wonder why my therapist used the word notice incessantly. Maybe I’m just slow, but it took me more than two years to wake up and notice my own patterns, my own learned defenses, and the coping strategies that absolutely were not working for me, and were, in fact, working against me. I kept trying to create peace in my life and all my trying was making it further away.
Now I am learning to notice what I do and how I think and question whether it is actually helping me at all. I am noticing when I act in a way that is not conducive to how I want to live, and that’s the first step.
Recovery doesn’t mean becoming your old self again. It means learning to love the version of you that survived.
I’ve told the story before of Ben and me going to my therapist for the first time and Ben telling her he just wanted his old wife back. She asked in return, “What if she could be better?” and I inwardly scoffed, having no clue what she was talking about.
But if I’ve learned one thing through two years of therapy work, it’s to have compassion for the person I was and the things she did to survive what—for her—were traumas. She did the best she could at the time. High fives, old self. Now it’s time to grow beyond those ways of being.
Just today I read this by
(Dr. Ingrid Clayton):One of the biggest misconceptions about healing is that it leads to feeling good. But the truth is, healing often requires us to stretch. And stretching (especially for those of us with complex trauma) can feel a lot like stress. It can stir up fear, resistance, and the impulse to retreat.
I could have written this a thousand times, but it’s probably the most common fallacy out there. If I had a nickel for every time I felt anxious, depressed, or angry about the way my “healing journey” was going, I would be wealthy—but not any happier. It really is true that you will feel worse before you feel better.
It is hard to change habits of a lifetime. Scary, even. Hence the stress, fear, resistance, and impulse to retreat. Where I used to just clam up, I have recently walked into my closet, given myself a minute to get my thoughts together, and then come back out to continue a discussion. For me, that’s growth.
I’ve heard it said many times that healing is not linear. Also true. It’s more like hiking a mountain range. You’re out of breath and your legs are burning and your pack feels like it weighs a hundred pounds, and just when you think you can’t take another step, some change falls out of a pair of pants you are hanging up and you gasp and jump back like it’s a snake, and for the fiftieth time that day you ask the universe, “What is wrong with me?”
One day you will learn to answer yourself with compassion, “There is nothing wrong with you. You’ve been through a lot.” Maybe that’s the feeling good part.
Maybe there are so many different perspectives on healing because there are so many people and for each one of us it looks a little different. But this quote from @itsmaggiehayes on Instagram sums it up best for me.
“Reasons to be anxious . . . and also reasons to be happy.” I have been an all-or-nothing person for a long time and it’s taken a lot of work to acknowledge the dialectics in my life—the idea that two seemingly contradictory ideas can exist at once. Life experiences have wired me to expect the hard rather than the easy. Growth and healing are showing me that both hard and easy, bad and good, grief and joy can be simultaneously true.
For my previous essay on healing, click here.
I really appreciate the mention and the kind comment about my notes!