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By: Lisa M. Hayes
Everyone wants to know how to heal from trauma with the least effort, to erase their triggers as if the trauma had never been there – shiny, clean, and trigger-free. The reality of it rarely works that way. For most of us, the best we will do is learn to get cozy with the things that trigger, get real friendly with the ghosts that haunt us.
To some degree, we are all walking injured, stacking the ways we get through the day, one on top of the other, until eventually, we can’t see the wreckage that scarred us. However, just because we can’t see it on the other side of that wall doesn’t mean it’s not there.
Neuropathways never die. Once a trigger ignites in the fire of fear, it will be our companion, sometimes silent, until it’s not, waiting for a spark, a neuron to jump, and you are right back where it all started wondering how you failed at healing when you tried so hard to make it go away. You did all things,
you read all the books,
you talked about all your feelings to the people you’re supposed to talk to
AND YET fuck if it’s not still there, occasionally hitting you with a sucker punch you did not see coming –
So, you think you failed, still broken, ashamed, and hiding from yourself
maybe resolved to get the healing right this time and try again,
maybe ready to give up.
We want to look at healing as a pass-or-fail endeavor, something you work on until it’s done. But healing is more like learning to harmonize the voices of rage, fear, and grief with the songs of compassion, resilience, and a steadfast desire to have a life without pain – healing is much more orchestra than it is something you conquer.
Healing is more art than science.
Healing is learning to tame your demons and retrain them to be more gentle than before.
Healing is a dance with yourself that you often do in your most alone places to the music of your beautifully fractured soul.
Believing healing is a process of putting things back exactly as they were before that shit happened is the best way to get stuck in your pain – you are not going back, and you will never be the same.
This is not a bad thing.
There is a sacredness in your grief, your fear, and your rage.
There is something holy about the haunted echoes of your pain.
You are not less whole because you still feel your bleeding in the shadow of a memory or because you startle and jump in the dark when nothing but your past is there.
In the imperfect reconstruction of your parts, there is beauty in how you have put yourself back together.
Healing isn’t just A JOURNEY.
It is THE JOURNEY of being human.
Maybe, just maybe, we should redefine healing as nothing more than learning to deeply love our broken parts until those parts that are broken become art that we are proud of.
Confluence Daily is the one place where everything comes together. The one-stop for daily news for women.
Lisa Hayes is an LOA Relationship Coach. She helps clients leverage Law of Attraction to get the relationships they dream about and build the lives they want. Lisa is the author of Score Your Soulmate and How to Escape from Relationship Hell and The Passion Plan. She is also the founder of the coach training program, The Coaching Guild.
