How Do I Heal?
We all want to know how to heal.
If you only open up Google and type in the word “healing”, you will see hundreds of results spanning from defining what healing is to the practical steps to transcending suffering. Attempting to define healing is an elusive process, firstly because it is highly individual. What worked for me or someone I know may not work for you.
Having different lived experiences, trauma histories, preferences, character traits and personal pet peeves is a glorious part of being a fully alive human being. It also means that healing cannot be prescriptive and has to take our whole selves and our histories into account.
We don’t like hearing vague answers when it comes to nailing down the healing process, simply because we are human and being human means wanting clearly outlined, predictable future. A road map to follow that explains the twists and turns ahead, and which forks in the road not to take.
But if I as a therapist provide you with a road map that is specific to that degree, I would not be doing you a favor. I would be offering you a template that may not fit you, your story or your process, which is not honoring to you as a multifaceted, living being.
So what can I give you? What pointers on the way to healing would be universal enough to apply to everyone?
Let’s take a look together.
1. Healing is slow
It is an old adage for a reason - it’s actually true. You have had many years to build up who you are: lessons learned, vows taken, parts of self hidden or cast aside, defense mechanisms and coping strategies built up, relational lessons learned and stored in the body.
You have had decades to protect yourself from the harm that you have experienced, promising yourself it will not happen again.
How long do you think it will take to begin naming all the processes you had to go through to survive? How long to name the layers you have grown to protect your vulnerability? To not get hurt?
It will take time. Because it has to.
Diving into opening old wounds headfirst and being gun ho about it is setting yourself up for retraumatization and harm. So healing has to be slow, simply because for many folks they were never given the time and attention to move at a snail’s pace. To process at their own rate. To be in difficult spaces together with someone who will not leave at the first opportunity.
So give yourself time. Give yourself space. You and your story deserve it.
2. Healing is not always “productive”
A lot of folks start their healing journeys and come to therapy expecting a clear, neat result, picturing what their life will look like once all their troubles are gone and they are fully healed.
What’s wrong with this picture?
First, it assumes that your troubles are something that needs to be eliminated or erased for you to have a good life. But the reality is life will always have something to say to us that we won’t want to hear. There will be struggles at work or in relationships, and we will question ourselves as we go from year to year and place to place.
Second, there is an assumption that as you work though all your stuff it will be a productive process that will only feel great. But healing is rarely productive in the way society taught us the definition of the word.
Healing can be messy, complicated and full of many deaths and rebirths. Deaths of who you had to be to survive, deaths of relationships that no longer serve you, deaths of interests or aspirations that were acquired as a response to trauma. There is a process of shedding old layers and growing new ones, which can be painful, unpredictable and far from a process that feels productive in the standard definition of the word.
There will likely be no award show celebrating you setting a boundary with a family member. There will not be a performance review where you get a raise for walking away from someone who harmed you. You won’t get a gold star for communicating your needs clearly and having them met.
Does it mean that healing is not worth it? Of course not! Because you (and likely your therapist if you have one) will be intimately familiar with what it took to get here and celebrate these successes regardless. Because they are profoundly meaningful to you.
This is where you get to look at where you came from and where you are now. And even if the journey of how you got there cannot be outlined step by step, you know in your bones you are farther along than when you began.
3. Healing is a choice, and a privilege
There are folks who may start moving toward healing and decide they do not want to continue. There may be a sense that it is too much, or that there is no time or space to begin this process. That is okay too.
We can’t require ourselves or others to heal on a certain timeline, or at all. It is a highly individual process that can only come about from a deep personal desire and choice to undertake it.
It is also important to note that healing is a privilege, and not everyone gets it. There are humans who struggle to meet their basic daily needs, and healing is the farthest thing from their minds. We cannot begin to heal when we have no food to eat, no warm place to sleep at night. Or when we have to hustle relentlessly to just survive. Our basic human needs must to be met before we can commence the taxing process of looking inward, reflecting and seeking understanding.
So it is important for us not to co-opt healing as a woke word and give into the very capitalistic notion of prescribing it as a process for everyone, judging or excluding those who are not doing it.
4. Healing is possible, and probable
Now that we have outlined what healing can be and what it can’t, it is paramount for me to underline that healing is possible and probable if it is something you want to do for yourself.
Humans’ capacity to heal is unprecedented. We have brains that experience neuroplasticity, literally allowing us to rewire our brains to think, feel and act differently. We have capacity to engage both sides of our brain, allowing the left and the right hemisphere to function in harmony.
We learn and code new ways of being into our very DNA. By understanding ourselves and reflecting on our patterns, coping mechanisms and all the things we had to do to survive we begin to create a space in between the stimulus and response. A pause where once something happens we get to ask ourselves “Can I do this/react to this/engage with this differently?” and see a new story begin to unfold. One that we get to create ourselves, rather than have it written for us by someone else.
That is powerful. That is worth fighting for.