Beyond the Healing
Part of healing is letting go of all the coping mechanisms that made up who you once were. It can strip you back so that your identity is entirely unfamiliar to you and others. Expect this. Anticipate transformation. Healing isn’t quietly sitting in meditation, contemplating your pain. It is being thrust into no man’s land, facing a tidal wave of brutal truths, the pain of unhealed wounds, the shadows you turned from in order to survive.
When you surrender those behaviours, habits, coping mechanisms that once kept you safe, you will often feel lost, unable to fathom who you really are. The truth of who you are may not be fitting to the illusions that others may still choose to hold about you. Illusions that you too, fed into. Because you believed them of yourself.
As you begin to shed those versions of yourself, to bravely face the authentic self, removing the bandages, exposing the wounds, you will need to dedicate time for transformation. This can be very painful, terrifying and unsettling. There is no guidebook and only you can take this journey. Those parts of you that held onto behaviours that distracted from the pain, can now surrender the baton. You are taking over the race.
Once upon a time your nervous system created a personality, made up of behaviours, which were designed to keep you safe. You became defined by these characteristics. One day, when you finally woke up to your pain, and started the brave journey of healing, you realised that the real person inside had been hidden. From you, from people who thought they knew you.
Until we “feel” the pain, we cannot heal. We cannot talk our way or write our way out of trauma. Even if we tell our stories, unless the narration is underpinned by the primal emotion, true healing is just a celebration of words. If only recovery were as easy as writing a blog, article or book. If only we were transformed by reading the experience. No. We must revisit the lived experience. We must place ourselves at the heart of the physical sensations, the fear, the shame, the terror, the anger, the abandonment.
We are on an uphill battle because our nervous system is wired to protect us from these powerful emotions, so we must deliberately surrender sophisticated coping strategies which we have long since identified as core traits of our personalities. Furthermore, we are inviting pain in! We are ripping the band aid metaphorically speaking and putting a microscope on the festering wound, long ignored.
I have to say that anyone who is on a journey of healing, as a lion’s heart. If you are reading this, and it resonates with you, I want to award you recognition of the bravery you are showing. The resilience, that feels absent, but underpins every day survived, every hour lived through. It is not fruitless. Every moment that we feel pain, suffering, we are moving through it. But if we have held the agony in, and waited decades, we need patience time and self-compassion.
Healing is very messy, as I mentioned in another blog. Worse than messy, it is brutal, and the process is not linear. You don’t work from unhealed to healed. There are mountains and valleys, rivers and oceans, hurricanes and tornados. But if we face the battle armed, and ready, we transform our pain, and we become who we were always meant to be.
Please reach out for support if this or any of my articles trigger any pain or if the subject resonates. You might talk to a friend, or family member, or you might prefer to reach out to your NHS GP or 111. There are also a lot of resources online.
