The One Thing You Need To Understand About Healing

I need you to understand this: you cannot heal unless you allow yourself to get there on your own.

Sometimes that’s all it really takes – giving yourself the space to recognize the hurt, grieve the loss, and realize just how badly you need to let go of it all. 

It’s going to take a long time, too. Healing is slow. Healing is often ugly, too. You’re opening up yourself to something you’ve buried. Maybe it’s something you’ve wanted to forget about. Or maybe it’s something you didn’t realize you were forcing yourself to forget.

I need you to understand that pushing down that hurt was okay. It’s a completely natural reaction – avoidance was how you protected yourself, how you coped. What you did or didn’t do is not something to be ashamed of. But what’s not okay is letting yourself carry on with that hurt weighing you down, dragging you through your days with an overwhelming sense of dread.

If you want to heal, you must allow yourself to get there on your own. Sometimes, it hits you out of nowhere: the urge to do something about your hurt, to stop feeling the way you do.

Your pain and trauma and all that you’ve neglected will be asking something of you: to face it. You don’t have to accept it or try to understand it. All you have to do is pay attention to it, to stop treating it like an afterthought. You have to take care of it.

I need you to understand, too, that your healing will be ugly and rough. There will be many moments where you’re just going to want to give up. But you can’t. Like stretching out and massaging a sore muscle, you have to keep going. Those parts of you are always going to hurt a little, but when you put energy into working through it, it will soften.

Your healing allows your hurting to soften.