The Truth About Healing
Do you know what bothers me a lot more than I’d like to admit? How healing from emotional trauma is somehow very often portrayed as some easy and transformative journey, almost like a walk in the park. Transformative? Sure. But easy? Not so much!
Yet every second blog seems to post articles describing how yoga and meditation or drinking water with lemon first thing in the morning drastically changed the blogger’s life and once those changes were done then *poof* they are healed, never having any issues for the rest of their lives. I mean, come on! If drinking more water and doing yoga miraculously healed people from emotional trauma, don’t you think there would be a lot less people dealing with it?
Sugarcoating a healing journey is not only misleading, but also extremely harmful. The reality is that healing from any type of emotional trauma – and I’m not even mentioning generational trauma here – is hard. It is supposed to be hard! You’re literally breaking down things you were taught to do from a very young age, things you were taught to believe (about yourself and others), you are breaking down who you became due to trauma, in order to be able to become who you were supposed to be from the very beginning. And that is hard! It may seem a cliché comparing a healing journey to the journey from caterpillar to butterfly, but the truth is that it is just as transformative, just not on the outside.
Do you want to know what you go through when tackling the load of emotional trauma and trying to heal from it? You will have breakdowns, feel more sensitive, you will cry a lot, you will feel tired and frustrated and angry and lonely and sad and annoyed at yourself and everyone around you. If you are actually making an effort to heal your trauma, you will feel more alone than you ever did in your life. Even if you felt like an outsider throughout your life, you will be surprised how lonely a healing journey is. Because those around you will not always understand what you are going through, and some of them will not like it at all.
The truth is, that embarking on a healing journey is something you should think about very seriously before you do it. I am not trying to discourage you from doing it, but I also think it is important to be open about how hard it actually is! It’s not as easy as you see on Instagram and other social media platforms, on the contrary. Healing is incredibly isolating, it’s even crippling at times. It will require you to look at yourself, really look. To admit you suffered from generational trauma is easy, to actually be able to admit your role in it is the hard part. Because it requires self-awareness like you never had before, it will challenge you over and over and over again and when you think you’ve overcome something and allow yourself to relax, there comes a trigger showing you how much work you still have in front of you. Most likely, you will not like who you are, you will realize you do not like the way you handle certain things, the way you act, or even how you think.
It is not a good feeling to recognize your own mistakes, to admit that you also did those things your parents did, that you acted in similar ways, and have similar patterns that you want to break. It will humble you, like nothing before humbled you, but it is necessary if you really are serious about healing your trauma and breaking the cycle. Without acknowledging our own flaws and looking deep down at ourselves, we will never be able to heal and grow into the person we want to be.
You will find yourself in a ball, hyperventilating and crying, and that is when it will be important to remember that it’s all part of the process, and it will get easier with time. The universe will throw you curveballs, it will try to challenge you, and it is your job to make sure you don’t get side-tracked.
It will take time
It isn’t called a healing journey for nothing, it literally says in the name that it is something that takes time. And when it comes to healing, it is a long journey, one that will most likely take the rest of your life. Because it means building a whole new self, building a better version of who you are, and that in itself takes a lot of energy, hard work, and most of all, commitment. There will be more times than you think, where you will want to give up, when things become hard, almost too hard to bear. You will question yourself, question the journey, question why you are even putting yourself through it. There will be bumps along the way, a lot more than you think.
And by the end of it, there will be people who will no longer be in your life. The sad truth is, we surround ourselves with what makes us feel safe, but that isn’t always the best thing for us, the best people. Because if you grew up in a traumatized family of any kind, you don’t know what a healthy relationship is. You don’t know what a real friendship is, what a friend is supposed to feel like because you most likely weren’t modelled it growing up. And those you did surround yourself with are probably not the type of people you will want to accompany you anyway. But it will still hurt, you will still cry, and you will still miss them, for a long time.
When things get hard, it is easy to convince ourselves, we were fine the way we were before. And those are the times when you need to stop and take a good look at yourself, to be able to see that it isn’t you talking, but your trauma, your fear of change. Long-term healing is worth it, it is life-changing, and it is worth the challenge of getting there. It won’t be a fun experience, but then again, it isn’t supposed to be. You are literally breaking yourself down in order to build yourself back up, pain is to be expected.
Think about it like a broken leg: it goes through various stages of healing. You may need a cast for a while, and then you may need physical therapy to get it moving like before. It’s uncomfortable, it’s difficult in the beginning, it feels stiff, and you will have a hard time getting it to do what it did before. But then, eventually, it gets easier, and before you know it, you are running and jumping, and it will be almost like you never broke it. Almost. Because a bone that has been broken, will always bear a scar, one you cannot see unless you do an x-ray, but even if you don’t see it with a naked eye, it is still there. Sometimes you will still feel pain, maybe when the weather turns.
It is unrealistic to expect a broken leg to heal from one day to the other, without help from a cast or a bandage, physical therapy, and even pain killers. So why should we expect healing from trauma, breaking the cycle of emotional abuse, and literally paving a whole new way for the generations that come after us, to be any easier?