Your healing journey does not need to be yet another life jacket you strap on and cling onto for dear life, and it shouldn’t come at the cost of enjoying life as it is now if you’re able to do so.
There is so much pressure to heal ourselves, “fix” or “work on” ourselves, to embark on a spiritual journey, “self-improve” and “build character” that it all just gets super heavy after a while. And yeah, that’s coming from me who built an entire blog on the premise that we can craft lives that are not trauma-based.
But it is 100% okay to take a break from actively working on yourself to appreciate and enjoy what you can in the life you have now. Without shame. Without guilt.
What is the point of healing from trauma if you’re just going to use it as another stick to beat yourself with when it doesn’t go according to your plan or timeline? As with anything that requires active effort, you need to allow yourself breaks or you will likely throw in the towel.
And we’re done giving up on ourselves.
Trauma strips a lot of things from us and one of them is the ability to feel or let ourselves experience guilt-free joy. A healing journey isn’t just about battling trauma. It’s also about letting life in and allowing ourselves to experience joy again (or for the first time).
The last two weeks have been really good weeks for me and I’ve been focusing on letting myself enjoy the fact that life is going really well right now. Things are productive but not overwhelming at work, I like my coworkers, I’ve enjoyed choir and a few social events (like a coworker boule competition and a photoshoot), I’ve gone to the gym, watched less news, and enjoyed cooking healthy meals.
The sun has been shining more recently and the days are steadily getting longer. I’ve been feeling at peace more than usual lately, and I’m allowing myself to let that sink in.
I mention these things to give examples of how healing doesn’t have to mean forcing ourselves to walk through deep tunnels of horrors past. It can be as simple as enjoying the here and now, as bumper sticker-y as that sounds.
Kindness is key.
We’ve no doubt internalized our abusers’ treatment and beliefs about us, but treating ourselves as our abusers would doesn’t help us. It is not a coping strategy and it does not keep us safe. It keeps us stuck in a self-actualizing loop and is exposure therapy in reverse. Our minds repeat what is familiar to us and any deviation from what it considers the norm is “unsafe.”
This is why our healing journey requires us to be kind to ourselves. We can only break that negative feedback loop by introducing grace, kindness, sincere joy, and new experiences into our daily lives.
So while I’ve had a very good last two weeks, it also meant that I didn’t write a blog post last week. I didn’t spend hours doing all the backend work that goes into writing and optimizing a post.
Instead, I opted for a bike ride around a big lake in the sun, with a break in an 1800s village full of goats and ponies. I went to the gym, baked an apple pie, and made yummy meals in my new grill/air fryer.
I invited life in.
I could have berated myself for being lazy, irresponsible, stupid, not good enough, prioritizing poorly, not being efficient with my time, and so on.
But I didn’t tell myself any of those things and I don’t even think my mind threw them at me more than a few times. My healing journey means, above all, showing myself grace and allowing myself to feel joy and peace in whatever shape they take.
I don’t care if a family member thinks I could be doing more. I don’t care if a friend doesn’t understand. If it doesn’t feel right in my heart or my gut, then I’m not doing it. And you know what that’s called?
Growth and being in alignment with myself.
So here’s your reminder to let go and allow yourself to just “be” now and then. You don’t have to read all the books, write all the journal entries, or look for the next best thing. Just be.*
* Yes, that’s often uncomfortable because of everything the calmness makes deafening, but we can’t be efficient and effective at all times. Make sure you check in with your body, too, since we so often lose the connection with our body senses.
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