What I Used to Believe Healing Was

🌱 What I Used to Believe Healing Was

For most of my life, I thought healing meant:

• moving on

• not crying anymore

• not letting it affect me

• being angry instead of hurt

• building a life that looked “fine” from the outside

• telling my story so others would believe me

• proving what happened so I could feel seen

And for a long time, that was my definition.

I left a narcissistic relationship.

I confronted the pain with my mother.

I wrote blog posts filled with emotion and truth…

but none of it healed me.

I was bleeding onto the page and calling it recovery.

I didn’t understand that healing isn’t the story you tell —

it’s the story you face within yourself.

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🌿 What Healing Actually Is

Healing isn’t “getting over it.”

Healing isn’t rage.

Healing isn’t numbing yourself until the memories fade.

Healing isn’t building a life around avoidance.

Healing isn’t hoping people finally understand you.

Healing is:

• sitting with what triggers you

• letting the truth rise instead of pushing it down

• allowing your body to feel what it avoided for years

• facing the memories you buried

• understanding why you reacted the way you did

• realizing your pain was born in environments you didn’t choose

• accepting that trauma shaped your brain and your nervous system

• learning you weren’t broken — you were wounded

And that was something I didn’t learn until I finally crashed.

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🌑 When the Spiral Became a Freefall

In late 2023, something shifted inside me.

By early 2024, that shift became a slow, painful unraveling.

I wasn’t spiraling in fear or shame.

I was spiraling because nobody heard me.

I was speaking up more than ever, and the more I spoke, the less I was understood.

Every unhealed part of me rose to the surface at the same time.

I didn’t know anything about trauma, trauma responses, nervous system wounds, or CPTSD.

I didn’t know that years of emotional injuries had stacked on top of one another.

I didn’t know that one traumatic event can alter a person… and consistent trauma can rewire them completely.

But that’s exactly what happened.

And in August 2024, I hit rock bottom.

I remember sitting numb for what felt like days.

I remember going to the doctor convinced I was having a heart attack —

only to realize later, sitting in the parking lot,

that I had walked in with suicidal ideations…

and a plan.

A plan crafted not out of impulse —

but out of exhaustion.

I believed my family would be better off without me.

I believed I didn’t fit in this world.

I believed I had failed as a wife, a mother, a person.

I believed I was too broken to be loved.

But rock bottom, I learned, isn’t the end.

It’s the moment God finally gets your attention.

🌤️ Where God Stepped In

I cried to Him for months.

I begged Him to take me home.

I asked why He kept placing me in positions to help people

if it only led to me being hurt, used, or pushed away.

But God didn’t take me home.

He kept me here — painfully, intentionally, silently.

Because what I thought was my purpose… wasn’t.

And the life I had built on top of trauma finally cracked wide open.

He wasn’t punishing me.

He was redirecting me.