I Knew Right From Wrong. I Didn’t Know Healthy From Unhealthy.

I’ve been thinking a lot about something I discovered during healing.

Growing up, I knew right from wrong.

I knew good from bad.

But what I didn’t understand was the difference between healthy and unhealthy.

And I don’t think I realized until I healed just how much that mattered.

Because something can technically be “good” and still be unhealthy.

Giving is good.

But giving until you have nothing left, taking responsibility for everyone else’s problems and believing it’s your job to fix them can become unhealthy.

Empathy is good.

But my empathy had no boundaries.

Standing up for yourself can be good.

But reacting from anger, fear or pain can become unhealthy.

Trying to make a relationship work can be good.

But continuing to give more and more of yourself because you believe you must be the problem can be incredibly unhealthy.

I couldn’t see those distinctions then.

I can see them now.

And that’s what has made me think so much about what I call an unhealthy mind.

I can’t tell you exactly what happened neurologically. I can’t tell you when it happened or whether there was ever some point when my mind “switched.”

I only know what it felt like to live inside of it.

And I know that when I look back as far as I can remember, unhealthy ways of thinking were already there.

So somewhere very early in my life, unhealthy became familiar.

Then every time I encountered more unhealthy behaviors, relationships, reactions or environments, I didn’t necessarily recognize them as unhealthy.

Sometimes they simply looked normal to me.

And I believe that’s part of what kept me stuck in survival mode for so long.

It wasn’t only the memories.

It wasn’t only the people who hurt me.

It wasn’t only what happened in the past.

It was what was still happening inside my mind because of what I had learned from those experiences.

The overthinking.

The anxiety.

The depression.

The triggers that could make something from decades earlier feel unbelievably close.

The constant analyzing.

The fear.

The way my mind could immediately go to the worst possible place.

And eventually, suicidal thoughts.

For years, I believed I was going to be a lifelong victim of what had happened to me.

And my pain was real.

That’s something I will never minimize.

But what I understand today is that the person who caused the wound and what my mind learned from the wound are two different things.

That distinction changed healing for me.

Because I couldn’t change another person.

I couldn’t change my childhood.

I couldn’t change my past.

But I could finally start looking at what all of it had taught me.

Instead of only asking:

Was this right or wrong?
Was this good or bad?

I started asking:

Was this healthy or unhealthy?

And suddenly I could see things I had never been able to see before.

Not only in other people.

In myself.

Some of my thoughts were unhealthy.

Some of my reactions were unhealthy.

Some of my behaviors were unhealthy.

Some of the things I thought were love were unhealthy.

Some of the things I thought were empathy were unhealthy.

Some of the things I thought were protecting myself were keeping me stuck.

That didn’t mean I was bad.

And it didn’t mean what happened to me suddenly didn’t matter.

It meant I could finally see from the outside in what I couldn’t see while I was living it from the inside out.

And then I could begin asking:

What would healthy look like instead?

That’s when things slowly started changing.

The healthier distinction became easier to recognize.

My reactions started changing.

My thoughts started changing.

Triggers started making sense instead of simply controlling what happened next.

And survival mode slowly stopped being the only way my mind knew how to live.

I don’t know exactly what you call that neurologically.

I sometimes describe it as rewiring because that’s what it felt like to me.

I know what my mind was like before, and I know what it’s like now.

And I also know where that road was taking me.

By August 2024, I had become so unhealthy and exhausted inside my own mind that I was preparing to end my life.

Had I stayed on that road, there very nearly wasn’t going to be a “rest of my life” for survival mode to follow me into.

And that’s why this matters so much to me now.

Healing wasn’t just learning how to live with what happened.

For me, healing became learning how to live differently because of what happened.

I still have a past.

I still have memories.

I still encounter difficult people and painful situations.

Life still has right and wrong, good and bad.

But now I have another distinction that I didn’t have before:

Is this healthy or unhealthy?

And sometimes that’s the question that changes everything. ❤️