What happened to me mattered. But eventually healing asked me a different question.
For most of my life, when I talked about my mental health, I talked about what happened to me.
And plenty happened.
Childhood experiences. Relationships. Betrayal. Abandonment. Environments that weren’t healthy for me. A marriage I repeatedly left and returned to. Work environments that affected me more deeply than I understood at the time.
For years, I thought healing meant understanding those things, talking about them, getting away from them, learning coping skills and somehow eventually getting over them.
Some of that helped.
But I eventually discovered there was another part of healing I had completely missed:
I had to understand what those experiences had taught my mind.
That changed everything.
Leaving wasn’t the end of my healing
When I finally left my former marriage in 2020, something interesting had already happened.
I had left mentally before I left physically.
There had been previous separations where distance gave me enough room to begin noticing things. Each time I stepped away, I could see a little more clearly. And each time I returned, some of the old patterns returned too.
Eventually I knew.
This wasn’t the life I wanted anymore.
Leaving mattered. Distance mattered. Safety mattered.
But I was completely unprepared for what came next.
I had gotten out of the relationship. The relationship hadn’t gotten out of my mind.
Not because I consciously chose to carry it.
Because I had learned things.
I had learned what silence meant.
What rejection meant.
What disagreement meant.
What somebody becoming distant might mean.
What I thought love required.
What I believed I had to do to keep someone.
What I believed I had to do to finally be understood.
And I carried those interpretations into places where the old situation wasn’t happening anymore.
That’s where I discovered the Inside-Out
When I entered a new relationship, things began happening that reminded me of the past.
But my husband wasn’t my former husband.
Sometimes he would get quiet because he didn’t know what to say.
From the Outside-In, that’s what happened:
He got quiet.
But Inside-Out, my mind could interpret that silence through everything it already knew:
Something is wrong. He’s going to leave. I’m losing him. Here we go again.
Then I responded to what my mind believed was happening.
I explained.
Then explained more.
I became upset.
Sometimes I yelled.
Sometimes I accused.
Sometimes I pushed him away before he could leave me.
And from inside me, those reactions made sense because I knew the entire story my mind was responding to.
But he couldn’t see that story.
He could see my behavior.
That was the beginning of something I wouldn’t have had words for until much later.
There were two perspectives of the same moment.
Inside-Out
What I felt.
What I feared.
What I believed.
What I intended.
What I thought was happening.
Outside-In
What I actually said.
What I actually did.
What another person experienced from me.
What my behavior looked like without access to everything happening inside me.
And sometimes those perspectives were miles apart.
I call that distance:
The Abyss.
The Abyss wasn’t the darkness inside me
This distinction matters.
The Abyss wasn’t me.
It wasn’t my trauma.
It wasn’t my diagnosis.
It wasn’t even the unhealthy behavior itself.
The Abyss was the distance between what I could understand about myself from the Inside-Out and what could be observed about me from the Outside-In.
For a long time, I wasn’t necessarily missing the truth about what happened to me.
I was missing information about what was happening through me in response.
Other people could sometimes see behaviors I couldn’t recognize from inside myself.
And I could feel pain, fear and intentions that they couldn’t see from outside me.
Neither perspective alone gave the whole picture.
Being hurt didn’t automatically make my response healthy
This may have been one of the hardest things healing taught me.
Sometimes I really was wronged.
Sometimes my concern really was legitimate.
Sometimes somebody else really was behaving unhealthily.
But:
Being right about the problem did not automatically make my response to the problem healthy.
I could have a legitimate concern at work and become so desperate to have somebody address it that eventually I brought up every other problem too.
I could recognize an unhealthy family dynamic and go from sibling to sibling or relative to relative asking:
“Do you guys not see this?”
Inside-Out, I was trying to understand.
I was trying to be heard.
I was looking for validation that I wasn’t imagining what I saw.
Outside-In, someone else could see me repeatedly involving third parties, overexplaining, escalating or talking about another person.
Both pieces mattered.
Understanding why I behaved that way didn’t erase accountability for how I behaved.
It finally made accountability possible without requiring me to hate myself.
Then I found the Bridge
I didn’t wake up one morning with a completely different mind.
It happened in pieces.
I’d catch something afterward.
Then I’d catch it while it was happening.
Eventually, sometimes I’d recognize it before I acted on it.
That changed the questions I asked.
Instead of:
Why are they doing this to me?
I started asking:
What is happening inside me right now?
Instead of:
Why won’t they understand?
I could ask:
What am I trying to make happen by continuing to explain?
Instead of immediately trusting every interpretation my mind produced:
What actually happened?
What do I know?
What am I assuming?
What did my mind add?
Does this actually require a response?
If it does, who is the appropriate person to address it with?
What would a healthier response look like?
That is what I call:
The Bridge.
Not positive thinking.
Not pretending something doesn’t hurt.
Not allowing people to mistreat you.
Not telling yourself your trauma wasn’t real.
And definitely not perfection.
For me, the Bridge became the place where I could finally bring my Inside-Out experience together with Outside-In information and ask:
What is actually happening—and what do I want to do with it now?
Healing became practice
Eventually it showed up in ordinary moments.
My husband brought home tomatoes that were softer than I prefer.
Once, my mind could have turned that tiny event into:
“You never listen to me.”
Now?
They’re tomatoes.
He left something on the counter.
Once, that could have become evidence for an entire story.
Now I can ask whether it actually matters.
A coworker does something that activates old concerns.
Instead of immediately deciding what she thinks of me or what she might be telling somebody else, I can separate:
What I know from what I suspect.
My daughter calls right before dinner.
Instead of assuming what she’s calling about and rushing her through the conversation, I can allow the information I don’t have yet to arrive.
That may sound incredibly simple.
It wasn’t simple when I couldn’t see it.
That’s the part I want people to understand.
There is no healing stopwatch
I won’t tell another person:
“You’ve been talking about this long enough.”
I don’t know how long another person’s healing will take.
I don’t know what their nervous system, mind, circumstances, resources, safety or history require.
But I have learned something from my own life:
Time passing and healing were not the same thing for me.
I could talk about what happened for years without understanding what it had taught me.
And eventually healing became less about repeatedly asking:
“What did they do to me?”
and more about asking:
“What did this teach my mind—and what do I want to teach it now?”
That did not absolve anyone else.
Their behavior belonged to them.
Mine belonged to me.
Their healing belongs to them too.
I cannot force another person to recognize their patterns.
I cannot heal them.
I cannot make them apologize.
I cannot make them become healthier.
Sometimes the healthiest thing available to me is a boundary.
Sometimes it is distance.
Sometimes it is leaving.
Sometimes it is speaking up.
Sometimes it is letting something go.
The Bridge isn’t one predetermined answer.
It’s learning how to see enough of the situation to make a healthier choice.
And I am still crossing it
I still get triggered.
I still have automatic thoughts.
I still catch myself slipping into old ways of interpreting something.
The difference is that I recognize more of them now.
And when I recognize one, I don’t have to shame myself for having it.
I can get curious.
Where did that come from?
What do I actually know?
Is this happening now—or did something happening now awaken something old?
What response belongs to the person I’m becoming?
For me, that’s growth.
And my faith is inseparable from it.
Looking back, I believe God wasn’t asking me to erase my story.
He was helping me understand it differently.
I thought I needed Him to take me out of my life.
Instead, I believe He began teaching me how to live it.
And today, my story isn’t simply:
Look what happened to me.
It’s:
Look what I couldn’t see. Look what I learned to see. And look what became possible once I did.
That is The Abyss & Bridge.
Shared from lived experience, not expert advice
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