Have you ever caught yourself in a constant loop of pain and suffering? Did it ever feel like you reached close to complete healing, but were somehow never able to achieve it, as some pain or wound kept popping up all over again? Well, to make things easier, I’m informing you that you’re not alone in this, as it is the natural way to heal. Does that mean that healing is impossible? Well, no, but healing is not as easy as it might seem. Healing is a cyclic process, and it doesn’t work linearly.
Healing is cyclic and not linear:
We don’t feel emotions in the actual way they are, but instead, we’re forced to learn a basic way to process our emotions and thoughts, and we’re sadly bound to it. In our culture as well, success is something that is measured by progress. And we equate progress with forward motion. This is something which we have been taught to implement in emotional terms, too. But we need to understand that our soul does not work in this straight pattern. In this world, we’re obsessed with speed and want everything to be done fast. But healing is a slow process, and it demands time and space. When pain continues to linger or it appears again, we feel like being trapped or failing, but instead of returning to emotions is a part of the healing process as it doesn’t stop affecting all at once, the pain keeps testing us until the effect starts fading and eventually vanishes. Our therapy culture has also trapped us that once you decide to forget, you’ll eventually forget, and no one shows the pain and confusion that comes in between. Nextly, our society has chained our brains to either be weak and stick with emotions, otherwise if we’re strong, then don’t struggle with emotions. But this is not an accurate, practical way to decide if someone is emotionally weak or strong. But still, in the fear of shame or embarrassment, revisiting old emotions feels much heavier than it is.
Healing doesn’t mean that you will never cry about your past. You might still cry about it for years, but eventually, with each cry pain will be less and it will be more tolerable. Those emotions will reside somewhere inside, but eventually they’ll not suppress your life. And some experiences need to be experienced multiple times to discard the pain that they bring. Healing is not about deleting the pain, but it’s about changing the perception of pain. Each time, the pain will be different, and it will not control you in the future. You might still remember it, still honour it, but that pain will no longer be your definition.
Why does pain keep returning?
Our mind has a very complex mechanism in which we store our emotions and subconsciously operate from them. Our mind likes to cling on things which it has already experienced rather than to focus on what it’s going to experience, One conscious part may want us to move on but still there’s a part in our brain that has because obsessed with the suffering and the pain and just because these emotions feel more familiar ot tends to hold them. Healing often challenges such toxic attachment issues and leads to silent inner battles. And in the process of healing, when we move a step forward on our way to growth, we often break several survival mechanisms that we’ve built in the past to protect us. When we outgrow our former identities, it breaks open our initial personalities and our attachment to the pain, and this eventually ruptures the pain. In the initial stages of jealousy, our mind usually starts numbing itself to escape the painful emotions, and as we make progress in our healing process, that numbness slowly starts fading, and pain becomes more visible. It’s the same pain that we denied feeling earlier, but eventually, we’ll become strong enough to face the pain, and eventually, with time, it will impact us a little less each time.
What does healing look like?
Our society and social media have contributed to setting a false narrative for the process of healing. They’ve shown us that healing is a simple and easy process of letting things go and being all happy and cheerful. Healing is not as pretty as society has shown us. Healing is a kind of ugly process that is often full of repetition of exhausting feelings, and it can be ultimately messy sometimes, but eventually it leads to a beautiful transformation of you being your strongest version. Healing doesn’t mean that you will stop crying. You’ll still cry, you’ll revisit the past, and you’ll remember each thing, and you will sit with your pain and thoughts in silence, and you’ll release them into your tears. Nights in the healing process often feel like crying sessions, but still in the morning, you’ll carry yourself and will walk with a smile on your face, and that is how healing works. You might feel so good, fresh, and enlightened one day, followed by a day when you will lose it all. A day full of confusion, and this is okay. It’s not you who is going to break, but it’s actually your mind trying to process the new emotions, and it’s just rewiring itself to get adjusted to the new reality. Mind also wants space, and when you provide your mind the rest that it needs, you’ll feel confused or drained for some time, but the refreshed brain will give you more clarity and vision in the future. Healing is not finding answers for every event that has happened in your past. Healing is about accepting the past and moving on from it. In our constant urges to find answers for why something has happened, we unknowingly push ourselves deeper into the anxiety. We simply need to tell ourselves that what happened has already happened, and it doesn’t matter to me anymore. In the process of healing, we should not try to get back to our old version, but instead, we should try to rebuild ourselves. We need to listen to our thoughts and needs, and we need to set new healthy boundaries for ourselves, and such small actions will eventually help us in reclaiming our lost power and charm.
Healing includes pain and past traumas, making a revisit, but their appearance is not to induce hurt but to deepen the peace. Each pain helps to rewrite a new version of ourselves and to reshape and reform our identity. It’s not a simple and easy process as believed by many; instead, it’s a complex cycle of life that has its value. Healing does not remove the pain, but instead, it transforms the pain into something else, such as power. Our pain still lingers, but it’s under your control you and you’re no longer controlled by your pain. Pain is like a multilayered onion. Healing includes removing it layer by layer, with each layer it deepens and induces tears, but each cycle of pain helps us to deal a little better with it.
“Healing is less about becoming a new person, and more about letting the old wounds know they no longer control you.”