“Why You Haven’t Healed Yet.”
“I’ve not healed because so much time has passed, but they’re still very much on my mind. I still love them. I get triggered when I see their posts. They’ve moved on and it hurts.”
Healing is not the passage of time, avoidance of pain or the absence of feelings.
For a long time, healing for me meant that I stopped thinking about the past. It meant waiting for “time to heal all wounds”. But over time, i’ve realized that’s not what healing truly is.
Oftentimes, people actually heal without knowing they have, they get closure without having to ask or seek for it.
Healing is a mind shift that happens when you stop fixating so much on the passage of time and avoiding your feelings. It happens when you feel your feelings but leave them for what they are.
I think healing happens when you stop obsessing about erasing someone from your memory because the truth is, some people will always be a part of our lives. The love we had for them or the impact they had in our lives.
And that’s okay
Contrary to the idea that healing requires you to “get over them, find new hobbies, meet new people, fall in love again or drown yourself in work”, you can actually heal without doing any of those things. when you don’t suppress your feelings.
When you stop fighting that you still love them even when you shouldn’t anymore and when they’re not deserving of it.
You can heal and still have love for this person. You can heal and still think good of them. You can heal and still forgive them. Forgiving your past is not a betrayal of your pain like you think it is. It also doesn’t mean that what they did was okay. It simply means that you’re setting yourself free.
Forgiveness is not invalidating your own experiences. Accepting that you still have or will always have love/respect for this person, doesn’t mean you’re stuck or not healed.
It means that you’re letting go and being at peace with their absence.
You’re able to heal from a place of love and peace instead of anger, hurt & shame.
Once you have that mind shift, you’re then able to look at it from a bigger picture point of view. You’re a able to start seeing that no how much you might’ve wanted it to work, it wouldn’t have worked if God didn’t want it to.
It wouldn’t have prospered without His blessings.
That voice in your head that has been chanting “just be a more heartless person” or “be nonchalant” starts to lose its place in your head.
You accept your experiences without losing your ability to love or be good again.
You’re able to internalize tawakkul. That your affairs in it’s entirety does not rest in your hands. You begin to see the blessing or the lesson that is there in the loss.
Perhaps something you never would’ve gotten, seen or learnt if you had still held onto it.
From a place of love and peace, you feel more gratitude than you do resentment. You’re able to live in grace even on hard days.
You feel a deeper sense of contentment with the best you’ve done, the best you’re doing & the best you’re STILL willing to do.
You’re also able to seperate your pain from yourself whenever it comes back, because on some days, it will.
You no longer see the hit of memories as state, but as a phase.
So while acceptance is important, how you accept it, and why, makes all the difference.
Understanding that you do not possess the power to stir the events in your life at will, is in itself a form of liberation.
This isn’t in any way saying that you have to love or see good in the people that hurt you. It just means that it’s okay to heal without hate in your heart.
And that it doesn’t take erasing someone completely from your mind, to heal. Love and healing can coexist.
