Trauma touches everything.
So healing touches everything too.
Which is to say, it’s easy to see how trauma has formed our most neurotic, needy, and anxious selves – but it’s easy to overlook how it forms even our best and most likable qualities too.
Healing is being confronted with the disorienting insight that some of your best virtues and attributes might exist especially because they were necessary mechanisms of survival.
In this way healing can feel like you’re loosing yourself because if you defined yourself and your virtue on qualities you needed to survive –
Who are you now that you’re safe?
Are these things still virtues or are they vices in the ways they keep you stuck in survival?
Furthermore – what does it mean for your relationships?
If people have come to love and relate to you especially on the basis of these things – then what are the implications now that you’re safe and you can finally relinquish your survival strategies?
We all know that trauma can be terrifying.
But we need to acknowledge that healing can be terrifying too
– especially in the ways it forces you to question and evaluate the totality of who you are.
It’s important to normalize this.
Healing is not all rainbows and butterflies.
It’s as harrowing as it is hopeful.
SO VERY HUMAN 