Therapy Bits

Being under no illusions about healing from trauma means recognizing, sometimes painfully, that recovery isn’t a tidy chapter break or a milestone you check off and move past. It’s a full-time job—one you didn’t apply for, one you never wanted, and one that doesn’t come with clear hours, benefits, or days off. For me, accepting this has been both grounding and humbling. It has forced me to see healing not as an event but as a way of living, a daily practice that asks for honesty, patience, and intentional effort.

There are days when I wake up feeling steady, believing I’ve crossed some invisible threshold into “better.” And then something small—a tone of voice, a scent, a sudden memory—pulls me back into old patterns of fear, vigilance, or sadness. In those moments, I’m reminded that healing is not linear. It doesn’t follow the logic of progress our culture loves to celebrate. Instead, it loops, spirals, pauses, and sometimes regresses. Accepting this has softened my self-blame. When I expect healing to be a full-time job, I’m less surprised when it demands something from me at inconvenient moments.

What has changed most is my sense of responsibility to myself. If healing is ongoing work, then tending to my emotions, boundaries, and well-being is not indulgent—it’s necessary. I used to think I could compartmentalize my pain and keep moving, as if sheer productivity could outrun the echoes of what I’d been through. But trauma doesn’t respect compartmentalization. It shows up in my body, my reactions, my relationships, my self-talk. Learning to attend to it with care requires vigilance, but not the fear-based vigilance trauma taught me. Instead, it’s a kind of attentive self-parenting: noticing when I’m overwhelmed, offering myself gentleness, choosing responses over reflexes.

There’s a loneliness to this work. Healing asks for introspection that can make me feel separate from others who don’t know what it’s like to carry invisible weight. But there’s also a community—people who understand that the quiet work of building safety inside yourself is as real as any external labor. Connecting with them has reminded me that although healing is personal, it doesn’t have to be solitary.

Being under no illusions also means acknowledging that some aspects of trauma may never fully disappear. Instead of striving for erasure, I’m learning to pursue integration. This shift relieves me from the impossible expectation that I will someday be untouched by what happened. Healing becomes less about becoming who I was before and more about becoming someone who can hold their own story with compassion.

At times, this ongoing work feels exhausting. But recognizing it as full-time also affirms something important: I am worth the effort. My well-being deserves the same consistency and commitment I readily give to work, relationships, and responsibilities. And maybe that’s the quiet gift inside the difficult truth—knowing that healing, though relentless, is also a continuous act of honoring myself.

RDP Tuesday! Illusion!