7 Things We Don’t Talk About When It Comes to Healing

Attention NYC Readers! To close out Mental Health Awareness Month, I’m inviting you to join me for an evening with Kenneth Cole and the Mental Health Coalition on Thursday, May 28, from 6–8 PM at 511 W 21st Street. There will be a conversation between Dr. Naomi from MHC and me, plus wine, snacks, and time to connect and bond with the community IRL.

Space is limited, sign up here

There are many misconceptions about what it means to be on a healing journey. And trust me, even I cringe a little at the term sometimes. With psychology-speak exploding online, it’s become harder to differentiate between the people using these terms to posture or manipulate and those of us who are actually doing the work in earnest. But such is life.

2016 was the year I realized I needed to direct my life differently. It was also my Saturn return—you can find the whole backstory here. I never felt inherently broken when I started, but I certainly thought I needed to fix myself. Over the last ten years, I’ve come to understand that it wasn’t that I needed fixing. It was that I had spent a long time banishing parts of myself that I didn’t like—or that my family had communicated they didn’t like. Those parts never actually go away, and even worse, sometimes they get in the driver’s seat of your life. 

Something in my brain shifted when I learned that, as children, we trade authenticity for acceptance from our family or even friends.

So ultimately, my healing journey helped me become more myself. When I wrapped up with my old therapist in January, she said to me, “I don’t want to say you’ve changed” in the time we worked together, “but you’re more you.” And that’s how I always hoped I would feel. I didn’t want to be a new person because I liked who I was at the end of the day.

It’s rewarding to learn how to see, accept, and love the parts of yourself that you once felt you had to suppress or push away. 

Healing childhood wounds, familial dynamics, and romantic patterns often shifts your life in ways you don’t really see coming, though. You can’t really change yourself and integrate everything you’ve learned without the world around you shifting as well. It can completely reorient how you see your relationships because our relationships with our parents/caregivers help inform how we bond with others—both platonically and romantically. 

From the exhaustion that can come with self-awareness to the anger that can’t help but bubble up, here are the parts of the journey that I don’t think we talk about enough when it comes to healing.

1. You stop trying to understand everyone

This is actually one of my favorite benefits of the healing process because I’ve always been someone who wanted to understand everyone and everything. That curiosity led me down this path in the first place. To be known is to be loved, and I suppose a part of me believed that if I could really understand other people, then maybe they’d also want to understand me. However, that same dedication to understanding or seeing me hasn’t always been reciprocated. I realize now that a lot of that was tied to my anxiety and anxious attachment, which made me feel like if I could fully understand someone, I’d have some sense of control over the situation—or I could be exactly what they needed. Of course, I am naturally curious, but I’m much more mindful now about how much energy I invest in people who aren’t equally invested in me. Sometimes it can feel like you’re trying to do the work for them when they’re not even interested in understanding themselves. So I no longer feel the need to endlessly analyze why someone treated me the way they did or why they can’t reciprocate in the way I want them to. I can take people’s actions at face value and decide from there whether they’re worth having in my life—and in what capacity.