Is Healing Ever Finished?

A few days ago, I realized I hadn’t thought about healing for several days.

I hadn’t checked in with myself.

I hadn’t analyzed why I reacted a certain way to something.

I hadn’t wondered whether I was making progress.

I hadn’t read anything about trauma, nervous systems, triggers, boundaries, attachment, inner children, emotional regulation or any of the other terminology I’ve accumulated over the years.

I had made dinner.

Read.

Watched television.

Worked on things.

Gone places.

Thought about completely ordinary problems.

I had just been living.

And then, naturally, I ruined it by wondering what it meant.

Was this progress?

Was I finally getting better?

Was this what healing was supposed to feel like?

And then came the bigger question.

How do you know when you’re done?

I Thought Healing Had a Finish Line

For a long time, I thought healing was a project.

This probably says as much about me as it does about the healing industry.

Give me a problem and I want to understand it.

Give me something I can research and I will research it within an inch of its life.

Give me a list of steps and there is an excellent chance I will make another list organizing the first list.

So when I finally understood that I had spent most of my life in survival mode, I approached healing the same way I approached everything else.

Figure out what happened.

Understand why.

Learn the terminology.

Find the experts.

Read the books.

Do the work.

Get better.

There was an implied final step I never wrote down:

Finish.

At some point, presumably, I would become a healed person.

I wasn’t entirely sure what she would be like.

Calm, probably.

She would have excellent boundaries.

She would rest without guilt.

She would respond rather than react.

She would have a regulated nervous system and perhaps own linen pants.

I would know I had arrived because the past would no longer interfere with the present.

That was the theory, anyway.

I’m not sure I believe it anymore.

What Exactly Are We Trying to Get Back To?

The language of healing often assumes there was a healthy version of us before something happened.

Then something happened.

We were wounded.

Now the job is to recover.

That makes sense for many people.

There was a before.

There was an event.

There was an after.

But what happens when the thing you’re recovering from began before you really had a chance to become anyone?

That’s one of the questions I’ve been sitting with.

I spent most of my life assuming the way I experienced the world was simply the way I was.

Always alert.

Always prepared.

Very good in emergencies.

Uncomfortable depending on people.

Unable to completely relax.

Resting while simultaneously feeling guilty about resting, which rather defeats the purpose.

I didn’t have another version of myself to compare it with.

I didn’t know I was in survival mode because I didn’t know what not being in survival mode felt like.

So when I eventually understood what had been happening, people talked about getting back to myself.

But which self?

Where was she?

I couldn’t remember her.

Maybe she never existed.

That sounds sadder than I mean it to.

Because increasingly, I don’t think the absence of an original version of me means something was permanently stolen.

It might simply mean I’m not recovering an old self.

I might be meeting a new one.

Maybe “Recovery” Isn’t Quite the Right Word

Trauma researchers have spent decades studying how chronic stress, particularly during childhood, can shape the developing brain and nervous system.

That matters because it complicates the idea that trauma is always something added to an otherwise completed person.

Sometimes our adaptations develop alongside us.

Hypervigilance isn’t necessarily something that arrived one Tuesday and moved into the spare bedroom.

It may have grown up with us.

So might independence.

People-pleasing.

Perfectionism.

Emotional distance.

The ability to remain eerily calm while everything around us goes sideways.

Some of these things can even become qualities other people admire.

“You’re so strong.”

“You’re so independent.”

“Nothing rattles you.”

“You always know what to do.”

Thank you.

Apparently my nervous system has been preparing for the apocalypse since childhood.

Glad it came in handy.

But this creates a strange problem when you begin healing.

If some of your survival adaptations are woven into the person you’ve always understood yourself to be, what exactly are you supposed to remove?

And what remains afterward?

I don’t know.

I’m not sure anyone does.

Which is inconvenient because there are plenty of people willing to sell us the answer.

The Business of Becoming Healed

There is an enormous amount of money in the idea that you aren’t quite finished yet.

One more course.

One more book.

One more retreat.

One more method.

One more breakthrough.

One more morning routine.

One more person explaining the five signs that you’re still carrying unresolved trauma.

Some of these things are useful.

Therapy helped me enormously.

Books have helped me understand experiences I didn’t have language for.

Learning about trauma changed the way I understood much of my life.

I am not anti-healing.

I’m suspicious of what happens when healing becomes an identity.

Because there is a strange trap hidden inside constant self-examination.

At some point, you can become so focused on understanding why you aren’t living fully that you forget to actually live.

Every reaction becomes evidence.

Every uncomfortable emotion requires investigation.

Every bad day becomes a possible setback.

Every relationship becomes an attachment-style laboratory.

Every irritation requires us to wonder which childhood wound has been activated.

Sometimes you’re triggered.

Sometimes you’re hungry.

These things should not receive equal investigative resources.

I started wondering whether I had accidentally turned healing into another form of hypervigilance.

Instead of scanning the outside world for danger, I was scanning myself for damage.

That’s still scanning.

The Idea of Post-Traumatic Growth Bothers Me a Little

There is a psychological concept called post-traumatic growth.

Researchers Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun developed the framework to describe positive psychological changes some people report following profoundly difficult experiences.

People may develop a greater appreciation for life, deeper relationships, a sense of personal strength, spiritual change or awareness of new possibilities.

I can see value in the idea.

I can also see why it appeals to us.

We desperately want suffering to mean something.

If something terrible happened, perhaps we can at least emerge wiser.

Stronger.

Kinder.

More grateful.

Transformed.

There is something reassuring about suffering producing a return on investment.

But I get uncomfortable when growth becomes another expectation placed on people who have already endured something difficult.

Maybe trauma changed you.

Maybe you learned something.

Maybe you became stronger.

Maybe you didn’t.

Maybe something terrible happened and it was simply terrible.

You shouldn’t have to turn it into personal development to justify surviving it.

And I’m not convinced healing needs to produce an upgraded version of ourselves either.

I don’t need to become better because of what happened.

I’d settle for becoming more able to live despite it.

What If Healing Is Supposed to Become Boring?

This is the possibility I keep returning to.

Maybe healing doesn’t end with some enormous revelation.

Maybe there isn’t a graduation ceremony.

No certificate arrives.

Congratulations. Your nervous system is now fully regulated. Please enjoy the remainder of your life.

Maybe healing gradually becomes less interesting.

There are fewer things to analyze.

Fewer moments when the past barges into the present and demands attention.

You still have reactions.

You still have difficult days.

Something may occasionally catch you completely off guard.

But you recover.

You recognize what’s happening.

You know what helps.

And eventually you go back to whatever you were doing.

Maybe that’s the part I’ve misunderstood.

I thought healing meant eventually never being affected by the past.

Perhaps it means the past is no longer running the meeting.

It can have a chair.

It does not get the whiteboard.

I Don’t Want Healing to Become My Life

This may be the biggest change in how I’m thinking about all of this.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life healing.

I want to live.

Those aren’t opposites.

There may be things I will always have to pay attention to.

There may be situations that affect me differently because of what I’ve experienced.

There may be old responses that appear occasionally and make me think, Well, apparently you’re still here.

Fine.

They can be here.

But they don’t have to become the plot.

For years, survival was the plot.

Then healing became the plot.

Now I’m curious about what happens when neither one gets to be the main story.

What do I like?

Where do I want to go?

What do I want to make?

What makes me laugh?

Who do I enjoy being around?

What would I try if I didn’t need to be good at it?

What does an ordinary Wednesday look like when I’m not merely getting through it?

Those questions interest me much more now.

Maybe We Don’t Need to Graduate

I don’t know whether healing ever finishes.

Maybe that’s because I’m asking a question that doesn’t have a useful answer.

Bodies change.

People change.

Relationships change.

Life continues to hand us things we didn’t order.

Something that felt resolved at forty may look different at fifty.

An experience you thought you’d made peace with may suddenly hurt again.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve gone backward.

It might just mean you’re a human being rather than a completed renovation project.

I find that idea strangely comforting.

I don’t have to finish myself.

I don’t have to uncover some pristine version of me who existed before life got complicated.

I don’t have to become so healed that nothing ever hurts me again.

And I certainly don’t need to spend every morning taking the emotional temperature of my nervous system.

Maybe I can simply become better at recognizing when the past has entered the room without handing it control of the house.

And then get on with living.

Because I keep thinking about those few ordinary days when I forgot to monitor myself.

Nothing profound happened.

There was no breakthrough.

I wasn’t consciously practicing gratitude or regulating anything.

I was occupied with my life.

Maybe that’s not the moment healing ends.

Maybe healing doesn’t end.

Maybe, if we’re lucky, it simply becomes a smaller part of a much larger life.

I think I’d be quite happy with that.