Today I have decided to stop trying to heal

I have been working on healing the wounds of my childhood for just shy of 40 years. Yes, I began my “healing” when I was 15, still a child. Today I have decided to stop trying to heal.

Hear me out.

To heal literally means “to become free from injury or disease: to return to a sound state.” When a bone breaks and “heals” there is a weakness where the break once was. If we cut ourselves, there is a scar that remains and reminds us of what happened. We cannot expect to be freed from the experience or returned to a sound state from emotional trauma as if it never happened. Because it did happen.

Trauma happens. I have spent nearly 40 years trying to figure out how to heal so that I don’t feel like an adult who was once a child that experienced traumatic abandonment over and over and over. I will never not feel like that was my childhood, because it was my childhood.

Sometimes, when the moon is in just the right phase, and the stars are in just the right alignment, and the house is too quiet, and I feel too alone, and someone says or does something that reminds me of that trauma, or that song plays…I find myself awash with the grief and pain and sadness and come face to face with my trauma all over again.

Until this morning, in those moments, I have tried an infinite number of healthy and not so healthy ways to, well honestly, not feel what I am feeling. This morning I want to apologize to my sweet traumatized self for trying relentlessly to erase her. Instead I open my arms and heart to her and say, “Oh honey, of course you feel this way. How could you not?” and let her sob in my arms until she’s done. Because that is what I always wanted someone else to do. To just hold me and let me feel whatever I was feeling without making me bad or wrong or trying to fix it or make it go away. I wanted someone to Love me exactly as I was, messy, sad, angry, grieving the same thing again, loud, silly, ridiculous. Whatever and however I was, I wanted someone to Love me unconditionally.

And I, I, have spent years doing the opposite. I have spent years acting and reacting out the same horrors I experienced as a child under the guise of “healing”. And that stops today.

Unconditional Love is what I teach, ironically, or not so ironically if you truly get the perfection of how this stuff works. And today in anticipation of tomorrow’s full moon and all of the heaviness and emotion I feel, today I Love my feels-too-home-alone self. I will not talk sense into her, I will not reason with her, I will not tell her that her weepiness makes others feel bad and will just lead to more aloneness, I will not distract her, or shush her, I will not tell her to put her big girl panties on and deal with it, I will not make her wrong in any way. Instead, I will Love her right where she is, and cry her tears, and share her story with my sacred trusting people – my besties, my sweet beloved man, my new pup, and I will let her be and feel Loved unconditionally.

There’s nothing to heal. There’s only to be and feel and Love.