My journey to healing has not been linear. In fact, its been a nonlinear, cyclical process. In my experience this cyclical process, like a cross section of a tree’s trunk, keeps me holding on to the stories of my past, albeit in different ways, intensities and contexts. To me, this isn’t a bad thing. It’s a necessity to understanding that we carry all the people we have ever been.
These stories from the past that have hurt me and come up in my present moment experience. They manifest as pain, as fear, as the prediction of an outcome. They are the limiting beliefs I hold of being too much or not enough. Healing, as a perpetual process, has become learning to gently hold these stories and let them go rather than try to relive them and in that try to fix them.
Stop Trying to “Fix” the Problem
The start of my healing journey was to acknowledge that I hold these stories. These stories are what I call broken glass because it’s as if in believing the story I can somehow put the pieces back together. I carry the shards so that one day, if I act just the right way or do just the right thing, the pieces won’t be broken anymore. The story will fix itself and in turn the way I was hurt will fix itself too.
Experience doesn’t work like that. You can’t fix the past. You can’t put the broken pieces back together. In fact, in trying, I just gripped the glass tighter. It was as if I was saying, “You can’t feel like that.” “You can’t think like that.” Which is really to say, “You can’t hurt like that.”
You can hurt like that. In fact, I think this world would be a lot more gentle if we could hurt like that. Acknowledging the pain of your past experience is to acknowledge that it had an impact on you. The experience whatever it was, no matter how arbitrary (and we are so quick to dismiss our experiences as arbitrary) mattered.
Stop Gaslighting Yourself
Don’t gaslight yourself into thinking it didn’t matter. It did. Your experience mattered enough to be stored in your body as feeling, as emotions constructed to keep you safe or as a disregulated nervous system preparing for fight, flight or freeze. It mattered enough to be the first thing your brain consciously or unconsciously remembers when met with similar yet entirely different situations; and it mattered enough to shift how you fundamentally show up in the world. All of this is to say the broken glass you carry mattered and it still matters because you started carrying it in the first place.
Let Go of Broken Glass
My life started to change, when I began to learn how to let go of the pain of broken glass instead of holding on to it. I allowed the experience to move through me instead of trying to fix it. Once I had accepted that I was hurting, I gave myself compassion in lieu of criticism and I could breathe into my body to tangibly tell it that I was safe. By allowing myself to know and experience fully what I was carrying. I could allow it to be. I could let it go.
Letting go of broken glass doesn’t happen overnight nor is it ever perfect, but it is necessary. You don’t have anything to fix and in that, you don’t have to keep trying. By allowing yourself to be with your experience in a nonjudgmental way, you can acknowledge how much something hurt you–how much it mattered. You can show up for yourself differently, embracing the experience as it manifests within yourself today, right now.
You on your healing journey can give yourself what you longed for then and you still long for now. What we all long for now: love.
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