How to find light during dark phases
What a squirrel taught me about healing childhood trauma
When we finally take the step to look at our emotional wounds from childhood, we hope for things to finally get better.
We do the work, face our shadows, and reflect on our lives. We want to understand why we carry patterns that make our lives miserable and full of suffering.
But the deeper we go, the darker our healing journey gets.
Old painful memories come to the surface. Our minds spiral like gyroscopes that never come to a standstill. Although we are exhausted, we can hardly find sleep.
At some point, it can feel like you’re living under a gigantic dark cloud. Almost as if your life before was an illusion, and you are now living a dreadful reality that has always been there.
And the more you think about all that, the worse it gets…
But there are ways out of this. Today, I share what worked for me.
The mind wants answers that don’t really exist
The core problem is that we try to escape our suffering by understanding our past and making sense of it.
That’s an entirely mind-based approach.
We replay our childhoods, analyse our parents, and search for explanations and some kind of logic. Making sense of things would be such a big relief.
But the sad truth is that often there is no valid explanation. Yes, your parents may have carried their own trauma. But that did not give them the right to unload it on your back, no matter how unaware they were of their trauma.
There was nothing wrong with you. Nothing could have justified the dynamics in your family system.
But yet your mind wants answers.... so it keeps working harder.
The small interruption I didn’t expect
While my mind spiralled like crazy, I was interrupted by something small.
I heard a knocking noise on my balcony that I couldn’t explain.
A cute red squirrel in fluffy, thick winter fur tried to reach seeds that slipped under a feeding plate for birds.
We looked at each other. And for a brief moment, I forgot everything around me. It felt as if the squirrel came to brighten up my day, like heaven-sent.
My thought spiral stopped. I wish he had stayed longer because watching this little bugger brought me a kind of inner peace I hadn’t felt for ages.
“How can I make him come again?” was the only question on my mind.
The next day, I bought nuts, placed them directly at my door, and hoped the squirrel would come back.
It did, and from then on, it did almost every day like clockwork.
How curiosity changed something inside me
When spring came, my curiosity took over. I wanted to know how far I could go with my new furry friend. Would the squirrel eat out of my hand?
I tried everything to slowly win its trust.
And… I succeeded. That was a magic moment on its own.
I gave my friend the name Anton. He started to come within a minute when I called him in the morning.
Every encounter with Anton brought back something I hadn’t felt in a long time — a simple, childlike curiosity about the world.
And that curiosity turned out to be more important than any insight I had been searching for.
At first, I didn’t understand why such a small thing could shift something so heavy.
Only later did I realize that this little squirrel had shown me one of the hidden traps of deep inner work.