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.
The hidden trap of deep inner work
When we are doing inner work, our focus turns almost completely inward. We want to understand everything inside us, and in a way, we also want to know who we truly are.
But of course, when our attention is all inward, we lose sight of all the beauty around us. That’s why everything can feel so dark.
At some point, we need to integrate our outside world again to find balance. For this, small things are often enough.
For me, it was the squirrel that helped me shift.
For someone else, it might be noticing the smell of a flower, watching birds closely for the first time, or observing any animal long enough to realize how much we don’t actually know.
These small moments reconnect us with something real, immediate, and alive — something the mind alone cannot provide.
Why childlike curiosity brings lightness back
Childlike curiosity shifts our focus outward in the softest way possible. It’s part of our very nature.
Exploring the world with all its little wonders and miracles is what lights our spirits and what makes us feel alive.
Childlike curiosity is pure lightness. And with this, it is the total opposite of the dark and heavy cloud we may feel above us.
After heavy emotional work, this lightness isn’t optional. It’s part of how we come back into balance with ourselves and with life.
Curiosity doesn’t solve everything.
But it opens space where heaviness can soften.
What to do when life feels unbearably heavy
The simple answer is: Get out of your head.
But we all know how absurd that sounds when we question the whole world and our existence.
Let me give you another perspective.
When we do inner work, we basically want to heal the child in us. We look at all the wounds. What if we asked ourselves what we can do to make this child feel alive and joyful?
And that’s exactly where curiosity chimes in.
What new thing would you like to try just out of curiosity, without any expectations?
Maybe you have always wondered how stripes get into the toothpaste. How about cutting a tube open and finding out?
Maybe you always wanted to know what this Peruvian-Japanese fusion food tastes like. Why not get a recipe and try?
Those are just a few random ideas.
You could also do something more practical, such as taking lessons in drawing, playing a musical instrument, knitting, or whatever comes to mind.
It’s all about trying something new and actively doing things.
Give the child in you something to feel alive.
Sometimes the light is just a small step away
We often believe that healing requires going deeper and deeper within.
Up to a certain point, this is true. We need to look deep inside ourselves to face our shadows and integrate them into our lives.
It’s easy to get lost in that process. That’s when life can feel completely dark. In a way, it’s a sign to adjust the course of your healing journey.
Often it’s the little things that suddenly get our attention. Don’t ask why. Instead, be open to the precious and beautiful moments that appear. Don’t push them away, as they are the keys to bringing your life into balance.
For me, it was a squirrel named Anton. For you, it might be something entirely different.
The important part is allowing curiosity to lead you there. Because even on the darkest days, light rarely returns through force.
It usually finds its way back through the smallest, most unexpected moments.
Before you go…
For those of you who read my bio and wondered how I fell madly in love with red squirrels… now you know.
If you have also experienced one of these magic little moments that brought light back to you, I’d love for you to share it in the comments.
Often, it's exactly such stories that bring hope to those of us on a very bumpy healing journey.
Reading your beautiful story, I couldn't help thinking of my own magic moments...
When my little magic moment happened, it was so little that I almost didn't see it. And so subtle that I had no idea it was magic. But it was magic, and over time it had the power to change me fundamentally. It was a tiny word: Hi.
I believe it was the equivalent of your squirrel's first visit and the connection you built with it.
That "Hi." is my Anton.
Without that "little magic moment", there would not have been the actual magic, unexpected moment that saved my life. Or, maybe it didn't; it let it end and allowed me to be born into a new life. The one that I'm meant to live. This moment arrived in the form of a 5-word sms :-)