If Healing Feels Boring, You’re Probably Doing It Right

What I learned about real progress

Sometimes I wish there were a recipe for healing childhood wounds. Like, do an exercise every day, and after x days, this and that will happen.

We all know healing doesn’t work this way. We also know that healing is not linear. Even when you manage to feel slightly less miserable, some dark clouds may show up again.

Last year I learned another lesson...

Healing often happens under the surface and can feel like making no progress at all.

My patience was heavily tested in this regard. It turned out to be a lesson on its own and gave me some valuable insights that I can now share with you.

Image by Almos Bechtold on Unsplash

Having the Wrong Expectations

For most things in life, you do something to get a more or less expected result.

You want to run a marathon? Just follow a training plan and keep track of your progress. You see that the effort you put into your plan results in visible progress.

It’s similar to healing physical wounds. When you break a bone, you have fancy X-ray images in the beginning, and at one point experience that you can walk again. After a few more weeks, you are totally back to normal, and healing is done.

But that’s not how it works with healing childhood trauma we carry with us, such as growing up as a family scapegoat in a dysfunctional family system.

In such cases, you may never have experienced any dynamics that could be regarded as healthy. So there is no before where you lived in a loving and caring environment.

And that’s exactly why you don’t really know what to expect from your healing journey.

Maybe you expect just to be loved and be accepted without having a reference for how that actually feels.

Hollywood movies that make you weep because of the romance you see don’t count. Love and belonging aren’t something you can explain or show. You can only know the true essence by experiencing it yourself.

And maybe the healing you long for isn’t like butterflies in your tummy or other elevated feelings. Maybe it’s just silence and peace, and maybe it’s even something completely different.

Healing takes as much time as it takes

You need a time frame if you want to measure progress.

Let’s say healing takes ten years. You wouldn’t check your progress every day — and if you did, you’d expect very little change.

Expecting everything to be fine within a year only leads to frustration when months pass, and nothing seems different.

But here is the kicker...

Many people become aware of what really happened in their childhood when they are in their thirties, forties, or even later. The thing is that we humans are very good at adjusting to the environments we live in, learn to cope, and somehow functioning.

Your life may feel very normal, as the emotional wounds you carry are just not visible to you. They are like a blind spot, something you learned to push away so well that you couldn’t see it...

Now you do... at least the parts that you either can or no longer want to suppress. Yet you don’t know what else is under the surface.

All you know is that you want to heal and feel whole.

So when you don’t know about the size and depth of the wound, it’s impossible to expect progress in a given time frame.

All you can do is take things step by step and trust the process.

And that can be quite unpleasant because the ego wants control.

But... there will be progress. It may just look very different from what you expect.

What healing looks like

Most of my healing I only recognised in hindsight. That doesn’t mean that it was insignificant. It was more like things got gradually better.

After a few weeks, I noticed that I slept better and that I only woke up at night when I had to go to the toilet and then fell straight into dreamland again.

Triggers were another thing. Of course, I still get out of balance sometimes, but the amplitude is much smaller. Nowadays, I sometimes need just seconds to get back to normal.

Like when I recently got news from the tax office. My heartbeat went up, and anxiety was spreading... I took a few deep breaths and decided how to get that problem solved. No more drama here.

Of course, it wasn’t seconds suddenly. I remember such news threw me off for days in the past... then it became just half days, hours, minutes, and so on.

I also noticed that I am no longer afraid of speaking my truth. In the past, I overexplained myself and invested way too much energy in finding the right words.

Yes, some people were not ready for that, and I fell back into old patterns. But after a while, I found out that by speaking my truth, I attracted more people who could deal with that very well.

In other words, I found myself living more authentically... if that makes sense somehow.

Why nothing seems to happen

Looking back, it’s kind of funny that whenever I made the biggest progress, it felt like standing still.

That’s because I was mainly looking for things on the outside. However, inside wasn’t that different. Although I was at peace with myself, I felt emptier than ever.

Healing felt a lot like self-betrayal at that point, and the only thing that I had achieved was to stay calm and not freak out with all the silence around me.

Later, I learned that in this phase of rest, my nervous system was reorganising. All the change happened under the surface.

It’s really difficult to describe what actually happened. The best analogy I could find was learning to play an instrument like a guitar, for example.

In the beginning, it’s really hard to put your fingers in the right position. It almost feels like you have to break them. You practise for weeks, and your wrist may hurt. And at some point, you understand that you need some breaks in between.

Then all of a sudden, the positions you have practiced so much work automatically. Playing the guitar becomes fun, and you wonder why it couldn’t always be as easy as this.

In the end, it comes down to your body having to learn a new reality. In the beginning, you push all the parts that you no longer keep with you out through inner child and shadow work.

After that, the vessel is empty and needs to be filled with something new. It’s nothing you can control with your mind, heart, or whatever you are conscious of.

Healing is a force of nature. All you can do is not stand in the way and take care of your body. But how healing in general works, nobody knows. Wounds just heal by themselves once you clean them and have a body that is still capable of healing.

There is a beauty in the fact that healing is done for you and that it often works the best when you least notice it. Maybe it has to happen under the surface so that you have no chance to stand in the way. But who doesn’t like cosmic jokes...

When magic finally unfolds

Sometimes life feels like a mirror. But at a closer look, it’s more like my brain makes me see things that I resonate with the most.

We all know this effect. Remember when you went to driving school and suddenly saw driving school cars everywhere you went. Our attention naturally shifts to what is important for us.

Before I started my healing journey, I lived in survival mode. Thus, I tended to be hypervigilant, read the room, and walk on eggshells. That was my coping mechanism for surviving in the environment I grew up in.

I’m only naming the obvious things here. There were so many other things that were fitting to my survival identity, and my brain focused on what was important for me.

The point is that all those things were real for me. They always were real. But they were only a fraction of the reality out there.

Magic kicks in when your inner self has changed so much that your perception suddenly shifts, and you also see all the beauty out there, not just the shadow.

For me, it was a revelation to experience how lovely young mothers cared for their children. Or when I had to talk with a tax officer, and I was deeply surprised that he was open to understanding my position and actually helped me, whereas my old self would have expected punishment.

Yes, it’s all little things. But when many of these little things that make life just a little better day by day... then you truly get to see the results of your healing.

Where life was once a struggle, you slowly start to feel that you belong, that you are here for a reason, and that you are somehow connected with the environment around you.

Magic... trust the healing process and make it happen.

---