How I Finally Knew My Healing Was Enough

From endless searching to the quiet moment I knew I was whole

We all know that healing from childhood trauma is messy. It comes with ups and downs and feels like walking through a labyrinth.

Many times I saw the light at the end of the tunnel.

But when things got better, another layer of painful childhood memory came to the surface, wanting to be healed. Almost like beginning from zero again.

Often, I wished that healing from trauma would be like healing a broken bone.

You go to the doctor. He puts a cast on it and tells you to come back in 4 - 6 weeks. Then he does a final checkup and gives you a thumbs-up when everything went according to plan.

You may still feel a bit weak where the bone broke. Still, you know it's alright and that it only needs some muscle training to get back to normal.

But that's not how it works with healing from childhood trauma.

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Childhood trauma is often buried for decades

As a child, you found strategies to push the pain away. That was the only way to cope with an intensity that otherwise would have overwhelmed you.

But one day, hopefully, when you are stable enough in life, the old painful memories come to the surface. Often, what triggers this is a growing awareness of painful patterns in life that repeat as if it were Groundhog Day.

That's when your healing journey begins.

Walking through the darkness

A broken bone is rather easy to identify. You have intense pain at a particular spot. The doctor only needs to do an X-ray to make the damage causing your pain visible.

However, your childhood trauma lies in the dark. You can only make it visible through the light of awareness. And that's exactly the reason why healing from childhood trauma can take a long time and feel like it will never end.

You cannot give it all your awareness at once.

Because every painful memory you uncover comes with real pain. That pain wants to be processed and the underlying wound healed before you can go to the next layer.

If everything hurt at the same time, you wouldn't know where to start.

The void stage

At one point on your healing journey, you feel like you already know everything and that there is nothing left to make you feel better.

You start doubting your journey and wonder what's the next mountain to climb, and if climbing again would make any sense.

I was in that state for 18 months after I already had 4 years of healing work behind me.

Looking back, this emptiness was a soft yet very powerful force that reshaped me.

At the end of this stage, I knew that I had finally healed enough.

That may sound a bit mysterious, but I will explain it to you in more detail.

Becoming at peace with yourself

At the beginning of your healing journey, you feel like an innocent and powerless victim. You are full of anger and grief.

At one point you become aware of your inner voices and discover that they cause intense inner battles. You are far from heaven and feel like you are in hell.

But then you become aware of where these voices are coming from and that you have the power to change them.

I replaced my inner voices with those of a loving and caring older brother and sister. They brought me peace and made me feel at home with myself.

That doesn’t mean that you won’t be upset or angry anymore. But you will be surprised how quickly you can return to a state of inner harmony.

Synchronicities re-enter your life

This one is not about Law of Attraction or any esoteric stuff.

Instead, it is a much more relatable real-life phenomenon. Your brain recognizes things that are important for you and brings them to your attention.

When you're in trauma mode, your brain uses a lot of its energy to protect you from pain. Because that is what is most important for you. It also explains why the same old patterns repeat again and again.

But once you have freed yourself from the weight of the past, your brain frees up capacity to help you with so many other things in life.

Yes, I know, this may still sound a bit woo-woo. So let me give you a simple example.

When you become a parent, you start to see more and more babies, pregnant women, and young parents around you. It seems like they all suddenly appeared out of nowhere. But the simple explanation is that your focus shifted.

Your brain helped you to see more of what is now important for you. It will also help you to recognize more of the things that you might need for the project you are currently working on.

The key point here is that without the trauma load, your brain can do so much more for you. You can compare it with being totally stressed out vs. being rather relaxed. It's obvious in which state you are more creative and find it easier to fix your problems.

The thing is that it can feel like magic when you suddenly seem to effortlessly stumble on the things you currently need.

It's not that it will always work this way. But a clear sign of healing is that this kind of synchronicity will happen more often and spice up your life in a beautiful way.

Experiencing flow states

During my healing, even simple things felt like pushing a rock up a hill.

My mind was racing, and I fell back into old memories and had a hard time concentrating.

Sometimes I managed to get myself out of this with binaural music. It helped quite a bit.

Nowadays, I fall into flow states rather quickly. Of course, I often have to push myself a little in the beginning. But once I am through the initial resistance, I am fully present and can work on a task for hours as if it were the most natural thing to do.

Finding things funny for no reason

In my dark days, I watched some fart videos to feel a little bit lighter (btw. GilstrapTV on YouTube is awesome). It was a distraction that I needed.

Nowadays, when I read the news or stumble upon something, I notice myself laughing. The world is often a very crazy place.

When you feel lighter, you can see more perspectives. It becomes a choice whether you want to see the humor in daily life or whether you want to take things more seriously than they really are.

Feeling a calling

During the void phase, I often felt lazy and did not really have the drive to do anything beyond the absolutely necessary.

But after a long time of rest, I felt an inner itching. I didn’t want to be still and feel passive. So many ideas raced through my mind about what I could do next.

I started to teach myself how to draw, experiment with music, began to program again, and tried some other things. Curiosity re-entered my life.

Now, when I wake up, I still need my coffee... and on some bad days, I am as slow as a snail. But then there are more and more other days where I work on something new and wish the day had more hours.

But these are also the days when I wake up with energy to keep pushing the things that are important to me.

Healing somehow got less of a priority. And the reason for this is that I don’t need it that much anymore.

Feeling like you matter and belong

There were times when I asked myself if anyone would notice if I just disappeared.

I know these were very dark thoughts. But I deeply believed I did not matter at all. Nobody saw me. When I tried to communicate with others, it felt like shouting into a void, and it probably was like that.

I had no idea who I was. In a way, life was easier when I identified with the given scapegoat role. It was not my real identity, but at least it was an identity.

Well, since I have a far better idea of who I am, my outer world seems to have magically changed. People I don't know greet me and often start small talk with me. It feels like I have some invisible connection sign on my forehead.

The things I now work on fulfill me. They don't feel empty and useless anymore.

I finally feel like I've arrived where I belong.

Healing was the top priority in my life for so many years.

Now the healing is done well enough to start living and enjoying all the other things that life has to offer.

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