Healing

Happy Day! Healing is a process, sometimes long, sometimes painful, and almost always surprising.  Sometimes healing occurs when you are just ready to move on from repeating the same things over and over.  Sometimes healing happens because there is nothing left to do with the pain anymore.  You have squeezed every ounce of every emotion out of it.

I remember years after my marriage ended and I ran into the minister that had married us.  She had been a close friend of my spouse's, a godmother actually, and I hadn't seen her since things went to the dogs.  We bumped into one another and were genuinely happy to catch up.  I remember feeling excited to hear how my ex was but I didn't have any underlying feelings or wishes that they were available, pining after me, or any other such nonsense.  I was curious about someone I had loved and that was that.  I felt so good after I left that interaction because I felt like a major part of me had healed from letting go of what I had planned on being the rest of my life.  The funny thing about healing is that it is as layered as baklava.  That healing, the getting beyond wanting the relationship again, had healed.  I have never gone back.  There has been no revisiting it in a nostalgic way or with any longing.  I am, as they say, over it.

However, the other parts of a relationship, and there are many, that were affected by that ending were then able to surface.  Over the next few years they came up, one by one and sometimes more, depending on the situation!  Sometimes the universe would give me one issue to deal with, others it would drop a bus on me.  Either way, I was able to manage my way through each issue around my past that sprung up in my present.  Healing takes time, patience and timing.  Often the time that is needed is to allow yourself to actually gain some perspective.  Looking back you are able to see things from a less emotional place which often means you are not taking things so personally.

Healing is sometimes as painful as the event that elicited the pain to begin with.  When we have held onto hurt we often don't know how to let it go, it becomes a part of us.  We get used to being the damaged person and when the time comes for the healing to happen you may find that you are resistant to it.  You may find that you set yourself to repeat what you have done before just so you are able to remain in a place that is well-known to you.  Often pain allows you to hold onto whatever was lost.  Letting go of that can mean finally letting go of whatever or whoever triggered the hurt to begin with, which, amazingly enough, we don't actually always want to do.  This is the timing part.  When you are at a point where the pain no longer serves you it is easier to let it go.

Being patient with yourself is the next bit.  Healing happens when healing happens.  There is no right or wrong way.  Allow yourself to be where you are.  No one has the right to decide when you are done with whatever has happened in your life.  One day we will begin to allow each other the space to be who we are, when we are, where we are.

Love yourself as you would love a newborn baby.  Remember that you are learning.  Remember that you are growing.  Remember that you are doing the best that you can.  That is all you can do.  That is all we ever can do.

xo

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