On Healing
We need human connection.
I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all.
Edgar Allan Poe
Why do some people never heal?
I think it’s possible to get stuck in your pain. To keep your pain in front of you when you really should put it behind you. I know because I have been there. You can live in a perpetual state of melancholy if you want, and revel in it too. It may feel like you don’t have a choice. The pain is too much and too heavy. There’s feelings you can’t resolve, of guilt, and shame, and grief and much more. Trying to resolve them, to understand them, is what causes you to stay stuck.
Trauma makes people see the world differently. What was once full of light becomes dark. There’s no shred of hope or colour to be found anywhere. Trauma changes people. It tells them a story about the way the world is, a bad one, and the victim begins to relate to the world only through their pain. They put up all sorts of walls. Subconsciously. Some that don’t even make sense. They see their pain in everyone else. They listen to sad music, watch sad movies, read sad books. Pretty soon, the only thing they can understand about the world is how sad it is.
But why do people choose to stay stuck in their pain? Why do they willingly watch and listen to sad things? The simple answer is that trauma isolates people. It makes them feel like they are alone in the pain they feel. The little comfort they do find, they find in others who have also been broken, and possibly stayed broken. People who experience trauma are constantly trying to figure out what happened to them, why it happened to them. They ask questions that rarely have answers, but they need to ask them nonetheless. They are seeking closure.
There is some joy in holding onto painful memories, which is why people find it so difficult to let go of them. If someone you love passes away, what keeps them alive is the pain you feel, the memories, the grief. This is why some people may experience guilt about feeling “happy”. They believe they no longer have a right to it. As if moving on and even letting go of the need to resolve the trauma would make them a bad person because it would require them to forget someone they loved.
Trauma is a story. It’s a story that we live out day to day if we choose. It’s a story we can repeat to others and ourselves. We can make it a core part of our identity if we want to. “This is what happened to me, I can’t believe this happened to me, I will never recover.”
Our thoughts about what we experience are extremely powerful. If we believe we will never recover, we may really never recover. By believing that we will never recover, we forego any reasoning to even try.
I believe that some feelings cannot be resolved. There is no closure to be had in a lot of what we, as humans, experience. There are too many questions, too many what-ifs, too many complex people involved in the breaking of us. So then how do we live? How do we move on? How do we “heal”?
While therapy can be useful in learning how to cope with trauma, I think ultimately what’s needed is other human beings.
I think often times, someone needs to reach into our broken world and physically pull us out of it. They need to shake us and wake us out of the melancholic daze we walk around in after we’ve been hurt.
This clip from Grey’s Anatomy, in which Derek says to Meredith “You were like coming up for fresh air” perfectly encapsulates what I’m trying to say:
Other people, good people, play a big role in saving us.
Only other people can help us rewrite our story by showing us through their actions, their behaviour, and who they are that the world can be different than it is in our imagination.
Feelings can’t be resolved through contemplation. Thinking about what happened to you will not erase it, or fix it, or make it easier to cope with it. What’s needed is for those feelings to be replaced by something good. “A reclaiming of narrative” as Allison puts it in the above tweet.
We need others to show us that the world is still beautiful. That the light never went away, it was merely obscured. That there is still colour, everywhere.
But we must also make a choice to believe in something good. To accept it when it crosses our path. To let ourselves be uprooted out of the bubble we built to protect ourselves from ever experiencing pain again.
It’s a constant battle against the story we know and the story we are being told. It’s easier to believe in what we already know because a change or “reclaiming” of narrative may even cause us physical pain. Our minds can be trained, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Once neural networks are formed, changing them with new information is mentally exhausting. That’s where therapy often helps. We need skills and resources to be persistent in believing in the good.
But the good itself can’t simply be learned or understood by ourselves or even be taught verbally by another. If a child grows up in an abusive household, how do they just “learn” what a good parent or human being is? They need to be shown by others through good actions. They need to be shown what healthy, normal, safe love looks like until it no longer shocks them. Until healthy, normal, and safe isn’t unusual and abnormal to experience.
This is also why it is really difficult for victims to leave abusive relationships. Usually the victim’s understanding of good is warped, or tunnel visioned. That’s why victims of abusive relationships also find it difficult to accept better treatment. Better is unusual. Foreign. It doesn’t make sense. It conflicts with the story that they already know.
We need others more than realize. There are some things that have no other solution than the touch of another human being, their smile, their words, and their love. We need to be willing to let people who love us into our world, no matter how broken it is, and no matter how scared we are.
Nothing in this world comes close to the magic another person is capable of bringing into our lives. Whether it’s a friend, or a lover. We need connection. We need someone to understand, and accept our scars. We need someone to tell us a different story about the world. One that’s filled with hope, and colour, and love.
Maybe then we can really begin to heal.
This was really good. It shifted some things in my mind.
Good stuff!!!! Healing in today's world is a serious undertaking. Seems the chips are stacked against it. Mind, Body and Spirit