Stretching at Sunset

Sharing – I’m NOT going to heal everything

ByMikeM Reading Time: 2 minutes

I have blogged before about what “healing” looks like and how I suspect many people get it wrong. Mostly it has to do with going back to the life I had before trauma, as if we could ever erase the trauma. I love that Todd has written this piece about how he’s not going to heal everything, and that’s OK.

“Whether it’s body image, relationships, career aspirations, or mental health, the essence remains the same. It’s okay to be ‘good enough.’ It’s okay to grant ourselves permission to be human.”

Read the whole thing, but I also wanted to add that for abuse survivors, I think this mindset is what we should be aiming for in adulthood. I’ve said it many times, I can’t go back to the person I was before the abuse, that person was 6-7 years old. What I can do is become the person I can be comfortable with, and grow into the person I would like to be as an adult. That person doesn’t have to be perfect and healed in every way that I can think of, he just needs to be the person capable of building the life I want to have.

It’s all forward-looking. It celebrates how far I’ve come without constantly reminding myself of what I haven’t done. In Todd’s words, it allows me to simply be human, like every other adult. In the end, isn’t that what we all want, to not see ourselves as the freak abuse survivor, but as an adult like other adults? With strengths and weaknesses, with quirks, and with success alongside failures?

We need to let ourselves be human and create a life where we can feel safe to be human.

https://toddbaratz.substack.com/p/im-not-going-to-heal-everything

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