If you’ve been in therapy for a while, or you’ve been doing your own work through reading and reflection, you may have noticed something: understanding your patterns doesn’t automatically change them. You can know exactly why you do what you do and still find yourself doing it.

That gap — between understanding and actual change — is one of the most difficult parts of the healing journey. It’s sort of this no man’s land that can be hard to navigate. 

Understanding that gap — and what it actually takes to move through it — is what this post is about.

Healing involves more than understanding what happened

Talking about your story, what you experienced, what you’re feeling — that’s an important part of the process. It can be difficult to say things aloud that you’ve never said before, and that matters.

But it’s only part of it. Talking about your experiences doesn’t bring lasting healing and change on its own. The deeper healing comes from connecting with the felt experience of what you went through. Allowing yourself to know, deep in your body and soul, what things were really like for you.

It’s also connecting with the part of you that lived it — the child who had to shut down emotions, who had to be grown up before they were ready, who needed emotional connection and it wasn’t available. That’s really hard work. But it’s also where the deepest healing happens.

Your body is part of the process

Your body is one of the biggest indicators that something is resonating with you. Often, your body will respond before your mind registers what’s happening. You might hear something or read something, and at first it may not land — and yet your stomach clenches, or you feel a flash of anger, or tears get stuck in your throat.

Whenever you notice something coming up in your body, pay attention to it.  It’s information to be curious about.

Also, your body is where your emotions live. Many of us learned early on to disconnect from our emotions as a way to survive. The body becomes one of the most direct ways back to them.

Your coping strategies will shift — but not all at once

As a result of difficult experiences in childhood, we end up with layer upon layer of unhealed wounds, along with coping strategies that developed in response. Those strategies are often the things that show up as the outward symptoms that bring people to do this work in the first place.

Those layers can’t all be dealt with quickly. And the coping strategies won’t shift all at once — they’ll shift as you’re ready for them. 

You may have gotten very adept at keeping your emotions stuffed down, for example. But at some point you start being able to feel. Bit by bit, you start to connect with your emotions, even if you can’t name them. And eventually, you won’t want to shut them down the way you used to.

You have to be an active participant

Having an intentional mindset about your healing process makes a difference in how you move forward and what you get out of it.

Think about recovery from a physical injury. Years ago I had an accident while snow tubing at Snoqualmie Pass. I managed to hit a mogul and come straight down on my head — apparently I’ve got skills. I walked out of the hospital that night but with real damage to my neck and back. If I had decided to leave my recovery entirely up to the physical therapists, I’d still be in constant pain today. But I did my part.

Healing from childhood trauma is similar. The support you have around you plays a big role. But what makes a real difference is when you show up and actively engage — because your healing happens in the relationship between you, the people supporting you, and the process itself.

Most of the work happens outside of sessions

If you’re in therapy, the 50 minutes you spend in session is proportionally a small part of your overall healing experience. The bulk of the work happens in between. Things like journaling, reading, setting aside time to process what’s coming up for you, talking with trusted people in your life, prayer or meditation, and simply paying attention to what surfaces as you go about your day.

And if you’re not in weekly therapy, this still applies. Staying engaged in your healing process as you live your life — that’s where the shifts accumulate.

I also want to say this: active engagement doesn’t mean your life is all healing work all the time. Sometimes the most important thing you can do is give yourself a break from it. If you’ve been doing intense work for weeks, a weekend of rest and play is part of the process too.

It takes time — and that’s not a sign that it isn’t working

If you’re like me, you might have gone into therapy with a time frame in mind of how long you’d be there. And now you’re wondering, two years in, why you aren’t done yet.

There’s no quick fix for the unhealed places in your heart, mind, and body. Healing work that gets at the root of things doesn’t work that way.

It takes time to build your tolerance for feeling emotions and put words to things you swore you’d never say aloud. When you move into the deeper work of connecting to what it was really like for you, that work can’t be forced or rushed. Your heart, mind, and body work together in this process. And that needs space to unfold.

The uncertainty of the timeline of healing can sometimes feel unsettling if you, like many of us, adapted to your environment by learning to anticipate and control as much of your life as you could. Sometimes what helped me with this was to focus on where I was in my healing at that moment in time rather than focusing on how much work there was to do and how long it would take.

With each session, each day, trust that healing is happening even when you can’t see it.

What this actually looks like

You won’t always have dramatic breakthroughs. More often you’ll notice subtle shifts — in how you respond to something, in how quickly you recover, in a moment when you caught a pattern you wouldn’t have caught before. You’ll see changes in how you approach your life and how you operate in relationship with yourself and others.

That’s real progress. Even when it doesn’t feel like it.

The healing journey will eventually touch every area of your life — relationships, how you see yourself, how you move through the world. Not because you’ll have arrived somewhere, but because healing leads to growth that continues to evolve over time. More freedom. More of feeling like you can be yourself as you discover more and more who that self is. 

Photo by Ashley Gorringe on Unsplash