Healing is Not a Linear Process

By now you know my motto: healing is not a linear process. Nature is not linear, nor is life.

seasons of life

Sometimes, we’re in a season of preparing. Sometimes, we’re in a season of doing, thriving, or even recovering. Sometimes the best we can manage is surviving. We may go back and forth between all of these seasons at various intervals throughout our lives and we may even feel like we’ve gone back to square one. And that’s okay. Healing, recovery, and self-reclamation are cyclical journeys. Other times though, we’re just in-between. In the void. Like being in the month of March. Some days it snows, other days daffodils are blossoming.

Trauma is a Neverending Journey

As if to prove my own point to myself, seven years after an acute trauma I had an emotional relapse and have spent the past 12 months working with not one but two therapists (one who practices EFT and another who practices Somatic Experiencing) to finally process what I experienced. Last February I knew I wasn’t ready to return to the place in which the trauma occurred, but I went anyway because I was being inauthentic and didn’t want to be the weirdo who missed out on something fun because it was where she died. I paid dearly for going against everything I advise by not putting my mental health first and spent the following 24 hours unable to get out of bed or stop crying. I had one recurring thought: healing is not a linear process. I was back at square one.

Only I wasn’t. I was seven years away from square one. I was just in center of the spiral again, which is different. When I shared my spiral metaphor with my therapist, she suggested her own metaphor of the non-linear recovery journey. She said that like a diamond, each deeper cut reveals another facet, another complexity to process and integrate. Throughout our trauma recovery we will polish one aspect only to encounter a reminder that reveals another facet and the journey begins again. But it’s important to remember that though the journey begins again, it will never begin at square one again because we are not the same people who we were at square one.

This past February, one year after my first significant relapse, I had dinner with someone who played a large role in my traumatic experience against my better judgement. When I shared how unfair the whole experience had felt, they asked me why it was unfair when it was my fault that it happened (is it just me or is there something about the month of March being a funny void space, a liminal time of healing?…).

I’ve spent eight years in recovery, clearing and processing so much, and just like that it all came up again. I spent the following 24 hours crying in bed. Again. And you know what?

It will come up again. And that’s okay.

The Importance of Integration

The void is a place of integration. If we went straight from active to thriving to surviving and back again, our nervous systems would collapse. We need the void spaces to recover and integrate everything we learned and achieved in those active spaces. Like a yin yang, we need the yin to process the yang, otherwise there’s disharmony. All things are conceived in the void. Babies, seeds, even creatives say we need boredom for ideas to take shape.

How do we know if we’re in a void space? Usually nothing seems to be happening. Maybe we feel stagnant or bored, or maybe it feels like we’ve been waiting forever to see the fruits of our labor. The void can be a place of uncertainty, which can feel threatening to our nervous systems or the void can be dull, very dull. Like the month of March. As dull or as unnerving as these void spaces can be, let’s challenge ourselves to honor them even if only for their reparative qualities.

Coping with uncertainty

Liminality can be uncomfortable. For some, especially trauma survivors, the in-between is tantamount to uncertainty, which is tantamount to threat. And yet, like March, liminality is a season of life that will continue to come around as long as we inhabit these bodies, so we had better get used to it and find some way to float because we can’t spend our lives thrashing in the dark waters, sputtering as we desperately try not to drown in an ankle-deep stream. Sometimes - and these too shall pass - we just need to relax our muscles, let the current support our weight, and see where it takes us.

We’ll find out soon enough.

(Learn more about how EFT ‘tapping’ therapy can help on our healing journeys)