The Truth No One Tells You at the Beginning
In my most recent Healing Out Loud episode, I talk about something no one warns you about: healing hurts before it heals.
Most people picture recovery as a peaceful climb into some serene place. But the truth? It feels more like tearing up the old floorboards and finding the rot underneath. It’s messy, painful, and necessary before you can rebuild stronger. I even wrote about a moment where I felt like tearing everything down, check out my full blog post: Why Healing Still Hurts After All the Work.
It takes courage to begin, and even more courage to stay with yourself when it gets hard. And believe me when I say this: it gets fucking hard.
Healing Isn’t a Straight Line
Here’s the thing nobody tells you at the beginning: healing isn’t all warm baths, journaling, and “good vibes only.” Sometimes it’s panic attacks that come out of nowhere, nights where you feel like you’re right back at square one, and mornings where you wonder if you have the strength to face the day.
That’s the demolition part. You can’t patch over trauma with affirmations and call it a day. The pain has to come up. The grief has to come out. The memories you shoved into dark corners years ago? They’re going to make their way back into the light. And when they do, it feels brutal.
Why the Pain Matters
But there is another side to it, the part that makes it worth staying and working through the pain: once the floorboards are ripped up, you can finally rebuild on something solid.
Healing teaches you how to hold yourself through the nightmare, how to trust that the pain won’t swallow you whole, and how to begin again from a place that’s real. It’s not easy, and it will take you places you never imagined, but it’s honest. And the honesty itself becomes freedom.
Understanding Your Nervous System
The deeper you get into healing, the more you start to actually get your nervous system. And when that happens, so many of your reactions suddenly make sense.
You stop calling yourself “too reactive” or “shut down.” You stop beating yourself up for choices that, at the time, felt like the only way through. Instead, you start seeing them for what they really were: survival strategies.
And those survival strategies? They aren’t flaws. They’re proof that at one point, your body and brain were doing everything they could to keep you safe. That moment you went off over something small? That was your nervous system slamming the alarm button. The times you felt nothing and just shut down? That was your body going, “Nope, too much, we’re hitting the brakes.”
From Survival to Safety
Healing isn’t about getting rid of those reactions. It’s about noticing them and meeting them with compassion instead of shame. Now, when I catch myself spiraling or freezing, I try to stop and think, “Oh… this is just my body remembering. This is how I made it through before.”
And the best part? Once you start seeing it like that, you realize you don’t always have to fight, flee, or freeze anymore. You can slowly teach your nervous system that it’s safe now. That it’s okay to breathe, to feel good, to let someone get close without expecting it to blow up.
It’s not overnight, but little by little, your body learns it can finally rest.
You’re Not Broken
So if you’re in the middle of your healing and wondering why it feels so raw, so heavy, so damn unfair, please hear me: you’re not broken. You’re doing the work. You’re in the part no one warned you about. And yes, it hurts. But it also heals.
Because you’re not tearing yourself apart. You’re clearing the rot so you can finally build a life that’s yours.
Photo by Haley Hamilton on Unsplash