I Thought I Already Healed This
There was a time when I genuinely thought I was going to heal myself and be done.
Like...
Go to therapy.
Talk about everything that happened.
Understand why I think, feel, and react the way I do.
Learn some tools.
Do the work.
Presto magico — healed.
No more triggers.
No more old patterns.
No more childhood crap showing up in my adult life.
I would understand it all, heal it all, and move the f on.
And for a while? I actually thought I had.
I was in a really good place.
I was happier.
I wasn't getting activated as easily.
I understood so much more about myself and where some of my patterns came from.
I even remember being in JourneyDance® and thinking...
I don't have anything left to process.
I'm good.
Oh, sweet Danielle…
If only it worked that way.
Because as life would have it, life kept lifing.
Something would happen.
Something I didn't anticipate.
Something would brush up against an old wound I didn't even realize was still tender.
And suddenly...
There I was.
Completely activated.
Sometimes at what felt like a full-blown 10.
And I remember thinking:
Are you kidding me?
I thought I healed this.
How am I HERE again?
Did any of that work actually work?
Turns out, nobody sends you a courtesy text before life touches one of your old wounds.
Hey, just a heads-up. Something's going to happen Thursday around 3pm that's going to tinge up all your old shit. Plan accordingly.
Wouldn't that be convenient?
But that's not how life works.
And it's definitely not how healing works.
Because the reality is, healing isn't linear.
I think about the trauma and difficult experiences I've lived through as wounds.
Invisible ones.
And before I really began healing, I think I was walking through life with a lot of those wounds still open and exposed.
So when something touched one?
Holy hot sauce, it hurt.
A moment happening in the present could brush up against something from decades ago, and my body could respond with an intensity that didn't seem to match what was actually happening.
The wound was already there.
It had never fully closed.
Today, I think about those wounds differently.
They've healed over.
They're not demanding my attention every day.
They're not constantly causing me pain or angst.
They're not running my life the way they once did.
But the scars are still part of my story.
And could something happen tomorrow that hits one of those places hard enough to hurt again?
Absolutely.
Could an old wound even reopen?
I believe so.
But a wound reopening doesn't erase the healing that happened before it.
That took me a long time to understand.
Because I used to believe that if something came back, I must not have healed it.
Now I know that something resurfacing can mean a lot of things.
Sometimes an old wound gets activated.
Sometimes there's another layer asking for my attention.
And sometimes something surfaces simply to give me greater understanding.
An...
Ohhhhh.
That's where that came from.
Isn't that interesting?
...without ripping anything open at all.
Not everything that resurfaces means I'm back where I started.
Because I'm not who I was when the wound was created.
And I'm not even who I was when I first began tending to it.
I have more awareness now.
More understanding.
More tools.
More compassion.
More capacity to notice what's happening inside of me.
And yes, sometimes something that once felt like a 10 now feels like a 4.
The wound may still be there. But it doesn't have the same hold on me.
That is healing too.
But there was something else I had to learn:
Healing has its own timeline.
There is no magic wand.
No skipping layers.
No rushing your way to the finish line.
Trust me... I tried.
There was absolutely a version of me who approached healing like:
Okay. I know what the problem is. Let's f-ing FIX IT and be DONE.
All of it.
Right now.
I wanted to push through.
Think through.
Talk through.
Force my way through.
I didn't want to spend years unpacking my childhood.
I didn't want to confront all the demons and skeletons in the closet.
I didn't want to tend to my inner child.
At one point, I basically wanted to tell her, Girl, you're on your own.
I wanted to get to the other side.
But I've learned that healing doesn't respond particularly well to being bullied.
You cannot bully yourself into healing faster.
You can't force yourself to process something because your mind has decided you've spent enough time on it already.
You can't cram a lifetime of hurt into a weekend workshop and demand that your body be finished with it by Monday morning.
Some things unfold slowly.
A little at a time.
Layer by layer.
And maybe that's not a flaw in the process.
Maybe that's actually how lasting change happens.
Because I've also realized that I was approaching myself like a project.
There were things about me I wanted to fix.
Patterns I wanted gone.
Reactions I wanted gone.
Anger I wanted gone.
Hurt I wanted gone.
I thought healing would finally turn me into some version of myself who no longer had any of it.
But that's not what healing has given me.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped asking, “When will I finally be healed?” and started asking, “What would help me feel more at peace?”
Healing hasn't made me a perfectly healed human.
What healing has given me is peace.
And access.
Access to parts of myself that were harder to reach when anger, grief, shame, fear, and old pain were taking up so much space.
More access to joy.
More access to play, rest, love, connect, create.
More access to ease.
To feeling good in my own body.
Not because I never experience anger anymore.
I do.
Not because I never grieve the past.
I do.
Not because I never feel fear, shame, sadness, or get activated.
Of course I do.
Healing isn't about eliminating half of the human experience so we can live happily ever after.
For me, it's been about changing my baseline.
Not eliminating the harder emotions — but no longer living inside them.
No longer letting the past dictate how I live in the present.
Anger doesn't have to be where I live.
Fear doesn't have to be where I live.
Shame doesn't have to be where I live.
The things that happened to me are part of my story.
They don't have to run the rest of it.
And maybe that's one of the biggest differences between what I believed healing was and what I believe now.
I don't keep showing up for myself because I'm still trying to finally become healed.
I dance because it feels so unbelievably good to dance.
I meditate because sometimes my mind needs somewhere to put down all those looping thoughts.
I rest because I need it — and I’m not trying to outrun what comes up when I rest.
I bring intention and ritual into my life because they help me stay connected to myself.
I keep tending to myself because life is going to keep lifing.
There will be curveballs.
There will be loss.
There will be change.
There will be relationships that touch tender places.
There will be things I never saw coming.
So no...
I don't keep tending to myself because I'm a project that still needs work.
I keep tending to myself because I am a woman worthy of my own time, energy, care, and effort.
That's a very different relationship with healing.
And maybe that's my invitation for you this week.
If something you thought you'd already healed has resurfaced...
Before you tell yourself you're back at the beginning...
Before you decide all the work you've done didn't work...
Before you make yourself another problem to solve...
Pause.
And ask:
What is this bringing up for me?
What needs my attention right now?
What would tending to myself look like here?
Not:
How do I f-ing fix this?
But:
How can I care for myself and tend to myself through this?
Because healing isn't a straight line toward some imaginary finish line where nothing ever hurts again.
Sometimes we revisit.
Sometimes another layer reveals itself.
Sometimes something aches.
Sometimes we realize just how far we've come.
And sometimes we need to tend to ourselves again.
None of that means we've failed.
Healing isn't something we finish.
It's something we tend.
Not because we're broken.
Not because we're incomplete.
But because we are worthy of the peace that healing can create.
And when we create more of that peace within ourselves?
It doesn't only belong to us.
It touches our relationships.
Our families.
Our children.
Our communities.
The way we love.
The way we parent.
The way we lead.
The way we move through this world.
I truly believe that when we tend to our own wounds, we change more than our own lives.
We interrupt patterns.
We break cycles.
We stop handing some of our pain to the people who come after us.
Healing starts with us.
But it doesn't end with us.
One layer.
One wound.
One moment of tending at a time.
And if you’re on a healing journey, remember…
There is no straight line through this. There is only the way we keep meeting ourselves along the way.
The Superfine Way 💜
— Danielle
P.S. If this reflection resonated with you, I invite you to read the first three in The Superfine Way Series: Everything Is an Invitation and Why I Never Say "Safe Space", Judgement is the Default. Curiosity is the Practice.
This reflection was originally shared with our email community.
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