We tend to think of healing as an ending. The end of spirals. The end of reaction. The end discomfort that keeps showing up in our thoughts and our relationships.

We imagine healing as the erasure of pain, an arrival point where the future becomes a straight line of certainty. Somehow, we begin to believe that emotional growth means emotional stillness. When nothing agitates us anymore. When we stop being triggered. At all. A never ending feel of light and grounded and happy. A life like a lake without a wrinkle.

And we, unknowingly, perpetuate this idea: in what we expect, in what we admire, in what we chase. In the assumptions we make.

I know, because I bought into this illusion too.

I believed healing would feel like arriving at a perfect moment where nothing ever went wrong again. As if peace, once earned, would gently yet firmly close the door on everything raw and sharp and I would only walk the soft path of life. I imagined a version of myself who had mastered calm, who no longer flinched, who glided through life untouched by pain. I thought that if I just did the work – read enough, understood enough, processed” enough – I would earn some kind of immunity from the rough edges of being human. I would be able to separate feelings with ease, the ones I want to feel from the ones I didn’t. Even better, that they would magically select themselves and I’d never have to experience guilt, shame, frustration, sadness, loneliness, confusion.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that I wasn’t seeking wholeness. I was trying to sterilize life. To scrub away it’s very essence.

When Insight Isn’t Enough

I learned how to name my patterns. Trace them back. Identify how moments of my childhood wired me. I uncovered the stories behind the reactions. I could fluently narrate the why and I understood my defense mechanisms.

But I was still reacting. Still caught in loops. Still waking up with weight in my chest. Still hurting.

I was drowning in awareness but starving for relief.

Because insight explains the pattern – it doesn’t interrupt it.

Healing began, not when I learned more, but when I could finally identify the meanings my mind had assigned to certain moments: “I am not good enough.” “I have to prove myself to deserve love.” “If I’m not needed, I’m not wanted.” “I can’t have it all.”

These weren’t truths. They were interpretations I assigned to a look, an interaction, an absence. Assumptions I had absorbed in moments of pain, confusion, urgency, or fear. Because , I have learned, we don’t store memories as precise facts. We store them as emotional associations linked to what something meant at the time.

That’s what needed to be unwound. Not the memory. The meaning.

A New Definition of Healing

I had to learn and accept that true healing is not about making pain disappear. It’s about becoming someone who is no longer shaped by pain. It’s about becoming someone who can hold discomfort without being ruled by it. Who no longer lets fear determine their decisions or distort their self-worth.

It’s not about becoming someone who never feels destabilized, but someone who knows how to move through challenges without letting them shape their identity, their decisions, or their sense of worth.

Healing is remembering who you are without the fear-based filter. It’s learning how to catch your thoughts before they harden into conclusions that become patterns that rule your life. It’s knowing how to pause: not to avoid, but to choose with clarity.

What Healing Has Come to Mean for Me

I now see healing in stages. Not in linear progressions, but in layers that hold different parts of life:

1. Making peace with the past.

Not by locking it away or pretending it never happened. But by revisiting it with clarity and repattern the stored meanings you once created in moments of fear, confusion, loneliness, or loss and your subconscious mind clung to. It’s not about rehashing the old story, but interrupt the pattern at the root.

Healing happens when the same story no longer yields the same pain.

2. Finding wholeness in the present.

When you allow yourself to feel all emotions without letting them alter your identity or compromise your values. When you wake without that tightness in your chest. When you no longer consumed by micromanaging how others perceive you. When joy doesn’t scare you, because it no longer feels like a setup for inevitable loss. When questions without instant answers are no longer reasons to panic.

It’s when you can receive love without trying to earn it.
When you can sit in stillness, and no part of you needs to escape.

3. Meeting the future without anxiety

When you make peace with the past and can be content in your present, you very quickly know how to replace the need to control the future with curiosity. And you know healing when you’re no longer dependent on everything going right in order to feel safe. When you’re no longer clinging on the idea of a perfect future.

When you’re not waiting for life to be flawless so you can be whole. You are whole, and from that place, you meet whatever comes next – with discernment, not dread; with curiosity and love, not fear.

Healing is not a finish line. It’s a different relationship with yourself.

The Real Mark of Healing

I know there’s a part of you still looking for a way to measure it all. To name it, to map it, to explain it. That’s how you make sense of the world. Even more so, success has taught you to track progress in clear, measurable increments: milestones, outcomes, revenue, titles.

And it’s no wonder you reach for the same certainty in healing. You want to know when it’s working. When it’s done. When you’ve arrived. I know, because that’s how I thought it worked.

But the markers of healing don’t show up in spreadsheets or 1-2-3 steps that map a precise journey.

They are subtle yet profound, and you recognize them in the moments where your reaction softens. Where your self-talk shifts. Where you noticed that the fear didn’t take the wheel, that the guilt didn’t shape your response, that the urge to prove yourself gave way to silence.

They’re subtle, yes, but unmistakable. Because when you’ve lived your whole life performing for love or earning your sense of safety, you can feel the difference the first time you’re simply present. Present with your own experience: without apology, without armor, without collapse. That is how you know. Not because someone gave you a new, shiny certificate that says in gold letters that you’ve made it. But because for the first time, your life no longer feels like something you’re protecting yourself against. You’re living it. From the inside, with peace.

Healing is not that you become unshakeable.
It’s that you learn how to return to your center when the world shakes.

Healing isn’t the end of effort.
But it is the end of inner war.

Shared with Love,
Gabriela

I don’t pretend I KNOW. I write from my experience and from my heart hoping that what I share will be the support someone needs on their journey. I reserve the right to be wrong and change my mind as I grow in my own understanding.

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