I used to think healing mostly meant dealing with the things that happened to me. If I forgave, prayed, worked through the hurt and eventually reached a place where I could talk about the past without falling apart, then I must have dealt with it.
What I didn’t understand for a long time was how much I had learned because of what happened to me.
When you grow up around difficult circumstances, you learn how to live in them. You figure out how to keep the peace, when to speak and when to stay quiet. You learn to watch other people closely because knowing what kind of mood someone is in may tell you what kind of day you’re going to have. You find places to escape when life feels overwhelming.
For me, some of those places were schoolwork, books and music. I also became a people pleaser and a peacemaker very early in life. I wasn’t thinking about emotional patterns back then. I was simply trying to make sense of life and find some peace in the middle of it.
Years later, I began to realize that some of the things that helped me get through those years followed me into a life where I didn’t need them anymore.
That realization changed the way I looked at healing.
When the Past Shows Up in the Present
I am very blessed with a wonderful husband and a stable marriage today, but marrying a good man didn’t suddenly erase everything I learned in the years before him.
There were times when I questioned things that didn’t need questioning. I struggled to trust even when my husband gave me no reason not to trust him. Sometimes I reacted to him from a place that really belonged to another relationship and another time in my life. I’ve gone back and apologized more than once because I recognized that what came out of me in that moment wasn’t really about him.
It took me years to understand some of that.
I think this is one of the more difficult parts of healing because we may look around and think, But my life is different now. Why am I still reacting this way?
The circumstances may change much faster than the things we learned while living through them.
You may leave an unhealthy relationship, grow up, move away, remarry, raise a family, build a career or create a completely different life. Then something small happens and your reaction seems much bigger than the moment calls for.
I’ve certainly had those moments.
Instead of only asking, Why did I react like that? I began looking a little deeper. Sometimes the better question was, What did this touch in me?
That question gave me somewhere to go.
I Had Some Things to Unlearn
One of the hardest things for me involved learning to see myself differently. When other people tear down your identity over a long period of time, their words don’t necessarily disappear simply because they are no longer standing in front of you saying them.
I had believed things about myself that weren’t true.
Part of my journey with God involved allowing Him to show me who I was through His eyes instead of continuing to look at myself through the eyes of people who hurt me. That process took time, and some areas took much longer than others.
Maybe that’s why I don’t think healing always happens in one great breakthrough.
Sometimes it comes quietly. You recognize something today that you couldn’t see five years ago. A reaction catches your attention. You hear yourself saying something and suddenly realize where it came from. You notice that you’re trying to keep everybody happy again, or taking responsibility for something that really doesn’t belong to you.
Those moments used to frustrate me. Now I think they may also become invitations.
God may show us something because we’re finally ready to see it.
Boundaries Were Difficult for Me
If you spend much of your life trying to keep the peace, boundaries don’t necessarily feel peaceful at first.
They certainly didn’t to me.
I worried about upsetting people. I questioned whether saying no made me selfish. I thought loving someone meant I needed to keep allowing them into places in my life that continually created turmoil.
Eventually I learned something that brought tremendous freedom: forgiveness, reconciliation and trust are not the same thing.
I can forgive someone without trusting that person again. I can love someone and still recognize that I need a boundary. I can pray for restoration without continually putting myself back into a situation that causes chaos in my life.
It took me many years to learn to set boundaries in certain relationships. Once I did, much of the turmoil those relationships created inside me began to settle. I could turn those people and situations over to God rather than feeling as though I needed to fix everything myself.
I wish I had understood that earlier, but I also recognize that sometimes we learn things when we’re ready to learn them.
Forgiveness Became Part of the Unlearning Too
Forgiveness probably taught me more about emotional freedom than almost anything else in my life, and it certainly didn’t come easily.
For years I thought forgiveness ought to feel a certain way. I imagined reaching some point where I no longer felt hurt or angry and then I would know I had finally forgiven.
My experience looked different.
Sometimes forgiveness began with a choice, and then I made that choice again. There were things I thought I dealt with only to discover later that another layer of hurt remained. I learned that forgiveness sometimes became something I walked through rather than something I finished in a single moment.
And then I discovered one of the hardest people for me to forgive.
Myself.
I could give grace to someone else and then turn around and judge myself without mercy.
Why didn’t I see it? Why didn’t I know? Why did I stay? Why did I make that decision? Why didn’t I protect someone I loved?
Some of those questions followed me for years. I carried guilt over things I thought I ought to have known or prevented, and learning to forgive myself became one of the hardest parts of my journey.
Eventually I had to face something uncomfortable. I said I believed in grace, but I wasn’t always willing to give that same grace to myself.
Maybe you know what that feels like.
We sometimes speak to ourselves in ways we would never speak to another hurting person. We look back with everything we know today and judge the person we were then for not knowing it.
I’ve learned to catch myself doing that.
So What Does Emotional Freedom Look Like?
I used to think freedom meant getting to the point where the past didn’t bother me anymore. I’m not sure I believe that now. There are things in my life that will always matter to me because they were significant, painful parts of my story. Healing hasn’t erased those experiences or made me forget them. What has changed is the way I respond when something from the past tries to work its way into the present.
I recognize things now that I didn’t recognize years ago. If I find myself trying too hard to keep everyone happy, I know that pattern. If I start taking responsibility for another person’s feelings or choices, I understand where that comes from too. Even fear feels different when I can stop long enough to ask myself whether something is actually happening now or whether an old experience is influencing the way I see the situation.
That kind of awareness has given me something I didn’t always know I had—a choice.
I don’t automatically have to follow an old reaction simply because it feels familiar. I can stop and look at what is happening. I can pray about it. I can talk with someone I trust when I need another perspective. Sometimes I realize that I need to set a boundary. Other times I discover that I’m expecting someone in my present to answer for something another person did in my past. There are also times when I simply need to give myself a little grace and recognize that healing takes time.
The more I’ve learned about myself, the more I’ve realized that many of these patterns made sense when they began. A child who learns to keep everyone happy may grow into an adult who has a very difficult time saying no. Someone who learned that speaking up brought consequences may still struggle to find her voice years later. A person who experienced betrayal may desperately want to trust again and still find herself waiting for something to go wrong.
When I look at it that way, I don’t feel quite so frustrated with myself.
Instead of asking, Why am I still doing this? I can ask, Where did I learn this, and does it still belong in my life today?
That has become a much kinder question.
What Are You Still Carrying?
Maybe that’s something worth thinking about in your own life too.
We carry things for so long that sometimes we stop realizing how heavy they are. An opinion someone formed about us years ago may quietly become our opinion of ourselves. Guilt over something we couldn’t control may follow us into places where it no longer belongs. We may keep trying to make everybody happy because somewhere along the way we decided that another person’s disappointment meant we had done something wrong.
I know what it feels like to carry those things.
I also know how tempting it is, once we recognize them, to turn healing into another assignment. We decide we need to fix ourselves, forgive faster, establish better boundaries, stop people pleasing and finally get all of this figured out.
I don’t think we need to do that to ourselves.
Some of the deepest changes in my life took years. Forgiveness and understanding surrounding some of my painful experiences didn’t come until I reached my thirties. Looking back, I can see how God continued working in places I thought I ought to have resolved long before then. In Through It All, I wrote about one deeply painful experience that took years before forgiveness and understanding finally came. I also wrote about the peace and comfort I found when I turned toward God during difficult seasons.
Perhaps that is one reason I feel so strongly about giving ourselves room in the healing process.
There may come a time when counseling or another form of appropriate support becomes part of that journey. There may also come a time when you recognize a boundary that needs to change or a conversation that needs to happen. But you don’t need to know every step before taking the first one.
Sometimes the first step is simply recognizing something you never recognized before. Maybe you learned to respond a certain way because you were afraid. Maybe you believed something about yourself because someone repeatedly told you it was true. Maybe you’ve carried responsibility for something that was never yours to carry in the first place.
When we begin to understand where those things came from, I think it becomes a little easier to look at ourselves with compassion instead of judgment. We stop expecting the person we were years ago to somehow know everything we know today.
I can’t go back and change what happened in my life, and I no longer want to spend my energy wishing I could rewrite every chapter. Those chapters are part of my story. Some of them hurt. Some took me years to understand. Some taught me things I later needed to unlearn.
But they don’t get to decide how every chapter after them is written.
That, for me, is where emotional freedom begins. Not in forgetting the past, and not in finally becoming untouched by it, but in recognizing that I don’t have to keep living according to everything the past taught me.
So perhaps the question today isn’t, Why am I not over this yet?
Maybe a gentler question gives us somewhere better to begin:
What did I learn in order to survive that I’m finally ready to unlearn?
You don’t need to force an answer or turn the question into one more thing you need to accomplish. Sit with it for a while. Talk to God about it. Pay attention to what comes to mind, and give yourself permission to discover that some things which once helped you make it through a difficult season no longer need to travel with you into the next one.
There is still more of your story to write.
— Michelle
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Educational Disclaimer:
Michelle shares her personal experiences, faith journey and reflections for educational and inspirational purposes. This content does not replace professional medical, psychological, psychiatric or mental-health care. If past trauma or emotional distress affects your daily life, please consider reaching out to a qualified mental-health professional for individualized support.
Michelle shares her personal experiences, faith journey and reflections for educational and inspirational purposes. This content does not replace professional medical, psychological, psychiatric or mental-health care. If past trauma or emotional distress affects your daily life, please consider reaching out to a qualified mental-health professional for individualized support.
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