What I Found on the Other Side of Survival

This past year has changed me.

Not in the tidy, inspirational way people sometimes talk about transformation…as if healing is a thing you discover after a certain number of yoga classes and once you can do that one pose with the weird breathing, you suddenly reach the improved version of yourself. My journey has been messier than that, and I think most journeys are. My path has involved remembering, unlearning, grieving, questioning, rebuilding, and occasionally discovering that something I thought I had healed was simply waiting for me at a deeper level.

But this year has also brought me back to a version of myself that feels better, despite all the chipped corners and broken pieces. 

I have spent much of my life surviving. You probably aren’t shocked to read that, but I was very shocked to discover this truth!  Because I did not have a dramatic upbringing. My family of Aquariuses are decidedly anti-drama.  But I came into this hellscape…ahem…world as very sensitive person.  So in order to protect a nervous system that was pretty touchy, I became very good at reading rooms, anticipating problems, carrying what other people couldn’t carry, and finding humor in places where humor had no business surviving. 

This little journey of mine has informed me about my own trauma.  A dear friend of mine recently was telling a story and mentioned in passing that she “doesn’t really have any trauma”.  I used to think the same about myself.  But I started remembering things I buried and…the real insidious part…the things I classified as something other than trauma.  My friend had done the same thing.  She lost her mother to cancer when we were in our 20s.  Loss is always a trauma.  I myself had never considered myself to be a victim of sexual assault because I was not raped in a dark alley. But the Athletic Trainer in High School touched me inappropriately.  Oops.  Forgot about that.  But no time to dwell on that. Gotta motor if I’m gonna make it to college.  Gotta motor if I’m gonna make it to that career path I never wanted…etc etc  

I learned how to keep moving. I learned how to make difficult things look manageable. I learned how to turn chaos into something functional and pain into something I could laugh about later.

Those abilities kept me alive. They made me capable, creative, compassionate, and resilient. But survival skills are complicated. The same instincts that protect us can eventually become the patterns that keep us from resting, receiving, trusting ourselves, or recognizing what we actually need.

Rest? Never met her! Until 2021 when an avalanche of health issues forced me to slow down  

This year, I began looking beneath those patterns. Oof! Did I ever! And like most spiritual awakenings, I didn’t set out to heal my “hyper functioning executive control” issues.  But I’m a digger, I must understand things, and sometimes the rabbit hole is my own self  

It started because I am working on a book and it is really important to me that I be authentic in my sharing. Vulnerability is really hard for me.  There’s zero water in my chart.  But what started as an unanswered question about authentic experience became a quest.  I started asking different questions. Not just, “How do I fix this?” but, “Where did this begin?” Not just, “Why am I reacting this way?” but, “What is this reaction trying to protect?” Not just, “How do I become better?” but, “What if there was never anything fundamentally wrong with me?”

That last question changed everything.

So much of healing is not about becoming someone new. It is about retrieving the parts of ourselves we were taught to hide, shrink, silence, or abandon. It is about meeting the person we were before the world handed us a list of conditions for being lovable. It is about recognizing that our anger may contain information, our exhaustion may be telling the truth, and the qualities we were told were “too much” may be the very things that make us powerful.

Healing has taught me that there is always a story beneath the story.

Beneath perfectionism, there may be a child who learned that love arrived through approval. Beneath people-pleasing, there may be someone who once needed to keep the room calm to feel safe. Beneath procrastination, anger, control, numbness, or over-functioning, there is often a part of us doing exactly what it learned to do to survive.

When we understand that, shame begins to loosen its grip.

We stop asking, “What is wrong with me?” and begin asking, “What happened to me…and what did I have to become because of it?”

That doesn’t mean we remain trapped in the past or excuse every harmful pattern. Understanding is not the same as surrendering responsibility. It means we finally have enough compassion and clarity to create real change. We can thank the survival version of ourselves for getting us here without allowing her to run every part of our lives forever.

This is why I now feel I have something meaningful to offer my clients.

Not because I have completed healing. I don’t believe healing is a certificate we receive or a destination we permanently occupy. Life keeps revealing us to ourselves. New thresholds appear. Old wounds speak in new ways. We continue learning how to live more honestly inside our own lives.

What I do have is a deeper understanding of the territory.

I know what it feels like to realize that a coping mechanism has become a cage. I know the grief of seeing an old story differently. I know how disorienting it can be to set a boundary and then feel guilty for protecting yourself. I know the strange emptiness that sometimes appears when we stop being the person everyone depends on. I know that becoming yourself can feel less like a triumphant arrival and more like standing in the wreckage of everything that no longer fits.

I also know that there is life on the other side of that reckoning.

There is a moment when your anger becomes discernment. When your sensitivity becomes wisdom. When the voice you used to silence becomes the one you trust most. When you realize that you do not have to keep auditioning for love, shrinking for comfort, or translating yourself for people committed to misunderstanding you.

You begin to understand that the parts of you once labeled difficult may have been the parts refusing to let you disappear.

My own journey has deepened the way I listen. I hear not only the story someone is telling me, but the story underneath it. I notice the places where shame has taken over the narrative. I recognize the difference between the voice of intuition and the voice of fear. I understand that humor can be both medicine and armor, and that sometimes we need both before we are ready to put the armor down.

I am not interested in positioning myself above anyone as an expert on their life. I believe each person already carries an enormous amount of wisdom about themselves, even when that wisdom has been buried beneath trauma, expectations, roles, and years of being told not to trust it.

My work is not to hand someone a new identity. It is to help them hear their own voice again.

I can hold a lantern, ask the deeper question, name the pattern, reflect what I see, and sit beside someone at the threshold. I can help them look at the pieces of their story with curiosity instead of judgment. I can remind them that healing does not require becoming softer, quieter, more palatable, or endlessly forgiving.

Sometimes healing looks like tenderness.

Sometimes it looks like rage finally being given a name.

Sometimes it looks like grief.

Sometimes it looks like laughing so hard at the absurdity of your own survival mechanisms that something inside you finally releases.

And sometimes healing is simply the moment you decide that abandoning yourself is no longer the price you are willing to pay for belonging.

This past year has taught me that transformation is not about erasing what happened. It is about changing our relationship to it. The wound may remain part of the story, but it no longer gets to narrate the whole book!

I am still learning. I am still becoming. I am still discovering rooms inside myself that I have not fully explored. But I am no longer speaking from inside the wound. I can see its shape now. I can recognize what it created, what it cost, and what it taught me.

I know the way through because I have walked it.

Not perfectly. Not without getting lost. Not without sitting down in the middle of the path and wondering whether I had the strength to continue.

But I kept going.

And now, when someone else finds herself standing at a threshold—between who she had to be and who she is becoming—I can meet her there.

Not as someone who has all the answers…but as someone carrying a light.