A Quick Disclaimer

I’m not a licensed therapist, psychologist, or mental health professional. I’m simply someone who has experienced trauma, spent years trying to understand it, and is passionate about psychology and healing.

I’ve gone back to school to study psychology, spend a great deal of time reading research, and regularly discuss these topics with my own therapist. Many of the ideas I share are information I learned, but they are also shaped by my own personal experiences, reflections, and opinions.

Nothing I write should be considered professional, medical, psychological, or therapeutic advice. My hope is simply to encourage curiosity, self-reflection, and healthy conversations. If you’re struggling with your mental health or relationships, I encourage you to seek guidance from a qualified mental health professional.

I’m still writing mostly for me, but I genuinely want to help others now too. Healing is often misunderstood. We think that if something clicks, the pain and suffering stop. It does not. This is the truth about healing. You’re not healing wrong; you just weren’t told what healing really looks like. I hope this helps you. Hugs to anyone who needs them today or any day. 🫂

It Doesn’t Change Overnight

One of the most frustrating and annoying lessons I’ve learned is that insight doesn’t automatically create change. Knowing does not automatically mean healing. And it pisses me off.

I used to believe that if I could just understand myself, understand why things happened the way they did, why I reacted the way I did, then I would heal. So I read books, studied psychology (in college as one of my majors), went to therapy to recognize every trauma response, identify every cognitive distortion, and name my attachment wound… if I had the knowledge, I would finally be free of them.

Instead, I found myself recognizing the pattern while I was still living it. I found I could hear the core beliefs whispering before I acted on them. I found that it didn’t heal me.

While I could trace things back through years of experiences that taught me to survive by anticipating rejection, pleasing others, staying hypervigilant, or trying to become indispensable, I still believed them.

That’s the part people don’t talk about enough. Healing isn’t magic; awareness doesn’t suddenly erase decades of conditioning. Our brains are designed to repeat what they have practiced the longest. The brain struggles to stop the neuropathway that have been reinforced for years, because familiar patterns often feel safer than unfamiliar healing.

They don’t ask whether the pattern is healthy. They ask whether it is familiar. Those pathways carved by years of fear don’t disappear the day you recognize them. They weaken slowly, one choice at a time. That single choice leads to another and another and another, until eventually, you create new pathways.

Sounds simple enough. But it’s not.

Daily Choices

Some days I choose differently. Some days I don’t. And when I fall back into an old pattern, I tend to think to myself, “Nothing has changed. Nothing will ever change.”

But that’s another old lie. Progress isn’t measured by perfection. It’s measured by persistence. But what lies between those choices is agony, suffering, pain, sorrow… the old familiar things that we know. The things that we don’t want anymore, but again, cling to because they are familiar. It is safer than what we don’t know.

The first time I repeated a harmful pattern, I didn’t even know I was doing it. I don’t know how long fear of the unknown pushed me back into those old patterns.

Why? Because when we are scared, our brains stop asking, “What is healthy?” and start asking, “What kept me alive before?” The amygdala sounds the alarm, the PFC steps into the background, and survival takes the wheel.

We don’t choose the newest path. We chose the oldest one. The one carved by years of repetition, fear, and familiarity. Healing, then, is not about never feeling afraid. It is about learning to recognize when survival has taken over, gently reclaiming the wheel, and choosing the healthier pathways.

But I kept persisting. Wanting change. Wanting a better, healthier life. Eventually, I started to recognize I was in the pattern. I recognized it months afterward. Then weeks. Then days.

Eventually, I caught myself in the middle of it. Not always. And, to be honest, I tend to notice it more once my PFC has been reactivated. But now, sometimes… I catch myself before I act. That is healing.

It’s not healing because I never stumble anymore, but because the distance between awareness and action keeps getting smaller. It’s a slow, painful process, but this is the truth about healing that we don’t often hear. The truth is there is no magic pill, no matter how much we wish for it. And this comes from a self-proclaimed witch (though there is science behind the power of rituals in psychology, but that’s a topic for a different day).

The Messy Truth

Healing is much messier than we wish it were. Recently, I made one of the hardest decisions of my life. I cut the cord (you may have read about it here). I cut the cord with my own unhealthy habits such as fear of abandonment, holding on to a future that never happened, my core belief that love means enduring pain, my core belief that I must be perfect and sacrifice myself to be worthy of being loved… because I finally recognized that the relationship had become more about the future I imagined than the reality I was living.

For a while, I felt stronger. Lighter. More grounded. Then yesterday, I cried because I missed him. This morning, I found myself watching old videos. Reading old messages. Smiling at conversations that once made me believe we were building something beautiful together. For a moment, it all felt real again, and I was full of hope we could fix it.

The memories reminded me why I fell for him in the first place. They awakened the hope I had worked so hard to quiet. They whispered about the future we had imagined together, the one that still lives somewhere inside me, and maybe even inside him.

A month ago, I would have drowned in those feelings without even realizing what was happening. Today, something different happened. I watched myself and noticed what I was doing. I recognized the pull. I could feel my mind trying to recreate the future we had built together in my imagination while another part of me quietly held on to reality.

I’m still standing between those two worlds. The imagined future and the truth. I don’t know which feeling will be louder tomorrow. I don’t know whether grief or hope will win every battle. But I do know this: I can see the patterns while they’re happening. I can challenge myself. I can fight back against the old familiar pain and the new fears. I can challenge my core beliefs. I can talk to myself and remind myself I deserve better. Not because the pain is gone. Definitely not because the pattern has ended. But because I can finally see it while I’m living it.

A New Phase of Healing

Someone once said something that has stayed with me:

“This may be the beginning of a new phase in the pattern, not necessarily the end of the pattern.”

That sentence changed something for me. Adding a new phase to a pattern is still progress. The pattern used to own me completely. Now it has to fight my awareness. It has to compete with reality. It has to answer to the healthier part of me that keeps asking, “Is this who he really was… or who I hoped he would become?”

And more importantly, I ask myself, “Do I want to let old patterns keep controlling me, or do I want to make healthy choices so that I can learn to be truly happy?”

That doesn’t make healing painless. In some ways, it makes it more painful because now I watch the battle happen in real time. I see the old wound begging for the fantasy. I see the memories trying to convince me that the imagined future still exists. And I see the person I’m becoming asking me to stay with the truth, not because it’s comfortable, but because even though a healthy version of myself is unknown and terrifying, it has to be better than the decades of proven agony the old patterns hold as evidence.

I don’t always win that battle. Sometimes I still let myself visit the life I thought we were going to have. But now I know what I’m doing. That awareness doesn’t erase the longing; it changes my relationship with it. Instead of drowning in the feeling, I observe the storm. Instead of blindly driving in, I question if this is where I want to stay. On a good day, I will turn my back to the storm and walk home to cry, process, and remind myself that a better future is ahead. That is a new phase of healing, and a new phase is still progress.

Recovery isn’t a straight line climbing toward the top of the mountain. It’s a trail through the woods. Sometimes you lose the path. Sometimes you walk in circles. Sometimes you find yourself standing in a place you swore you’d never visit again. But if you keep moving, if you keep choosing the path a little more often than you choose the wilderness, you are still moving forward.

Two steps forward and one step back is still one step forward.

The Goal

The goal was never to become someone who never struggles. The goal was never to stop feeling (though I have mastered dissociation). The goal was to stop following every feeling. The goal is to pause before reacting in order to strengthen a new pathway.

Every time I offer myself compassion instead of shame, I weaken an old one. Every time I choose honesty over fear, boundaries over people pleasing, or reality over fantasy, I become a little more like the person I’m trying to grow into.

There are still days when the old beliefs knock me on my ass. Sometimes they even walk into my house and make themselves comfortable… but they no longer get to decide who I become. Healing isn’t the absence of old wounds; it’s learning that they no longer have to write the ending of my story.

So if today you repeated a pattern you promised yourself you’d never repeat again, don’t mistake that for failure. Take responsibility where you need to. Learn from it. Rest if you’re exhausted. Then stand back up.

Healing change isn’t built by never falling; it’s built by refusing to stay on the ground. The person you become is not determined by how many times you return to an old pattern. It’s determined by how many times you choose to begin again. And maybe one day the pattern will finally end.