I often feel like when I talk to my people about healing, it’s like I’m explaining color to someone who is and has always been fully color blind. How do you put words to something that someone cannot even conceptualize? I’ve seen color, I know how beautiful it is, much like I’ve seen healing. Yet I sit across from people balancing this place in which I so desperately want them to heal and I know they have to make the choice for themselves. It is a much harder choice than it seems because it requires such a leap of faith. Asking someone to heal is asking them to trust me, when they don’t trust… to believe in something they’ve never seen… to be vulnerable when they’ve learned the world isn’t safe… to believe they deserve it when they think they have no worth… and to face the fear of who they are if they aren’t hurting. Today, I realized that I’m offering those new glasses that allow color blind people to see color for the first time. I know that they work and that it’s worth it, but they don’t. I am asking them to have hope when they have learned that they will be let down if they do. The glasses are right there, I’m offering them, but they are afraid to take them. I know that if they would just put it on, they would see…but I also know that it’s not that easy either to take that leap of faith.
Healing is a beautiful thing and I have yet to meet someone that is past the point of healing…though I also have yet to meet someone that doesn’t feel they will be the exception to that. Healing is moving from a place of feeling and experiencing our past and our pain, to it being a story. I read a great analogy that frankly I wish I would have come up with…Have you ever broken a bone or had surgery or a sprain, etc? Think back on that injury. You remember that it hurt but it doesn’t hurt now, right? That’s what healing does for trauma as well. We will always remember that it hurt, it won’t ever magically be okay, but we don’t have to keep feeling pain.
I wish that I could choose healing for people, but all I can do is offer the glasses. And, as much as you can hear me in this moment, healing is possible and it is worth it. You may think that you are “dealing with it”, that “it’s not that bad”… it CAN be better. I’m also not asking you to do the journey alone. If you need help finding someone, ask. Ask me, ask a friend, ask Google…you deserve to feel better than you do and you can. The journey can be messy and painful but so is what you are already doing.
You may have never seen color before but I can promise you that once you do, it’s worth it.