Why Your Healing Journey Will Change You Forever

When you begin, nobody tells you about the grief that comes with healing. Because it sounds counterintuitive. Why would getting better involve loss?

Through my own healing journey and decades of walking alongside people through their most tender seasons I’ve learned: healing demands that you release the version of yourself that learned how to survive inside the wound. And that version? You might love her. You might have no idea who you’ll be without her. But she cannot come with you.

The person you built around the pain

When something hurts us deeply, we don’t just experience it and move on. We reorganize. We develop workarounds, protective strategies, entire personalities shaped around the injury. The child who learned that love was conditional becomes an adult who over-gives to feel worthy. The one who was abandoned becomes someone who leaves first. The one who was told her voice didn’t matter becomes either very quiet or very loud.

These adaptations were intelligent solutions your younger self devised with limited resources and no guidebook. No one should ever feel ashamed of how she survived.

But surviving and thriving are different animals.

The strategies that kept you safe begin to cost you something as you grow. The walls that protect your heart start to feel like a prison. The hypervigilance that once saved you now exhausts you. The people-pleasing that earned you scraps of love leaves you hungry and resentful.

Healing means acknowledging that what once served you is now standing between you and the life you actually want.

Why we resist our own transformation

I’ve sat with people on the edge of real breakthrough who suddenly pull back. They convince themselves that “it’s not that bad” or “this is just who I am.”

This isn’t self-sabotage in the way we usually think of it. It’s loyalty to our wounds. The pain we know feels safer than the unknown territory of wellness. Our suffering has become part of our identity. It’s woven into how we relate to others, how we understand ourselves, even how we connect spiritually.

Some people have built entire relationships around their brokenness. “I’m the anxious one.” “I’m the one with the difficult past.” “I’m the caretaker because I know what it’s like to be neglected.” These roles feel solid. They give us a place to stand.

Healing threatens to take that ground away.

And on a deeper level, there can be an unconscious fear that if we heal, we’re somehow betraying what happened to us. As if our continued suffering is the only way to honor the gravity of our experiences. As if getting better means it wasn’t really that bad.

Let me be clear: Your healing does not minimize your pain. You can acknowledge the full weight of what you’ve been through and still choose to stop carrying it in your body.

What the healing journey actually looks like

Real healing is not returning to who you were before the wound. That person is gone, and trying to retrieve her will only frustrate you.

Healing is becoming someone new. You become someone who has integrated the experience, who can feel the old ache without being controlled by it, whose identity is larger than what happened to her.

This can be genuinely disorienting. You will have moments when you don’t recognize yourself. Old triggers won’t hit the same way, and you might feel strangely empty where there used to be reactivity. You may feel distant from friends who knew you in your wounded state, because they haven’t changed but you have. Conversations and relationships that used to feel central to your life may no longer interest you.

And you will grieve. Even when the change is entirely positive, there is grief. Grief for the years spent surviving instead of living. Grief for the relationships that couldn’t come with you and grief for the familiar pain because it was yours.

This is normal and healthy. Grief is not a sign that you’re doing it wrong.

Identity crisis is part of every healing journey

Women often come to me in the middle of transformation, upset because they feel like they’re falling apart. “What the hell is going on? I don’t know who I am anymore,” they say.

Good, I tell them. That’s exactly right.

You can’t heal while clinging to every piece of your old self. Something has to go. Something has to transform. A caterpillar doesn’t just sprout wings. It becomes liquid first. It loses all recognizable form before it becomes something that can fly.

If you’re in that liquid state right now, I know how terrifying it is. I know it feels like you might stay dissolved forever, like you might never find solid ground again. But dissolution is not destruction. It’s reorganization. And it’s happening because some part of you is ready for a form that actually fits.

Letting yourself become someone new

Healing is not fixing yourself so you can go back to your old life. It’s letting yourself be transformed, knowing that your old life might not fit anymore.

This means:

Allowing relationships to shift or end when they’re built on your dysfunction rather than your wholeness.

Sitting with the discomfort of not having your familiar coping mechanisms to reach for.

Tolerating the vulnerability of being seen in ways your protective self would never have allowed.

Disappointing people who preferred the smaller, quieter, more manageable you.

Accepting that you might be good at things you never tried because you didn’t believe you deserved success.

Feeling the full range of emotions you numbed to survive. This includes joy, which can feel threatening to a nervous system that’s used to bracing for impact.

A note on spiritual bypassing

Healing is not transcendence. It’s not rising above your pain or your body or your human experience.

True healing moves through, not around. It requires you to be more present in your life, not less. More embodied, not more detached. More willing to feel, not more skilled at floating above feeling.

If your spiritual practice is helping you avoid your wounds rather than tend to them, that’s not healing. That’s a sophisticated defense mechanism with oils and incense. It doesn’t work.

Genuine transformation requires you to stay close to your experience, even when it’s uncomfortable. To stop abandoning yourself the way others may have abandoned you and offer your own suffering the same attention and compassion you freely give to everyone else.

The healing journey requires courage

It takes genuine bravery to heal because healing is not passive. You are not simply recovering from something. You are actively choosing to become someone you have never been.

You are choosing uncertainty over the painful familiar and growth over the comfort of stagnation. You are choosing to honor your future self over your loyalty to your wounds.

This is not a one-time choice. It’s a choice you make again and again, each time the old patterns call you back, each time it would be easier to slide back into who you used to be.

It’s okay to be afraid, to grieve, to move slowly, to need support. And it’s okay if you need to circle back to old places before you can truly leave them for good.

Healing is not a straight line. It’s a direction. And there is no right or wrong way. It’s your journey, your way.

So here’s what I want you to know

If you are terrified and grieving and wondering if you’ll ever feel solid again:

You will.

On the other side of this undoing is a version of you that isn’t built around the wound anymore. Someone who can hold her history gently, without being held hostage by it. Someone whose capacity for presence, love and joy has been restored.

That person is worth grieving for. That person is worth becoming.

You can’t heal and stay the same. And thank God for that.

Be Blessed,
Taylor 💛

 

I write often about the quieter, harder parts of healing. If you’d like more of these reflections, come join me at my Heart of Healing community for women supporting each other through the messy middle of transformation. I’d love to have you with us.