Your Path to Liberation Lies in Your Responsibility for Your Healing

I was recently listening to a podcast where Marianne Williamson was speaking. One piece of wisdom she shared was, “You may not be responsible for what happened to you, but you are responsible for your healing.”

It is only natural for us to experience a range of emotional or even physiological responses when we are violated or hurt in some way. There may be a part of us that wants vengeance, a part that seeks justice, a part that craves acknowledgement or validation, another that longs for safety (and usually recreates anything but that), and so on. And honestly, these parts that are organically created in response to what happened, are completely justified in their existence. Our body will even hold what we are not conscious of. The residue of what occurred is tangible. What we do, and how we live our lives accordingly, however, is a different story.

It is absolutely essential that in our healing process we feel our pain, move through emotions, and re-process or re-integrate the parts of us that have been fractured, and feel anything but whole. There is a saying from Buddhism that states, “The pain is inevitable, the suffering is optional.” The pain of what happened is real. Your hurt is real and needs to be seen. Yes, take up space and let the grief transform you in every way that it needs to. And let the transformation set you free. Let what once felt impossible to even look at, to even give voice to, become a piece of you just as much as the parts of you that you deem worthy.

When we live through the part of us that is suffering, we remain victim to what happened in our lives. We live from the experience of what happened to us, waiting for the completion in a form of being saved, validated, resolved, or something else. From this space, we might feel small, threatened, unseen, unworthy, unsafe, defensive, angry, and life can feel limited. We will likely continue to experience more or different versions of pain in our unconscious attempt to resolve it. Our relationships may be volatile, our perspective of our ourselves may be distorted, and we may not feel that we have both feet planted on the earth. We keep ourselves, and those involved in our hurt, in a warped prison where we are waiting for them to set us free. None of this because of conscious choice, but because of what the trauma dictates. 

We do not need to wait for safety to be real again. We do not need to wait for the words we will never hear. We do not need to wait for someone to release us from the pain. We do not need to stay in any waiting room of any form. We each hold the key to our healing. And when we start to take responsibility for our healing, we realize that the walls we believed were made of impenetrable concrete, can become as soft and light as feathers, gracefully falling with each moment we choose empowerment. Each time we choose to add another line to the story we are writing, no longer subscribing to what was written from this place.

We take our power back when we recalibrate our nervous system and define what safety means once more. We reclaim our worthiness when we uphold the boundaries that feel terrifying to set. We transform what has become instinctual responses when we step into our evolved (or evolving) Self by saying yes or no when we mean it, removing ourselves from danger, and walking away from toxic relationships. We show ourselves love by following through on the commitments we make to ourselves, and by being graceful when we are not able to do so. We learn and practice communicating, allowing our voices to be heard, giving others a chance to see us and when appropriate, meet our needs. We start to believe that this experience is not who we are, but something that happened to us, and we build an identity that transcends this space. We become who was there all along, underneath the hurt, our truest Self who never left at all.

Trauma is not always easy to recognize and equally cannot be intellectualized into healing. Questioning reactions, noticing the body's response or general state of being, reflecting on relationships and how we experience people in our lives, and our general sense of who we are, can be starting points to building an awareness.

Here are some ways to begin to heal:

• Psychotherapy: EMDR, Somatic based therapy, Brainspotting, Equine therapy, DBT, attachment based therapy and more

• Nervous system education and tools for re-calibrating 

• Yoga, Breathwork, Dance, Acupuncture

• Energy healing, sound baths, Reiki, meditation

• Community: friends, support groups, classes, spiritual or religious sanctuaries 

• Nutrition, supplements, sleep

• Reading books or listening to podcasts aligned with healing and healthy inner/outer relationships 

• Evaluating and labeling safe, trustworthy people

If you are reading this and need help with finding support, please email me at laura@soulmergence.com

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