Maybe it’s just me, but when tragedy strikes and I hear people talk about “healing,” something in me thinks — that’s not quite right.
You can heal a body. But even then, there are scars.
Healing a broken heart? A devastated soul? That’s a different story entirely. And we now know it’s not just emotional — a broken heart is physically painful. Grief lives in the body. It hurts in ways that are measurable and real.
The only way through it is to go through it. There are no shortcuts. You have to do the time — until the edges feel a little less ragged, until more meaningful moments can come into view, until life doesn’t feel quite so obliterated.
You keep going. One day at a time, sometimes one hour at a time — until the sun comes up and a couple of flowers bloom and a butterfly zips past you and somewhere in the back of your mind you think… huh. That was nice.
Is that hope? Maybe. Don’t analyze it. Just let it be.
But don’t call it healing. You can’t rewind life no matter how many times you hit that button. What you can do is give yourself enormous credit for coping with grief and loss — for keeping going until you can breathe again. Until you can live again.
That’s not a small thing. That’s everything. And if the weight of it feels like more than you can carry alone, trauma recovery support and mental health support exist for exactly this reason — reaching for them isn’t giving up. It’s part of coping with loss well.
Building a stronger you, one day at a time, Dr. Claudia