If you are like me, it can be challenging to feel like you are safe and are in control of the healing process, but you are. We all are. We often lack safety and healing feelings for those of us who have experienced trauma of any kind. Sometimes the very ideas of safety and healing could seem far off and even foreign as we try to live our lives in the present. In one of my recent counseling sessions, my counselor asked me to write on such ideas in our virtual session together, and I wish to share with each of you what I wrote in hopes that something within the words might spark feelings of hope, safety, and healing within you. (The prompt was: First what is safety like and then what it healing like) This is what I wrote.
Safety is like walking a path never journeyed nor one that was never paved for you to travel, knowing that the ancestors are there with you, holing you in their embrace, and providing you unconditional love with compassionate support. Safety is not necessarily an absence of pain or uncertainty; while still being free at the moment to experience all of life‘s activities, including the trauma that might be addressed and even unpleasant to hold at the moment. Likewise, healing feels like entering into a space of past trauma and being able to endure the uncertainty and discomfort, knowing that you are safe at this moment that while the past did occur while the trauma did occur that it is not your present and does not have to be your future. Healing is safety informed by the past where one imagines and builds a future for themselves that they wish to see, embody, and experience.
Friends, this journey to healing that we are on is not an easy one, though, at many times, I wish it were. There are bound to be ups and downs, highs and lows along the way, and no one's journey to healing will ever be the same as no one's pain, or suffering is ever the same as similar as they might seem each of us experiences them differently and thus heal in similar yet different ways as well. Wherever you on your healing journey, know this; you are worthy, you have dignity, you are stronger than you give yourself credit for, and though at times it might seem like you are on this journey alone, you are never alone as countless others are on their own healing journey at this very moment all around the world.