In the frigid morning, the river shatters.
I emerge from the frozen silence of the woods and jump as a crack punctures the silence. I move quickly toward the high bank, searching in alarm for the sound of danger.
But it’s just ice. The hard shell encasing the shallows is splintering and cleaving as the tidal water moves beneath it.
The ice extends out thirty feet from both sides of the riverbank while the center remains open – a narrow waterway moving ice floes with surprising speed down river as the tide moves back to the sea.
A massive ice floe catches the frozen shallows, the moving ice grinding against the stationary ice like an 18-wheeler jamming itself down a too-tight alley. The crash is terrifying.
Its brutalness stuns me. It feels wrong, like watching a mirror’s slow-motion fall to the ground. I want to reach out and stop it. As if I could. As if I should.
I stand on the granite outcrop, the cold air penetrating my layers, and watch the world tilt and break and think this is what healing is.
Why Breaking Is Necessary
I used to consider my trauma to be a liability.*
It didn’t just decimate my self-worth and corrupt my relationship to my body. It destroyed relationships, shrouded my life in fear and shunted all my resources to self-protection.
When everything is done in pursuit of safety, thriving is an unachievable mirage.
I used to resent (envy) people with secure upbringings. I was convinced they were whole and I was broken, an inequality that could never be balanced. No matter how much I healed, it was never enough to overcome such a thwarted beginning.
It was like being the youngest child in a family: You are always trying to catch up, but your siblings just keep getting older and, no matter how you try, you can never close the gap.
I used to be the riverbank ice. Just as I would form and think the worst was behind me, I would fracture and split all over again.
For this I felt enormous shame. My pain caused other people pain. My maladaptive behaviors created untold conflict.
Why couldn’t I just let it go? Why couldn’t I stop hurting and breaking? Did I need to stop making such a big deal of long-ago transgressions?
Why couldn’t I just be more normal?
There is probably a term for this, but I don’t know it. It’s when you not only carry the shame of what happened, but you judge yourself for the impact it has on you.
Its only outcome is self-rejection and self-abandonment.
Yet healing is not possible without the self. This is the terrible irony of healing: the healing needed is to come home to ourselves, yet how can we heal if we are nowhere to be found?
My answer: we never actually leave. It just feels like that. Our truest selves, the part untouchable to others, is always within.
Healing isn't all candles and crying. It's about breaking down the walls that separate us from ourselves. It requires cracking. It’s loud and messy and scary and worth every break.
We Are Our Own Medicine
I spent so many years clawing my way toward what I feared might be a non-existent liberation. For reasons I don’t fully understand, some part of me believed in my own redemption, believed real healing was possible.
That thriving was possible.
I’m so happy to say I was not wrong. It is possible and I am living that liberation now.
All those years of breaking, when I thought I was doing it wrong, I was healing. It’s only now, peering from the safe shore of wholeness, that I can see it.
Understanding trauma healing means reframing what we thought we knew. I am the ice and the water below forcing it to crack open. I am the both the grinding current and the frozen sides awaiting the collision.
Destruction is a sacred part of the medicine.
I did the unbelievable and turned shit to gold. I transmuted a liability into my superpower. What used to be a regret is now a gift.
I am an alchemist. Most of us are.
I was never broken: I was merely breaking. Just as I needed to.
These days I look back and wonder how much easier and kinder it all would have felt had I known that when it seemed like everything was going wrong, it was actually going right.
I imagine how much less I would have hurt if I knew my pain wasn't just okay, but completely and utterly necessary.
If we can hold ourselves while we break, with tenderness instead of judgement, we restore what was once taken from us. We become for ourselves what we long ago needed.
We take our rightful spot as the healer and the healed.
*(I don’t like the phrasing “my trauma” but cannot find a more appropriate wording. Because I’m not talking about trauma in general but the trauma I experienced. Or, more accurately, the impact traumatic events had on me.)
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