Healing Was Never Meant To Happen Alone
I used to think hyper-independence was a personality trait. I took pride in being self-sustainable. One-woman band, baby.
Looking back, I realize how much of a survival response that actually was.
From learning to suppress my needs as a child to losing both of my parents by the age of 26, I became accustomed to handling life on my own. For much of my life, it was a brilliant survival response that literally kept me alive. I am grateful to my nervous system for doing what it had to do.
But when I got sick, I had no choice but to confront those deeply ingrained patterns. Basic tasks like making breakfast or grocery shopping became incredibly difficult.
I was forced to do the thing I was afraid of most: ask for help.
Forced dependence isn’t the healing thing you think it is. For me, it was traumatizing. On top of being disabled, I felt like a complete burden. I was deeply ashamed of needing anyone. More than anything, I just wished I could get better so I wouldn’t have to feel these things anymore.
Living with any type of chronic condition can intensify hyper-independence. Many of us have spent years having to ask for help before we were ready to address that wound.
The people around us, however well-meaning, don’t always understand what we’re going through. Instead of explaining ourselves again and again and risking feeling infantilized, we choose to push through and do things solo. And in the worst, but not uncommon, cases, others perceive us as lazy or attention-seeking and treat us as such.
The invisible element that often goes unspoken is the grieving we do in isolation. We grieve the lives we once had, not being believed in our pain, being gaslit, the futures we once saw for ourselves, and being constantly misunderstood.
I believe that living in a hyper-individualistic culture while holding these complexities can be inherently traumatizing.
When you get into the nitty-gritty of the nervous system, you learn that trauma isn’t necessarily the event that happened, but how your body responds to that event.
If you are met with adequate resources, care, and comfort, your nervous system has what it needs to return to a state of relative safety. If instead you are left alone to deal with an overwhelming event, your body may remain in a state of protection long after the event itself has passed.
The result can be living with a low-level survival response much of the time, which can add another layer of stress to the health issues we already have.
Many people with chronic conditions experience secondary trauma because they’re left to carry overwhelm alone. Having access to physical and mental healthcare matters. Being believed matters. Feeling safe and seen matters.
We have no shortage of symptom management. Luckily, there is a surplus of doctors, medications, supplements, and treatment protocols. And I am, of course, grateful for my team of healers who have kept me going.
But what we are missing is a safety net of people who understand our experience intimately.
We need radical permission to grieve what has been lost in the company of compassion. We are craving spaces where we don’t have to explain ourselves.
Medicinal camaraderie.
Our greater health depends on softening secondary trauma with safe connection.
We’ve been duped into believing that wellness means being symptom-free. And by proxy, we forget that we can be well while living with chronic conditions, loss, depression…
Disease and pain are a part of life, and you can live with pain and still be well. Not because you are in denial of reality, but because wellness is the quality of relationship you have with what is happening.
Wellness is not the absence of illness. It’s your relationship to it.
This is the same for grief, rage, abandonment, and all that you bear.
True wellness looks like living with pain without making pain a moral failure. Resting without shame. Advocating for your needs without apologizing for having them. Making room for both grief and pleasure. Viewing your body as an ally, even if you don’t like what it’s doing.
Wellness doesn’t mean that nothing hurts. It means that pain, grief, illness, anger, and limitation don’t automatically become evidence that you are failing at being alive.
For some of us, it is too big an ask to be in relationship with ourselves after a lifetime of guarding. That’s why I think connection with others is so important.
It is medicine to hear yourself in someone else’s story. Sometimes you need to compassionately relate to others before you can compassionately relate to yourself.
As a healer, I wish I could create a magic cure for all that ails you, but I can’t.
What I can create is something I think we all desperately need: a place where we don’t have to explain ourselves.
Where the collective says, “We’ve got you. We won’t let you fall. You’re allowed to grieve, feel joy, be angry, or feel nothing at all. You’re allowed to come exactly as you are.”
A place where secondary trauma simmers into belly laughs and communion.
Imagine a moment when you were left alone to deal with something scary. The suffocating heaviness that sat on your chest, the lump in your throat, the electricity of panic.
Now imagine someone sitting beside you, helping you hold it for a moment. Imagine knowing, without a doubt, that you are not alone, that you are believed, that you are held.
Maybe, just maybe, you don’t have to do this alone anymore.
Maybe healing was never meant to be a solo job.
If this piece resonated with you, I created a free 20-minute workshop called You Are Not Failing at Healing for young adults living with chronic illness and chronic pain.
In it, we’ll explore what happens when we stop treating our bodies like problems to be solved and start understanding the ways our nervous systems are trying to protect us. We’ll talk about the survival responses that can develop when illness disrupts your relationship with your body, yourself, and the life you imagined—and what it might look like to approach yourself with a little more compassion.
If you’ve spent a long time feeling like you should be handling this better, healing faster, or doing more, I made this for you.
You are not failing at healing. You are not broken. And you were never meant to carry all of this alone.
Until next time, be gentle with yourself.
Abby (LMT, CLMD, Somatic Practitioner)
