Healing Myth #1: The Fantasy of “Getting Past It”
How trauma lives in the present, even after insight
Many people come to therapy carrying a quiet expectation, even if it’s never spoken out loud that, “If I do the work, this will be behind me.” If I commit, really do the work, life will eventually feel better. Relationships will improve. Old patterns will loosen their grip, and this will all be behind me.
This expectation is understandable. It is also deeply shaped by the way healing is often described.
What I’ve come to see is that healing does not unfold as resolution. It unfolds as revelation. And revelation can be far more destabilizing than we expect.
Behind me implies resolution. Completion. An endpoint.
The idea that trauma can be processed, integrated, and then placed neatly in the past where it no longer influences the present is a lie.
This belief is rarely stated so directly, but the messaging is everywhere. If you commit, if you show up, if you’re brave enough to face what happened, life will improve. Relationships will feel easier. Old patterns will lose their grip. You will be freer.
Four years ago, I entered EMDR therapy with that promise quietly intact. I committed myself fully. I sincerely believed that if I was willing to stay with what insight alone had not reached, as it was living in my body and shaping my present life, and do the hard work, I would move through it and be done with it. And it would be behind me.
Revelation Instead of Resolution
What I didn’t understand then is that trauma work doesn’t simply resolve. It reveals.
Instead of closing a chapter, it often opens the book wider.
When Healing Doesn’t Bring Relief
My initial experience wasn’t relief, but recognition, with a wallop of surprise that I hadn’t expected. I began to see how much of my present life was still organized around survival, even after years of talk therapy that had given me insight and self-awareness. Patterns I thought I understood were still quietly running the show.
One in particular surprised me: fawning. I was a master at it, so skilled that even I didn’t know I was doing it. Responses I believed were “me” were actually protective strategies shaped long ago.
This didn’t feel like progress. It felt like falling apart.
That unraveling was necessary, and in many ways deeply important. But I wasn’t prepared for it, and my family system certainly wasn’t prepared for it either.
Healing, in this sense, did not place the past behind me. For a time, it felt like I was drowning in it.
Staying with the trauma work, leaning into my supports and doing a great deal of work in between sessions, I began to see it with compassion and perspective. Not to relive it, but to finally recognize how it had been living through me, in the present.
The myth isn’t that healing doesn’t work.
The myth is that healing ends.
What trauma work offers instead is compassionate consciousness. And consciousness can be profoundly destabilizing before it is liberating.
Healing is not about getting somewhere else.
It is about being able to stay, right here, right now, with you, just as you are.
