When Healing Feels Like Loneliness

On trauma work, nervous system repair, and the ache of doing the hardest parts alone.

Now that I'm on solid ground, why does healing still feel like an uncontrolled free fall?

I’ve spent most of the last year doing deep trauma work. Not just talking about pain or writing it out into the either, but actually processing it - with a therapist I trust, with ketamine assisted psychotherapy and a guide who has offered unwavering and fiercely consistent support, with my own shaking hands and trembling nervous system, and inside a body that often wasn’t sure if safety was real.

A body that still isn’t sold on the fact that safety is something afforded to everybody.

There’s something almost cruel about this phase I’ve arrived in now, this place of more clarity, more steadiness, more "solid ground" than I’ve known in a long time. Because standing here, I can finally see the whole damn mountain I’ve been climbing. And somehow, I thought healing would feel lighter than this.

I didn’t expect the grief that would rise as I realized how much work still lives inside of me.

The layers.

The echoes.

The neural pathways carved by survival that now ask to be gently rewritten.

I’m not surviving anymore.

But I’m not fully thriving either.

I’m in the space between.

And in this space, this sobering, disorienting space, I’ve been met with (& reminded of) the reality that no one else can do this part for me.

No therapist.

No guide.

No partner.

No friend.

It’s mine.

Mine to sit with.
Mine to endure.
Mine to trust.

To be honest, that feels like a suffocating gut punch.

Because the truth is, trauma has rewired my brain and body to believe that I literally won’t survive the discomfort. In the moment that it surfaces, I actually cannot breathe. I find myself shaking uncontrollably. I feel like I’m the only person on the planet, AND like I’m being pushed out a plane a million miles above the earth. I feel like I’m free falling to my death and everything is awful and impossible and so damn lonely…. and then I get a notification that I have a new email and I’m somehow reminded that I’m still sitting in my desk chair in my house with my family and that I am not actually ascending to my death - but that chime is the only thing that pulled me back from the brink of being terrified out of my mind. I exhale, and then I’m… there. Not okay. Not re-assembled. But present.

That pain, that panic - it’s a warning sign.

That stillness equals danger.

That quiet will devour me whole.

And so I metaphorically bolt.

I numb.

I scroll.

I clean obsessively or cry at my desk or build a life so full of noise that I forget there’s anything underneath it. (Truthfully, it’s impossible to forget. Even if it’s at 11pm when I’m crawling under the covers, that thought is there, in the back of my mind, hiding in the shadows, undermining every moment I felt strong or brave or capable that day.)

But here I am - continually, desperately, committed to learning how to stay.

To sit in the unbearable moments of “nothing is wrong right now but everything still feels wrong.”

To not pick up my phone.

Even when I feel like I absolutely must.

To not reach for something outside of myself.

[It’s fucking hard.]

To just breathe.

This is the part no one glamorizes.

The part where you realize that healing isn’t about becoming unbroken. It’s about learning how to carry what you’ve lived through without it breaking you again.

It’s about looking at the wound while it’s still raw and choosing not to run.

I’ve done so much work to get here.
And still, this part?

This sitting with myself,

This believing that there’s any point to staying present in pain?

Some days, I’m still not so sure.

There’s no bow on this.

No wisdom I feel ready to offer.
Just this moment. This breath.

This truth.

If you’ve found yourself here too—on your own kind of solid ground, surprised at how unsteady it still feels—I see you.

What are you learning in the quiet?
What’s rising when there’s nothing left to distract you?
What does staying look like for you right now?

I’d love to know, if you’re willing to share.