Where Does Your "Healing Journey" End?

Exploring trauma, growth, and the danger of expecting closure.

There’s a trend online of people, mostly women, outwardly stating that they are “on their healing journey” or “in their healing era” as a stonewall defense for prioritizing themselves, often at the expense of their relationships or without consideration for the people around them. While I am absolutely an advocate for therapy, self-reflection, and taking care of your own needs before taking on anyone else’s, I feel like the concept of a dedicated steamroller of self-care as a phase is being over-used and setting an expectation for these girls that there is some sort of finish line to their healing journey that does more harm than good.

It’s possibly a folly of youth that I have outgrown, but I think the idea that healing is a moment or project or limited-scope-undertaking is naive and speaks to goal-setting rather than actually gaining wisdom from our experiences. We ALL go through things we would rather have never felt or had knowledge of, and it always leaves a mark… or in some cases even scars. Are you ever really over it? Trauma? Breakups? Bad jobs? Grief?

When even after time, therapy, growth and change, if the memory colors the moments here and now, then is “healed” ever achievable? I don’t think it is, and I think setting that expectation is going to lead to disappointment and self-sabotaging behavior for the people that chase that idea. I think that we observe what happened, we absorb the lessons we learned from it, and we use that information to make decisions for the rest of our lives that help us do whatever is within our control to avoid ever feeling that way again. Not healed… just smarter.

The “healing era” ick didn’t start with a single post, but a growing trend of TikToks and essays on Substack since those are the two mediums I absorb content from the most. From flippant statements like “So what if I woke up one Monday morning and decided not to fuck with you? I’m in my healing era.” on TikTok… like what the fuck are you healing from? Being considerate? Communicating a crossed boundary? Putting up with behavior you don’t like? Healing era in that use just sounds like the new age version of ghosting… cutting communication without explaining why or giving the other party the opportunity to correct whatever slight they might have given. While you don’t owe anyone your backstory, make sure you OWN it yourself.

Then there are entire think pieces on Substack where the writers spell out all the ways they’ve prioritized other people’s needs above their own and made grand declarations of change and called it going on a healing journey. In this case the concept is a solid one, but healing just doesn’t feel like the right word… there’s no scar, no injury, no traumatic event… just recognition that decisions you’ve made up till now no longer serve who you want to be and what goals you have going forward. That’s self-reflection and gaining wisdom and we CONSTANTLY do this our whole lives as we gain experience and adjust our own course.

I think the behavior I see most often associated with the “healing journey” statement is that it is usually followed by bold declarations of entitlement… we’re ALL entitled to put ourselves first… put on your own life vest before trying to help your neighbor and all that jazz. But the “healing era” girlies take it to the next level and seem to think that in order to live their best life they have to be completely inconsiderate to others, or to do what they want at the full expense of other people.

And that is where the line is between self-prioritization and self-centeredness… and it is a fine line indeed. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where this trend crosses the line, but it does. Gloria Alamrew of CultureCraft spelled it out much better than I can here in her piece “Healing Is Making Us Mean”, illustrating in paraphrase that a simple “I don’t want to” has now become “I must decline because I am on a healing journey away from being a people-pleaser” and other therapy-speak-coded bullshit excuses for isolating ourselves and not participating in activities and village-like rituals… and the kids wonder why we don’t have community.

My 20’s were all about survival mode. It was less about healing and more about recognizing where I came from and ruling out what I no longer wanted to give my time, attention, and energy to. I grew up with one massive trauma right after another, and it took nearly a decade of chipping away at the false beliefs those traumatic experiences etched into my heart and mind in order to feel even moderately functional in society. In my 30’s I began to see that I was safe. I realized through moment after moment, interaction after interaction, and even through conflict and challenges, that I had managed to build a life where those survival skills were good to have, but also didn’t apply to me any more. I could let them go and live lighter for it.

An example of that trauma is hunger. There were times growing up when I was so hungry it hurt for days. Without going into detail, some of my most scarring experiences from childhood came from evil people taking advantage of my hunger to do unspeakable things to me in exchange for filling my belly, something no 10 year old should experience. As a result I have a very broken relationship with food that I thought would go away or “heal” as an adult once I could control my access to food, but it just changed. Evolved.

The physical sensation of hunger feels dangerous to me still. Because I NEVER want to feel that, and I am hyper-aware of how vulnerable and helpless hunger can make a person, I lean towards over-feeding myself and everyone around me. I spend an inordinate amount of time planning family meals, ensuring I have snacks in my purse and that food will be available at any function I attend, and that my pantry and freezers are always a little overstocked. I’ve never really “healed” from that trauma. I probably never will.

But I use it to inform my decisions. I self-reflect on WHY anxiety and stress make me binge eat. I actively choose to treat food as fuel rather than as comfort, and I don’t always get it right. It’s a decision, not a reaction, that I work on every single day. I find alternative ways to self-sooth, but I don’t punish myself for my impulses. I didn’t create them, I’m just working with what I have.

This is where that “healing era” culture has me concerned. I look at all these people who are making these statements and I just see disappointment in their future because the healing is never done. When there’s an expectation of a finish line… an idea that the trauma will just be dead and buried one day… only to have it resurface by surprise or be a constant struggle or even a teeny tiny voice in the back of your mind that you have to ignore, then it’s almost as heartbreaking as the original trauma itself. So when the trauma resurfaces, or the self-destructive behavior born of that trauma, they blame themselves. They cut more people off and fall into a spiral of self-depreciating thought patterns and lose whatever progress they might have made working through those issues because they see their efforts as having failed. By assuming a finish line, the expectation becomes closure, when the reality should really be growth.

Healing Era girlies, at least the ones I tend to see in my timeline, seem to be of the mindset that they can’t “heal” in their current situation. Their job, their family, their relationships and friendships, and so they cut them out one by one. Granted, in SOME cases those are good moves, but on the whole, your problems tend to follow you wherever you go so you’re just taking them off one plate to eventually put on another. And once you finally experience the growth that time inevitably provides, you realize that some people didn’t deserve to be punished for things they did not do, or were not aware of. Some people are just bystanders that catch a stray dismissal or insult or demonization because you weren’t done working out your pain so you lash out like an injured beast and call it your “healing era”. Some of those bystanders might have known how to help your injury.

And I do say “healing era girlies” because the trend does seem to apply to women more than men. Perhaps it’s because men internalize their trauma and don’t feel safe expressing themselves. We (women in general) have a tendency to diminish a man’s worth when they show signs of anything that can be construed as weakness. It’s not fair, and we shouldn’t do that, and I personally go out of my way NOT to, but there it is. This is why we hear about women’s emotional work so much more than men’s. It’s also why women’s trauma turns into art, where men’s trauma tends to turn into violence when left unchecked, but I’m no psychologist so that’s a deeper conversation for another time and a more qualified person.

I’m just here to explore why the “healing era/journey” trend gives me reservations, and I think I’ve narrowed it down to this: I don’t want to see a generation of girls that came after me setting themselves up for unrealistic expectations of an arbitrary “done date” on becoming who they want to be, while distancing themselves from the experiences that shaped who they are. That feels like a performative form of avoidance rather than a productive strategy for living a better life. The hunger experiences I’ve laid out on this page encompass such a few tiny moments in my otherwise very big 46 years, so while I understand their impact, I have grown in so many ways to appreciate the other much bigger experiences in my life that also shaped me. It’s growth. It’s evolution. It’s ok to set out a plate of cookies for guests while also planning to send them home with the guest so I’m not tempted to binge them later.

I’m not healed. I probably never will be. But I am smarter about how I navigate my history and the way it impacts my daily life. I recognize the patterns of behavior that stemmed from negative experience, but I appreciate the ways they have evolved into positive moments that reaffirm I have separated my current life from that which left me so broken before. And food is just one of the many signs of safety and security that I have now in my 40’s that I am grateful for.

If I could go back and tell myself when those injuries would stop hurting, I would be honest and say they never stop. They just get overshadowed over time. The injuries or trauma or things we want to heal from are each a tiny black grain of sand in a very big hourglass that measures all the experiences we have in our lifetimes. The longer we live and the more brightly-colored moments we share with others just drown out the sight of that black grain. It doesn’t ever disappear, it just gets lost in there until something shuffles it to the surface. Accept its existence but don’t use it to measure your whole life by, or as an excuse to isolate yourself while you try to evict that grain. It’s a futile effort.

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Drinking: Lynchburg Lemonade… a little sweet with my sour.

Listening To: Whirlwind by Lainey Wilson