Gentle healing… what does it look like?
Gentle healing… what does it look like?Years ago, when I first committed to healing my childhood trauma, I came at it like a warrior. I wanted to hunt down every memory and destroy it. One weekend, I stayed with a cousin. We shared some of the same childhood traumas and each had others that were different. I pushed us to keep talking about it all—over and over. For me, it felt cathartic at the time. For her, it felt re-traumatizing. We both went back to our therapists. Mine told me it was okay for me, because I was finding meaning in those memories. But for my cousin, it wasn’t what she needed. She had already laid some things to rest. She was living in joy. My intensity pulled her into pain she wasn’t ready (or willing) to revisit. She stopped talking to me for almost a year. Back then, I thought she was “avoiding her healing.” Now I see: she was healing gently. She was only touching what felt ripe. The rest could wait. That memory came full circle for me years later, when I attended a group session called Adult Children of Narcissistic Mothers. The facilitator pushed me to recount moment after moment with my mother, trying to prove she was narcissistic. It was retraumatizing, not healing. And it was designed to hook people into a program. But I didn’t need that. I already knew my mother fit the criteria. What I needed was safety, pacing, and respect for what my body could hold in that moment. That experience was the last push I needed to commit to building a gentler way. Gentle healing doesn’t force. It doesn’t retraumatize. It honors the body’s timing. That’s what I’ll be teaching in Heal the Ripe Trauma, August 25–29 at 5PM EST. Because true healing isn’t about digging—it’s about listening
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