Resuming My Journey Within
- ckraley
- Feb 6, 2023
- 5 min read
“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.” -Natalie Goldberg
“Stop picking at that scab” is something many of us heard growing up.
We are taught from an early age not to pick at cuts or scrapes. Parents would catch us peeling off a scab and tell us to stop doing that so that the cut or scrape could heal. Doctors would tell us, after bandaging us up, or finishing up with stitches, to leave the wound alone so the body could work its magic and heal properly. Give it time, and you’ll be as good as new.
As we age, we lose that urge to pick at scabs or cuts. We realize that our parents and the doctors were right, that we need to leave physical wounds alone so they can heal. We often learned it the hard way, too: peeling a scab off so often that the cut or scrape seems to be in a perpetual state of unhealing. The wound remained raw because we didn’t let the body heal itself.
Leave it alone, give it time, and you’ll be as good as new.
How our bodies heal from physical injury shows that the human body is an incredibly complex machine.
Leave it alone, give it time, and you’ll be as good as new.
Unfortunately, many of us apply those lessons to our emotional wounds throughout our lives. After enduring trauma, we work hard to put it behind us as quickly as possible. We put it somewhere deep inside of us. Somewhere where we’ll leave it alone and let time heal it.
Leave it alone, give it time, and you’ll be as good as new.
I’ve learned the hard way that we can’t treat our invisible internal wounds like the cuts and scrapes we suffered as kids. We can’t just leave them alone and rely on time to heal them. We do need to give them time so we can have the perspective to process them properly, but in the case of our traumas – time does not heal all wounds.
Pushing traumas down deep within us doesn’t heal us or the pain that caused it. Scar tissue develops, but more from neglect than any healing. Depending on how long you’ve buried it, countless layers of scar tissue may have built over it. Maybe even to a point where you pushed any feelings about it under all that scar tissue, where the pain has dulled or faded away. We often confuse the numbness of that with being healed.
Those invisible wounds need to be purposefully probed (preferably with professional help) or essentially picked at to get down to the original injury so that it can be explored and start the actual healing process. If they are under years and years of scar tissue, that scar tissue needs to be peeled back layer by layer until the original wound is uncovered. Once that original wound is found, we need to go into that wound to experience the event that caused it in the first place so that we can try to heal from it. We need to let ourselves feel the feelings we buried.
I started this blog to talk about my journey of healing from the internal wounds of my past. Over the past five years, I have learned the immense value of digging deep and probing old traumas. I have felt firsthand what it feels like to finally truly heal from those traumas that had been buried for so long – healing that I never thought possible. I wrote hoping that people would see themselves in my story. I wanted people to see that no matter how long ago your trauma happened or how far you’ve buried it down within you, you can still heal from it.
I wrote about some of the darkest days in my life, but in many ways, my story was just getting started. Writing about the car accident and the days after in the hospital took more out of me than I expected. I had worked through all that in therapy long before I wrote about it, but writing about it somehow was more of an emotional drain, so I took a short break from writing in the fall of 2021. I took a break from peeling back the scar tissue.
No matter how much healing I have accomplished by peeling back layers of scar tissue and digging into old internal wounds, my mind often pleads to stop looking into those old wounds. I have found over the years that my body reacts to probing past wounds, much like it would an external injury. I have a defense mechanism that kicks in and diverts me from exploring those wounds within me. That mechanism almost tricks my mind into thinking of those internal wounds like the external ones, where we must leave the wound alone to let it heal. It is trying to protect itself from the pain of reliving those old wounds. It buried them for a reason and wants them to remain buried.
That is where I have been for the most part since I last shared a blog post back in the fall of 2021. Once I started listening to the thoughts, my defense mechanism was feeding me – it was a losing battle. I had already written most of my next blog post, but something inside me told me to relax and stop exploring the dark parts of my past. It told me that I had earned a break. Unfortunately, I bought into it. I put it off for a week, which turned into months, and eventually over a year.
I would often think about writing and maybe even put a few lines to paper, but my mind would pull me away from going back within myself.
I started writing to try to help others and became frustrated with myself for stopping. I grappled with the realization that I can’t be an effective advocate for taking care of your mental health and the value of healing from trauma if I give up when it gets a little tough.
Ultimately, the voices within me led me to start writing again. As I’ve dug through the scar tissue of various wounds of my past, I have found that there are parts of myself buried under that scar tissue. Parts of myself that I had shoved down and let be buried by the scars. Parts of myself that haven’t seen the light of day for so long. Parts that I have had to reacquaint myself with. Parts that had been hidden so long and forgotten that I’ve had to work on building a relationship with them and earning their trust.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be reposting my blog from the beginning as a recap before I pick up the story where I left off with a new post – resuming my journey within.
There are parts of me still buried & hidden. I owe it to them to share their story.
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