It’s ok if you’re not ready to heal.
It’s ok if you’re not ready as long as you know why.
I understand that this can be a touchy subject so I want you to bear with me for a second. There are some very valid reasons why you’re not ready and you may not even realize it.
The first is that no one ever explained this to you. If you don’t know, you can’t heal from it.
The second is that you honestly don’t want to break down the why.
This is where it gets tricky and where we as humans tend to get defensive. Once you know why you’re avoiding healing, that gets rid of your excuses and forces you to make a decision to move forward on your healing journey or not.
This is something so important to understand.
How do you find out if you’re not ready to heal?
If you read posts like this you feel a lot of resistance towards what I’m saying you need to dig deep and figure out why.
The first thing is probably because you have not allowed yourself to grieve your past. When you don’t allow yourself to grieve you’re holding yourself back.
I didn’t understand that not only was I allowed to grieve, but that grieving was an essential part of the recovery process.
You stay in abusive relationships because of those honeymoon moments.
The moments where they tell you that they care about you, that they love you. Those moments that pull you in and make you want to stay.
So first, I want you to realize that you’re not broken. I want you to grieve your past. Your brain wants you to grieve your past. It isn’t comfortable or fun, but so important.
When I go out of my relationship with my ex there’s a lot that I lost. It was good that it ended, but I didn’t just lose my husband. I didn’t just lose my partner, I lost my dreams of my future.
We were in the process of adopting two kids. And I had to grieve the loss that I was never going to meet them because I was a single mom now. And the country didn’t allow single parents to adopt.
So I lost the two kids that my son and I had grown close to and gotten attached to.
I had to grieve over dreams for our future together.
I had to grieve the fact that the man that I was looking at was not the man that I married nor the man that I wanted him to be. Processing all of that was really difficult.
It sucks. But grieving is an essential part of the recovery process. It is required. If you want to heal, you have to allow yourself to grieve. So often we allow our ego to hold us back from that grieving process.
You think that because it wasn’t healthy, you don’t have a right to grieve the relationship. You deserve better so it needs to just be over. But the fact of the matter is, is when you do that, when you stuff your feelings, it’s like getting a coke bottle, dropping a Mentos in it and putting the lid on.
It’ll hold for a second. It may hold for two seconds. But at some point, it’s going to explode.
Whether it is in an hour, a week, a month, or 10 years from now, eventually it’s going to explode. So please save yourself the time, anger, all of the unnecessary discomfort.
Allow yourself to grieve.
When I grieved, I’ll be honest. It was probably two weeks of me being a mess. I was not a great mom at that time. I was not a great daughter, sister, friend, or even a good person to myself.
But think of it this way: two weeks compared to a year, 10 years, a lifetime. If you allow you allow yourself to just grieve now, you’ll find yourself in a much better place in the near future.
So often the walls around us are ones that we built ourselves.
I had a major trigger last week.
When I was scrolling through TikTok, I saw a video that brought up some emotions. And what happened when that trigger hit is I began having what I thought were exaggerations of my own worst fear.
But really after processing it, I was having flashbacks of something that I had been through that my brain hadn’t been ready for in the past.
When you allow yourself to work through this, your brain will put out things when you’re ready. I wouldn’t have been able to handle that flashback a year ago.
When you allow yourself to work through and grieve, your brain will help you along the way.
Your brain builds up these walls because it knows you’re not ready yet.
Thank your brain for protecting you. Thank you brain for doing what it needed to do to keep you safe. But then allow yourself to grieve through it.
You are allowed to miss your abuser. You are allowed to look back and miss moments with them. That’s okay. Full permission. Feel what you’re going to feel, there’s nothing wrong with that. What’s not okay is going back.
Just because you miss them in this moment doesn’t mean you’re gonna go back. So allow yourself to feel into the process, allow yourself to grieve.
Grieve the death of a future that you thought you were going to have.
Grieve the death of the man you thought he was, the death of the hope that it was gonna work itself out.
Really grieve those things. Cry, get angry, punch a pillow, get a therapist, go to a boxing class.
Allow yourself to grieve.
Why else would someone not want to heal?
You probably haven’t acknowledged the fear that you’re experiencing at the thought of healing.
It’s a completely different life.
It’s okay to be scared of healing.
When you first look at the pool, you’re scared of the water. But you’re never going to learn how to swim until you finally go out to the deep end.
Think about when you learned how to walk. Can you imagine being a baby trying to get your legs to work? Can you imagine how terrifying to be the big, fat baby and you’re trying to walk?! Going from laying on your belly to laying on your back and all of the sudden you’re standing up and looking down. And you’re seeing these little sticks holding your chubby self up. It’s scary, but you did it.
Fear is completely normal.
Fear is what’s keeping you from walking out into the freeway during rush hour. When fear is holding you back from living the life of freedom that you deserve, it becomes a problem. That’s when you have to look fear in the face.
Tell your brain “thank you so much for keeping me safe, but it’s time to experience freedom.”
It’s time to experience recovery and finally let go of the chains that are holding you back. So you can step forward into the life that you deserve.
Recovery sucks, I know.
I’m not here to tell you it’s easy or that it’s a “do it once and in two weeks you’re done” type of thing.
But what’s on the other side of it? Freedom, opportunity, respect, love, understanding, trust. It’s finally being able to do that thing that’s on your heart.
If you are at that point where you’re scared girl, I feel you. It is okay to be scared. The reason I stayed as long as I did with my ex was because I was absolutely terrified of what it meant to be a single mom.
Life made the decision for me; my ex gave me the best gift he’s ever given me which was my freedom. And the moment I got that my entire world changed. Guess what? I’m a single mom. And now I’m a business owner. I’m out here helping other women change their damn life.
I didn’t think I could do it and yet here I am.
You can do recovery. You are strong enough to make this happen. But you have to go after it. You have to decide, are you going to live in fear or are you going to live in freedom?
It is really fucking hard to live in fear. And it is really fucking hard to live in freedom. Choose your hard, it’s up to you. I can’t make the decision for you.
But you can make that decision for yourself.
It is okay to be scared. It is okay to not be ready. But it is not okay to sit in your suck and sit in your victimhood if that’s not what you want. If you want to sit there and be the victim, that’s fine.
But if you want more, why are you wasting it? You are too amazing to sit there and let the people that hurt you continue to run your life.
I understand the fear. I know the feeling. But I also know that the healing and freedom on the other side of fear is completely worth it.
If you’re ready for the next step, then I encourage you to grab my FREE Confidence Course. It’s a five day crash course that covers the exact framework I give my clients. These skills will give you a solid foundation to begin your recovery journey. Click here to grab your spot!
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