Have you heard the phrase “healing isn’t linear”?
If you’ve seen any mental health art floating around on Instagram or Pinterest, chances are, you have! But while it makes a lovely little sound byte or short affirmation, to actually get comfort from it requires a bit of work in understanding what it means, and practice in offering yourself compassion.
So, healing isn’t linear. What does that mean?
Most obviously: your healing isn’t going to happen in a straight line.
There isn’t a step by step path for you to take to get to go from “unhealed” to “healed.” Your healing will be ongoing throughout your whole life, as you handle and overcome new hurts and obstacles. Sometimes it will feel as though you’re back at the beginning of your journey, even if you’ve been actively caring for yourself for years.
There also isn’t a step by step path to healing in the sense that what you need for your healing will look different than what someone else needs. Often, we get caught up comparing our journeys to someone else’s, feeling as though we’re doing something wrong if our paths don’t match up exactly. But the truth is our healing needs are as varied as we are. What helps you might not help someone else and vice versa. Don’t feel as though your path is leading you astray just because it looks different than someone else’s!
It also means that you might “fall back” a step.
Maybe you’ve been turning to healthy coping skills for a long time, breaking old self destructive patterns and sticking with new healthy ones. But then, a lot of obstacles or challenges come at once, and things just get too overwhelming for you to be able to manage the space you need to cope calmly and with your new healthy tools, so you turn back to familiar, unhealthy patterns.
There’s this idea that this sort of recurrence of unhealthy habits sets the clock back to zero. Now instead of valuing all of that progress you made before this instance, you might feel as though you’re back to square one. But that just isn’t true! All of those instances of choosing healthy coping mechanisms or behaviors aren’t erased by one instance of turning to old familiar patterns. You still have the ability to do that again–you were just in an environment where you didn’t have enough support to manage things in a healthy way. Give yourself some compassion, and remind yourself of the many other times you’ve turned to newer, healthier ways of dealing with things.
It means healing isn’t a task, it’s a practice:
We hang on to patterns and habits that don’t suit us for so long time because at one point in our life, they served a very important purpose, and they usually kept us safe in some way. So, while our lives have shifted now and what once protected us now actually harms us, it’s still instinctual in some ways for us to see those patterns or habits as necessary for our survival. So, even when we learn healthier ways, that doesn’t mean we’re instantly and seamlessly able to incorporate those healthier patterns into our lives. It’s not once and done, it’s an ongoing practice you have to choose.
