There is a strange thing that can happen when you spend years trying to heal.
You begin with, Why does this hurt?
Then: Where did this come from? What are my triggers? What are my boundaries? What does my nervous system need?
These are good questions. Necessary questions, sometimes.
But eventually, your entire life can become a committee meeting about yourself.
I know because I have sat at that table.
I have spent years examining my childhood, my wounds, my reactions, my fears, my relationships, my body, my nervous system. And much of that work was necessary.
But eventually I had to ask a rather uncomfortable question:
What if I have become too interested in myself?
What if healing has become another way of staring at the wound?
There is a subtle narcissism hiding in modern healing culture. Not the loud kind. The wounded kind.
The kind that turns every discomfort into a trigger, every difficult person into a boundary violation, and every sacrifice into an act of self-betrayal.
But Christianity keeps pulling my attention outward.
Toward God.
Toward my husband.
Toward my children.
Toward forgiveness.
Toward responsibility.
Toward service.
Toward the deeply inconvenient command to die to myself.
I still believe wounds need tending. Boundaries matter. Patterns need breaking.
But eventually I have to stop asking, “How do I feel?”
And ask:
“What is the loving thing to do?”
Because I don’t want to spend the rest of my life recovering from my life.
I want to live it.
Maybe healing isn’t becoming endlessly comfortable inside yourself.
Maybe it is becoming free enough to leave yourself behind occasionally.
Free enough to notice someone else’s suffering.
Free enough to endure discomfort without immediately making it a diagnosis.
Free enough to stop asking what the world owes you.
Free enough to become useful again.
B🤍
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