The One Subtle Behavior That Reveals You’ve Finally Healed, According To A Therapist
Healing is not about living a life completely free of pain.
Pressmaster | Shutterstock When we are trying to heal from something, we often seek out quick fixes to shift our minds away from our pain. Whether we take up a new hobby or opt for more destructive distractions, constantly trying to find ways to conceal our feelings only hinders the healing process.
Therapist Raquel Hopkins, known online as @raquel_capacity_expert, revealed a counterintuitive behavior that signifies that you have truly healed — and it does not involve starting a brand new life free of any struggle or pain. In fact, it is quite the opposite.
According to the therapist, you have finally healed when you 'stop trying to heal yourself from being human.'
"Healing isn't about creating a perfect life where nothing ever disturbs your peace," Hopkins explained in a recent TikTok. "It's about realizing that everything that disrupts your peace is not here to break you. Sometimes it's here to grow you."
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"You'll know you're healed when you no longer need to understand the past in order to move forward. You stop replaying old wounds, looking for closure that may never come," she continued. "Instead, you make peace with what was, and you start to focus on who you're becoming."
She insisted that healing is all about becoming stronger.
Healing isn’t about becoming free from sadness, struggle, and pain. It is about accepting the fact that these feelings are inevitable and improving your coping skills for when they do happen.
"You don't heal so that life stops being hard," Hopkins added in the caption of her video. "You heal so that the hard things don't shrink you."
When you have healed, struggle no longer feels like failure — you recognize that it is just a part of life that everyone experinces. "Healing isn't about building this life that never challenges you," Hopkins said. "It's about building the capacity to handle life without constantly needing to retreat and or recover from it."
Emotional healing is a difficult and ongoing process.
Hopkins further noted that if you must cut people off to find peace, need life to be easy in order to function, or are constantly avoiding discomfort, you have not healed. While it may be tempting to seek a life free of pain and struggle, that is neither realistic nor is it true healing.
"Emotional healing is the process of acknowledging, allowing, accepting, integrating, and processing painful life experiences and strong emotions," Marriage and Family Therapist Theodora Blanchfield explained. "Many people have a tendency to want to control the process of emotional healing by minimizing the pain and controlling their emotions. However, this can actually inhibit the process of emotional healing."
It should be noted that healing is not linear. You could feel on top of the world one day and completely defeated the next. Again, that does not mean you have failed — it means you are human. True healing is about embracing life’s painful struggles and learning to navigate through them with resilience and compassion.
Megan Quinn is a staff writer with a bachelor's degree in English and a minor in Creative Writing. She covers news and lifestyle topics that focus on justice in the workplace, personal relationships, parenting debates, and the human experience.