How Do We Heal?

It was one of my recent restless nights. I woke up and tried to get back to sleep to no prevail. The anxiety was overwhelming. Breathing didn’t help, my heart was still pounding in my chest like it was ready to finish a race. After about an hour I decided to get up and sneak down to my computer.

Sometimes when I wake up like this I can identify a specific issue that is hanging over me. Sometimes it helps me to research possible solutions, to read the thoughts of others who’ve been through similar things. My nightly search history is probably very scary to anyone invested in my mental health.

That night, I couldn’t identify a single issue that was bothering me. It was one of those nights that the simple answer to what’s bothering you would have been either I don’t know or everything. It felt like a heavy weight on my shoulders, a potent darkness pulsing through my body instead of blood.

I pulled a blanket over me and typed into the browser:

How do you heal?

A general question. A simple question. And yet, many hours of browsing the depths of the internet later, I know that it’s an impossible question. It’s 2021. But we don’t have an answer.

Of course, there were some popular contenders.

Many people said time.

Others said Religion, God, or Spirituality.

And yet others broke their healing down into habits. Meditation. Better sleep (hah!), diet, even seeing friends more (or less).

But while I kept scrolling through hundreds of answers, what stood out to me was the general uncertainty. There is no one size fits all answer. Is there even a one size fits anyone at all answer? Maybe not.

It’s obvious that time plays a part in our healing process. But it doesn’t truly do the healing. It just benefits the process of forgetting.

Is forgetting healing?

If it were, I don’t think so many people would be struggling with early childhood trauma or trauma of any kind.

Time plays a fundamental part in our survival and our striving forward as humans. When I go to the dentist to have a root canal it’s absolutely horrible. While I’m sitting in the chair I vow to myself to never see a dentist again. But a mere days later most of the pain is forgotten and I’m ready to go to my follow-up appointment. Yes, part of that is just about being an adult and pushing through but the other part is that just a few days have significantly reduced the amount of pain I actually remember.

Healing from mental and emotional trauma works just like that. I was reminded of this when my dog suddenly died this summer. I cried less as the days went by and eventually, the heavy pain I felt in my chest subsided. But did I heal? I’m not sure. Every time I do think about her, I feel all of that pain just as on day one.

So what about the second popular answer, healing with the help of God, Religion, or Spirituality? I can somewhat relate. I also looked for answers in Spirituality and even Philosophy to help me cope. I almost have an easier time believing in the power of spiritual or philosophical practice when it comes to healing than time. And the sole reason for that is that just believing something works is such a driving force. It bundles our energy in a way that can achieve incredible things.

Believing is like throwing a blanket over reality.

You don’t have to look at the mess if your blanket is thick enough. For atheists like me, that blanket is more like a quilt made up of smaller things I’ve chosen to give power: meditation, yoga, growing things, painting, writing, reading poetry, Stoicism, and to some degree, Buddhist practice.

Lastly, changing our habits or adopting more healthy habits can improve the way we feel overall and, of course, research has proven that certain behaviors can make a dramatic impact on our well-being (there’s a reason cognitive behavioral therapy is popular!). I do believe that to some degree, replacing bad habits with good habits can benefit healing but I look at it more as healing the tissue around the gunshot wound. The stronger the tissue gets, the less significant the wound. Can it heal the actual wound? I’m doubtful.

So how do we heal?

At the end of my sleepless night spent reading about healing, I closed my laptop with a conclusion that works for me.

We don’t know.

We don’t even know if we can.

But our need to heal, to find something to help us heal, is a great example of the power of human conscience, of our drive, of our willingness to solve problems and do better.

That in itself for me is an incredibly comforting thought.

I hope you find some comfort in it too. Because one thing is for sure: we all need healing. No matter how alone you may feel, billions of people are walking the same path as you.

Art in the Waiting Room is the place where I put all the writing that happens while I’m busy writing other things. Here you’ll find essays on topics that burn through my chest, poetry, short stories that I’m too lazy to have edited or submit anywhere, as well as chapters of my many novels — upcoming and never coming alike.

Nicole Alexandra Michaelis is a writer currently based in Stockholm, Sweden.