In Healing There Are No Villains
Changing How You View Your Recovery
In story writing there almost always has to be a villain labeled the antagonist. The hero of the story is the one we can’t help but to always root for, they are the protagonist. They’re the ones who are set up to face challenging times but also they’re built to overcome them. The antagonist, well, their job in any story is to oppose our hero and fight against what the hero desires.
I absolutely love storytelling because it appeals to our humanity and it uncovers what it is that we really want, by the way we root for our heroes in their story, to win. But who really ever truly roots for the villains, the antagonists, the ones who get in the way of what our heroes want and keep them from reaching their innermost deepest desires? No one roots for them really because they were written to be the “bad guys” they were structurally designed to bring the adversity in the story.
In real life, we may not be on a story-like conquest to retrieve a special ring and we may not be warding off a villain like Thanos but we for damn sure are characters in our own stories where we face our own adversities, inner conflict, and pain. Some of the pains we’ve faced have hurt us deeply, caused us trauma even. For some of you reading this, the pain that you may have endured because of the past left wounds so deep that it has affected the way you love others or even how you receive love.
Healing is possible for you but you have to make the decision to not only want it but to accept the fact that change will happen after you’ve began the journey to it. Healing is messy. It is painful. It is bloody. Most, importantly, healing is costly. Being restored means purging the very way of thinking that you’re used to. Healing means shedding and taking off what it is that you’re used to wearing. It means surgery on the most cancerous parts of your personality. It means cutting open the paralyzed parts of who you are to reveal what you didn’t know was hidden in you all along.
You wanna know how all of that happens? It happens by going through some of the most heartbreaking, treacherous, emotionally enduring obstacles of your life sent to uncover the best of who you are and burn away the worst that didn’t serve your life’s purpose. It will be a series of what seem like unfortunate events.
For any story though, healing happens just after the turning point where you are forced to face the new normal after what was a series of the most unfortunate events.
We’re forced to navigate through the things that have the potential to kill us but they’re not allowed to because we have growth to achieve and we got places to be with destinies to fulfill. Our lives were built to build us.
We discover ourselves in some of the most unfortunate circumstances where it forces us to look forward to what we want and it brings us face to face to purge the past. Characters in stories are almost always faced with a hard decision that they will have to make that’ll cause a change in who they are and who they become, forever. Their world now becomes different. We are the same, not much different. Art imitates life really.
I want to advise you that real heroes need to heal. With all of the wounds you’ve gained from living out your own life’s story, it’s very easy to try to save everyone else while you bleed.
Now let us discuss the ones who hurt you. The people you see as villains. I have to ask, if you call people villains, then are you truly healing and being restored?
When it comes to true healing, your sight begins to change as well as your desires. You don’t set out on trying to make the world pay and you no longer seek the revenge on those who hurt you. No, your focus shifts for the better where you actually begin to transform into the hero that you were always meant to be. You now become focused on moving forward and you set your sights on how you can personally change the world. When that becomes your desire, then you begin to set out on how to become better emotionally, mentally, and spiritually to help you have a better chance of carrying out that mission.
When you’re healing, you no longer see people as villains. You somewhere along the way begin to learn that “villains” are broken people with broken hearts and unhealed pain and trauma. For them, there is no other way that they see the world than through their broken lenses and their broken perception. Healing, true healing, teaches you to have an understanding of the human condition. You begin to understand that you won’t allow yourself to become a doormat but you are willing to see the brokenness in people and not hold it against them or even yourself. You begin to understand that they are suffering in their own story, facing their own adversities.
What separates you from them is that they haven’t yet made the choice to go a different path. Maybe they don’t yet know that it’s possible that they can or they may not see their choices as wrong because of how they perceive the world around them. Remember everyone has the potential to be a villain in someone's story, including you. Maybe you once were.
But in the grace of healing, forgiveness and grace stewards the way we see people, they are not our villains, they are broken people, who out of brokenness, hurt you. Forgive them. Forgiveness keeps your story going, your healing continued. Also, you may need it someday.
Heroes save remember?
In this story, your story, you are the hero that we’re rooting for.
Heal.
The world is counting on it.
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