tracing pains through therapy
Four years of therapy, and I still find myself searching for a finish line that doesn’t exist. I thought healing would be like solving a puzzle, like finding the missing piece that would make everything whole again. But healing is not a solution — it is an excavation, a process of digging through the rubble of yourself, of sifting through what’s worth keeping and what needs to be left behind. And sometimes, even when you think you’ve cleared the wreckage, you find yourself stepping on shards of glass you missed, cutting yourself open in places you thought had already healed.
My therapist once asked me, “When did you first start believing that pain was something you had to carry alone?” And I didn’t know how to answer. I sat there, trying to pinpoint the moment, but it wasn’t just one — it was a series of small, quiet abandonments. The times I needed comfort but was met with silence. The times I cried and was told to stop making a scene. The times I was left behind and convinced myself it was normal, that I was just easier to leave than to stay for. Pain was never a wound I could show; it was something I learned to tuck away, to endure quietly. But therapy has a way of dragging these things into the light, of making you name what you spent years pretending didn’t exist.
My therapist chose to do Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, a method where you lay out the timeline of your life, tracing the patterns between who you were and who you’ve become, drawing invisible lines from childhood wounds to present-day fears. At first, I resisted. I didn’t want to believe that so much of my pain was built on thoughts I could challenge. But my therapist would ask, “Is that thought serving you?” and suddenly, something that felt like an unshakable truth crumbled into something I could question. Still, questioning doesn’t mean it disappears. It just means I now see the cracks. Some days, that realization is freeing — like I have control over my own suffering. Other days, it’s exhausting. Because control means responsibility, and responsibility means I can’t just blame the past for everything anymore.
Therapy makes you track your thoughts like a scientist cataloging evidence. What happened? What did you think? How did it make you feel? It sounds simple until you realize how much of your pain is muscle memory, how quickly your mind fills in the blanks with stories you’ve been telling yourself for years. I used to think people left me because I wasn’t enough. But when I traced that belief back, I found it rooted in moments I had barely even registered at the time. A childhood misunderstanding. A rejection that wasn’t even about me. A pattern of avoidance that I didn’t know I had been repeating. The past doesn’t just haunt you — it programs you. And healing is the slow, deliberate process of rewriting that code.
Healing is strange. It doesn’t erase the past; it just changes the way you hold it. It doesn’t take the pain away; it just teaches you how to carry it differently. And even then, healing is not linear. Some days, I feel like I’ve moved forward. Other days, I feel like I’m right back where I started, as if every step forward was just an illusion. But maybe that’s part of it. Maybe healing is not about reaching a place where you never hurt again, but about learning to exist with the scars.
Because in the end, therapy doesn’t give you back the person you were before the pain. It gives you the tools to rebuild yourself into someone new. And maybe that’s what healing really is — not a return to who I used to be, but an acceptance of who I am becoming.
