Real & Raw: Week 3 - Survival Isn't Healing

Raw & Real: Week 3 of the 10-Week Series

There’s this shiny, feel-good lie that gets passed around like it’s wisdom: “If you survived it, you must be fine now.” Like crawling out of the wreckage means you’re ready to start a TED Talk. Like survival itself is the end of the story.

It’s not. It’s the beginning.

Survival is the bare minimum.

It’s the base of the mountain, not the summit.

It’s the moment you exhale after holding your breath for years—only to realize you still don’t feel safe.

Survival is making it out of the burning house with your body intact but the smoke still lodged in your lungs, and no one tells you what to do with the ashes.

Survival is the scar. Healing is learning how to live with it.

Let’s be real—getting through something traumatic doesn’t mean you’re healed. It doesn’t mean you’ve “moved on.” It means you didn’t die. 

That’s it.

You endured.

You coped.

You adapted.

You shoved pain into the corners of your life so you could function without falling apart in the grocery store.

You compartmentalized.

You buried.

You swallowed things whole because that’s what was required to keep going.

But survival doesn’t transform the pain.

It just puts it in a different room.

And when you finally sit still long enough—when life slows down or someone says something in a certain tone, or a smell hits your nose just right—that pain barges back in, demanding to be witnessed. And suddenly you’re no longer a survivor—you’re a living archive of things no one wants to talk about.

Because here’s the part no one wants to hear: Healing is ugly.

It’s raw.

It’s violent in its unraveling.

It’s panic attacks in Target. It’s dissociation during a movie. It’s bursting into tears because someone used the same phrase your abuser used.

It’s recognizing you’ve recreated patterns you swore you escaped because trauma doesn’t just haunt—it shapes.

Healing isn’t soft.

It isn’t soothing music and scented candles and yoga poses at dawn.

It’s clawing your way back into your body after years of disconnection.

It’s undoing damage you didn’t cause, in a world that wants you to smile through it and stay “grateful you survived.”

And let’s talk about that myth, too—this obsession with gratitude.

The world wants you to be thankful for surviving.

It wants you to spin your pain into purpose, to be inspiring, to rise from the ashes with some catchy slogan about strength.

But some days?

I’m not grateful.

I’m pissed.

I’m tired.

I’m still bleeding.

Gratitude can come later—if it comes at all.

Because healing isn’t linear. It doesn’t arrive wrapped in meaning. It arrives in pieces. It shows up in breakdowns, in boundary-setting, in rage, in grief, in absolute stillness.

I didn’t crawl out of trauma whole. I came out in fragments.

I came out with my nervous system hijacked.

I came out bracing for the worst, even on calm days.

I came out constantly scanning for danger, even in rooms where the door is locked and the lights are soft.

I came out unable to trust joy, love, even rest—because everything good has always come with a catch.

That’s what survival does: it keeps you alive, but it doesn’t teach you how to live.

That’s what healing has to do.

And let me be honest here—healing feels like betrayal sometimes.

Because when you start to feel better, you might start feeling guilty.

You might wonder if you’re allowed to move on.

If you’re dishonoring what happened by no longer drowning in it.

If peace means forgetting—and forgetting feels like disloyalty.

That’s how deep the trauma runs. It makes you question even your recovery.

That’s how cruel survival is. It gets you out, but doesn’t walk you home.

So no, survival isn’t healing.

It’s important. It’s necessary.

But it’s not the end.

It’s the wreckage.

Healing is the painstaking, slow, often lonely work of rebuilding something out of it.

And healing doesn’t always look like progress.

Sometimes healing looks like saying “no” and not explaining why.

Sometimes it’s staying in bed and choosing not to self-destruct.

Sometimes it’s ugly crying. Sometimes it’s numbness. Sometimes it’s just not quitting.

So if you're surviving but not thriving?

If you're still frozen or furious or exhausted?

You're not behind. You're not broken. You’re in the middle.

And the middle is brutal. But it’s also where the real work starts.