You Don't Heal By Getting Over It

The pain won't get smaller, but your life can get bigger

My daughter was five weeks old when I had a panic attack in a hospital room. She had developed a high fever, and we’d ended up back in the same hospital where she was born. While the nurses tried to get her pulse, the machine kept malfunctioning, beeping the exact tone I’d heard during my emergency C-section weeks earlier. My body recognized the sound before my brain caught up.

That panic attack is what sent me to therapy. I had a difficult birth, and my daughter went straight to the NICU. I knew it had taken a toll on me, but I’d been telling myself I was fine until that day when my body told me I wasn’t. Even as a therapist myself, I had trouble accepting what had happened and getting help.

You may not relate to my story, but most of us are walking around with some version of this. Maybe it’s a divorce, a death, or a relationship that ended badly. The specifics differ but the shape is similar. Something happened, and now part of you is stuck in the room where it happened.

What we want is for the pain to be gone. We don’t want to manage it, live with it, or accept it. So we go looking for the thing that will fix it or at least make it smaller. And when nothing does, we start to wonder if we’re broken.

After a painful event, it’s natural to contract. It’s as if you have an open wound — of course you want to protect it and make sure it won’t get irritated or infected. But over time, a temporary lockdown can become permanent, and one day you realize you’ve been turning down invitations for months and haven’t been to a certain part of town in a year. The pain stayed the same size while everything else got smaller.

We can’t go back to who we were before. When something life-altering happens, we get split in two — before and after — and there’s no version of you that doesn’t carry it. The only direction is forward, into a different life from the one you would have had.

Researchers call this post-traumatic growth, and what they’ve found is that people who survive the hardest events of their lives don’t describe getting back to normal. Instead, they describe building something different. Closer relationships. A clearer sense of what matters. A life that, in some ways, is more honest than the one they had before. Nobody is grateful for what happened to them. But sometimes pain forces your life to fall apart so completely that the only option is to rebuild it from scratch and decide what’s worth keeping.

So how do you do this? You expand your life slowly, in pieces small enough that you don’t shut down. In therapy, we call these corrective experiences. You’re not trying to overwhelm your system. You’re giving it one small, manageable piece of information at a time, and the opportunity to respond differently. Mine started with the hospital where I gave birth. For a year, I’d avoided that whole part of the city. Then I started driving past it on purpose, again and again, until the sight of the building felt completely mundane. Everyone’s version will look different. If you’ve lost someone, it might be looking at a photo you’ve kept face-down in a drawer. If you were fired from a job, it might be texting an old coworker just to say something small.

Three years later, I can drive by the hospital without thinking much about it. My daughter was born at 8:07 in the evening. I wasn’t awake for it. So every year on her birthday, at exactly 8:07 p.m., I hold her. I know it won’t last forever. I can already hear the teenage version of her saying “Mom, stop!” as she’s trying to head out to a party. The pain of missing that moment still lingers. But my life has gotten big enough that I can hold both the pain of missing that moment and the joy of being with her now.