"Your healing is not behind. It is happening at the exact pace your nervous system believes is safe enough not to break you."
Do you ever feel like you should be further along in your healing by now, as if there is a timeline you are secretly failing?
Healing is one of the easiest things to compare and one of the worst things to measure with comparison. You see other people posting about cutting ties overnight, forgiving completely, or transforming their life in a year, and a quiet fear creeps in. Why am I still triggered by this? Why is this taking me so long? It is easy to decide that your pace means you are doing healing wrong. In reality, your nervous system is moving at the exact speed it believes you can handle without breaking.
Your nervous system is not interested in impressing anyone. Its first job is survival, not aesthetics. If your body learned that certain conversations, places, or emotions were once dangerous, it will not let you rush through them just because your mind is impatient. The shutdowns, the freeze responses, the exhaustion after a hard therapy session are not signs of failure. They are signs that your system is carefully testing how much it can safely process at a time.
When you push yourself to heal faster than your body is ready for, you do not actually move quicker. You overwhelm yourself, then spiral back into old coping mechanisms. You binge content, stack tools, and then feel worse when none of it seems to “stick.” The problem is not that you are broken. It is that you are trying to heal at the pace of someone who did not live your life, endure your history, or carry your particular nervous system.
Real progress often looks like tiny shifts that are easy to miss if you are only scanning for dramatic change. You calm down five minutes sooner after a trigger than you used to. You speak up once where you would have stayed silent. You take a break before you completely shut down. These are not small. They are proof that your system is slowly learning it is a little safer than it used to be.
You are allowed to honor your pace. You are allowed to take breaks from the work without deciding you have gone backwards. You are allowed to say, “This is as much as I can open right now,” and trust that your timing is not ruining your life. Your healing is not a race with a medal at the end. It is a long conversation between your past and your body about what finally feels safe enough to release.
