Time doesn’t actually heal all… but this might

Have you ever been told that time heals? Or have you ever felt that enough time has passed since an upsetting or traumatic event and thought, "I should be over this by now"? Well, let me be the one to tell you—this is all a load of 💩.

The truth is that trauma fundamentally alters the way your nervous system operates, and your nervous system can’t tell time. It doesn’t care if it's been 15 minutes, 15 days, or 15 years. If a memory is still threatening to your nervous system, it will act accordingly.

This became startlingly obvious to me a few years ago when I experienced one of the worst panic attacks of my life because of something that had happened to me almost 15 years earlier.

When I was a teenager, I got into a long-term relationship that ended up being emotionally abusive and borderline physically abusive. It started off innocently enough, but as time went on, he slowly began to cut me off from my support system—my friends and family. He would tell me all the reasons why they didn’t have my best interests at heart and why he was the only one I could trust. If I ever tried to argue with him, he would quickly gaslight me and turn it into a conversation about all the ways I either misunderstood, was wrong, or how it was my fault. He began to tell me that nobody cared about me like him and that nobody could ever love someone like me other than him. I became so beaten down that it felt impossible to leave. He had made me so dependent on him. I was young, naive, and had low self-esteem to begin with. He knew exactly how to play into every insecurity.

The real problems began when I tried to leave. It started with him making threats towards himself, saying that if I left him, he would harm himself. The threats quickly became directed at me and my family. He broke into my house on several occasions; one time, he advanced on me with his fist raised, only interrupted by my friend's presence and the threat to call the police. In the months that followed, he threw a coffee at me in a coffee shop and made both direct and indirect threats against my life. Needless to say, I was terrified. I ended up filing a version of a restraining order against him, which took almost a year to process but was eventually successful.

In the aftermath, I felt unsafe even in my own home, knowing he had been able to get in before. I refused to even sit in my backyard because, on a corner lot, the backyard was easily accessible and visible from the street. I went to university and had to share pictures with my roommates and school staff in case he decided to find me there.

Despite all this, I didn’t even realize that this was a traumatic experience until many years later. I didn’t recognize my severe lack of trust in the years that followed as being correlated. I didn’t notice my unhealthy attachment and relationship patterns that resulted from that lack of trust. I didn’t notice how unsafe I felt in my own body. After spending years doubting and ignoring my own instincts and being on constant high alert, I became so disconnected from my body and its signals. It's startlingly clear now to reflect on it, but I didn’t see it for what it was then.

Eventually, I went to talk therapy and recognized this situation for what it was. I did many sessions focusing on it. I came to understand how and why it happened, developed some coping strategies, thought I had it handled, and moved on. I entered what might have been the first healthy relationship of my life with my now-husband. I put many years, therapy sessions, and distance between myself and the trauma of this relationship, and thought I had healed and moved past it.

That is, until one day, I saw a post on social media that seemed to link this high school boyfriend to me through a mutual friend. In reality, the connection was unlikely. But to my body, it felt like he was standing outside my house. I had one of the most intense panic attacks of my life. To my nervous system, it didn’t matter that it had been 15 years. It didn’t matter that the likelihood of the connection through a mutual friend was slim, nor did it matter that he wasn’t there, and I hadn’t seen him since that courtroom. It didn’t even matter that I had talked through it and understood how none of what happened was my fault or that I thought I had worked through it. In that moment, to my body and nervous system, he might as well have been standing in front of me, and it reacted accordingly.

This experience is why I believe so strongly in the power of EFT and other somatic-based tools. It's why I am such a proponent of nervous system regulation work. While talk therapy is an incredibly powerful tool, to truly heal from trauma, we must also incorporate the body. There won’t be one tool or one modality to use; instead, we must consider this a well-rounded and holistic approach to healing.

Being triggered in the way I was that day was a blessing in disguise. It showed me that my body still felt threatened by this person. I was still having reactions based on something that, by societal standards, I should be over by now. I’ve now spent a lot of time working through those memories using tapping and other somatic practices. I’ve come a long way. I can now remember him and things that happened without having a panic attack or much of a physical response at all. That is really the goal of healing—it doesn’t change what happened to you or make you forget it, and it certainly doesn’t make what happened to you okay. But it can help you reach a place where you can recall the event without re-experiencing that trauma on a physiological level, without having your nervous system go on alert and enter a survival state.

Remember, healing is not linear. You will have days where you feel totally fine, and others where the trauma can pop back up, and that is okay. While I've come so far, I would never claim to be 100% healed, because I don’t believe such a state exists. This is real life. In fact, even as I write this, I know there is still work to do, as I'm feeling triggered by sharing my story. But I also take my power back in these moments, because rather than allowing the trigger to change my actions or my feelings, I know I have the tools to move through it. I have the ability to take this opportunity to once again teach my body and nervous system that I am safe and he is nothing more than an unfortunate memory.

By posting this story and sharing it with you today, even though it's triggering and even though I've never shared this story so vulnerably before, I will post it anyway. In doing so, I hope to heal another little piece of myself and perhaps inspire you to know that you can heal, too.

🌻 Remember, healing is a journey, and every step counts!