From Survival to Integration: What Healing Really Means
I was chatting with a friend recently about my dating blog and how it’s been difficult to find a man on the same healing path that I’ve been on.
“But what does that even mean, ‘healing’?” she asked.
It’s a great question!
Here’s what I mean…
What Healing Really Means
Optimal Childhood vs What We Have
Optimally, childhood would be full of warmth, nurturance, gratitude for the miracle of life, laughter, hugs, loving eye contact, positive attention, reading together, parents cheering on soccer games, and minimal household tension, probably all with the scent of chocolate chip cookies baking in the oven wafting throughout the home.
But the reality is that modern society is quite stressful. Parents often don’t linger lovingly. Children can be burdens. Bills need to be paid, and in many homes, especially in 2025, with such widespread income inequality and wealth disparity, there never seems to be enough money. Adults struggle with addictions, from drinking to watching TV. Children struggle for attention and affection, and there never seems to be quite enough to go around. Food is fast and devoid of nutritional value. Kids are shushed, left alone at home, or implicitly asked to regulate their parents’ unreliable moods. Grandparents, aunts, and uncles live far away, no longer part of a collective village.
Talk around the dinner table seems to be about what we’ll achieve or buy, or do. We keep forgetting to cherish each other and small moments, fueled by the capitalist and military industrial complexes…conquer more lands so we can have more things. Get the resources, make stuff, and then promote the buying of things as the path to happiness, to make more money so we can conquer more lands.
There seems to be some sort of invisible undercurrent that dictates everything but kids grow up only feeling empty or uncomfortable. The undercurrent is called EMOTIONS and they never get named. Other things that never get named are hypocrisy and manipulation.
Some parents go off to fight wars for the upper class, bringing home the normalization of killing other human beings, and shell shock (later called Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD). Their kids become parents, and they pass on a little piece of the war to their kids. No one stops to say, “Wait, does this have to be normal?”
No one learns how bodies work. No one learns how brains work. No one learns how the nervous system, which is programmed to stay vigilant to keep us from dying, turns on itself when it’s always vigilant and never resting in family and community support. Think of a burrowing mammal, such as a rabbit, which must leave the safety of its protected underground den to collect food throughout the day, darting its eyes and moving its head at the slightest threat, must come home to its warm warren and rest at night. Imagine the rabbit arriving home and the furtive darting of the eyes and head stops. Little bunnies are fed and tended to. The nervous system must rest.
What is Healing?
Healing is when someone hears a rumor that they could learn about how the body and brain work. Healing is when we start to gain awareness and ask questions like, “You mean the constant barrage of stress, hypervigilance, productivity, achievements, pop-up notifications, and popping my head out of the warren to look for predators is killing me? How do I do it differently?”
Healing is learning the safest way to exist and then practicing it.
Healing is grieving all the time we spent doing it the other way—living in fear.
Healing is learning how the body wants to stay alive through fight-or-flight, but then if we’re in fight-or-flight response too often, the body breaks down.
Healing is when we decide to learn how to live better and healthier through nervous system regulation.
What is Grieving, Though?
According to Merriam-Webster dictionary,
grief (noun)
1a : deep and poignant distress caused by or as if by bereavement
(his grief over his son's death)
b : a cause of such suffering
(life's joys and griefs)
Grief is distress and either the cause of the suffering, or the suffering we feel from the cause. When we grow up in homes, communities, or nations with suffering, and low emotional or community support, the negative feelings, the sufferings, start to pile up. We make excuses for why they never mattered in the first place. Pretty soon it’s like we never had any needs.
Not having needs. Not having the language to explore emotions. Not acknowledging the things that hurt. These start to create a lot of suffering in adult life! A lot of mix ups. A lot of unintentionally hurting others through ignorance.
And then usually families with a lot of stress have enmeshment issues—they’re not sure where one member of the family ends and another one begins. Everyone’s needs and feelings get mixed up with everyone else’s. The least functional person in the family dominates the tone for everyone. Soon, children become mind-readers, trying to predict what mood their unweildy parents are going to be in in each moment. Later they’re confused why they don’t know who they are, what they like, or how they’re feeling.
In this way, healing becomes about creating new boundaries of selfhood that may have never existed:
This is where I start and you end
This is what I like and that’s what you like and they’re different
I’m going to let you feel that without taking it on
Grieving becomes about letting ourselves feel that our needs and wants mattered and that there were experiences that hurt and that it was okay that those things hurt. We don’t have to pretend anymore than we’re okay.
But here’s the thing.
Here’s Why Healing is Hard
When a childhood is particularly painful, stressful, or chaotic, the mind creates a shield to survive it. That shield doesn’t want to feel the weight of all the grief and pain, so it creates an imaginary, delusional world instead that’s better. In these worlds, we may create explanations such as having a special path or purpose in life that is secret and special (delusions of grandeur). Or delusions that we were meant to spend life alone, meditating in a cave, better and more all-knowing than anyone. Or that we were meant to serve people all the time at the expense of ourselves (martyr or savior complex).
These delusional worlds are childlike, but they become a safe mental home and we carry them into adulthood, clinging to them, often to the detriment of real-life progress or fulfillment.
Control delusions: “If I predict when someone is going to get upset and stop it in advance, I’ll feel safer”
Perfectionist delusions: “If I’m perfect, I’ll be lovable”
Fantasy love delusions: “If I love someone enough I can save them or heal them” or “Someone is coming to love me enough and save me”
Specialness delusions: “My pain makes me special”
Self-erasing delusions: “Other people had it worse” or “If I play it small, it’s better that way for everyone” or “I don’t have needs” or “I don’t get angry”
Intellectualizing or spiritual bypassing: “I can come up with a reason for this” (instead of feeling it) or “I’m superior to others because I don’t need to have feelings” or “God has a special plan for me”
Hero delusions: “I was put here to suffer/do really hard things/be in charge” or “I must keep winning _____ to be worthy”
As humanity evolved to understand the mental world, the field of psychiatry tried to group these delusions, complexes, maladaptive behaviors, and thoughts together into categories so we could better understand them.
Schizophrenia should be seen as a delusion of grandeur, for example. “Someone is out to get me,” is a delusion of having more importance than one has. And we’d want to ask, why would someone’s mind create a delusion that they’re important? If they felt especially unimportant in childhood.
For something like depression, wishing for death is a protective layer—if we die, then we don’t have to feel anything anymore. And then, also, maybe other people would finally notice how much pain we’re in.
With anxiety, it’s about control. If I can anticipate every possible thing that could go wrong, I’ll feel more in control, and that feels safe. But we’re never really in control. It doesn’t work.
All mental illness is an attempt to find some semblance of control and comfort amidst extreme chaos. And it’s a particularly human adaptation. Rabbits don’t invent stories to keep themselves mentally safe amidst fear and predation. They just either live or die. I explain in this video, an excerpt from Latchkey Urchins & Friends Podcast. The book I’m referencing is The Evolved Nest: Nature's Way of Raising Children and Creating Connected Communities by Dr. Darcia Narvaez.
I like to talk about The Mandalorian as a Child Trauma Parable. Each episode, the Yoda baby (Grogu) is in trouble—evil characters want to kidnap him to get hold of his special powers. In each episode, the viewer is on the edge of their seat as he gets into and out of trouble. The Mandalorian, the superhero and father figure, always comes in to save the day—save the helpless baby. Order is restored. The viewer sighs a sigh of relief. The baby is nurtured with the comfort of safety.
In real life, we need our parents, our caregivers to be our Mandalorian. We need to feel safe to go out and explore the world, sometimes getting into danger, knowing that we can come back and feel cared for and nurtured by people who love us at home.
If we never have the opportunity to relax into safety, we will have all manner of health challenges:
Mental health issues and mental illnesses
Digestion problems
Headaches and migraines
Chronic pain such as back or hip pain
Chronic body tension
An accident-prone life (see my blog about this here) because we’re always dissociated and agitated
Significant diseases such as cancer and heart disease
Stressful interpersonal issues
Trouble keeping jobs or long-term relationships
Once I learned that physical health was linked to childhood trauma, after reading Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score in 2017, I knew I wanted to go into the field of explaining these links. The field is called Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) Science.
In 1998, the landmark ACEs study was published linking childhood stressors with every manner of mental and physical illness, with a dose-response relationship—the more trauma, the more illness.
There’s this other term you need to know: toxic stress. Former California Surgeon General Nadine Burke-Harris wrote a great book about toxic stress called The Deepest Well. Can’t recommend it enough! Lightbulbs will go off.
Stress is important. It’s what enables us to live our lives, accomplish tasks, take care of ourselves and others—it’s needed. But too much stress all the time without the Baby Grogu safety rest breaks becomes toxic. If the rabbit can’t come back to the safety of the warren, it will perish. Humans don’t perish quite so immediately. Our minds and bodies break down. The mental and body breakdowns happen with toxic levels of stress. Barages of stress.
Quite Simply, Here’s What HEALING Looks Like:
Notice signs of over-stress in the body
Notice what the body feels like
Take dedicated time to switch into the parasympathetic nervous system “rest and digest” mode through deliberate practices (I outline some such as legs on a chair and 4-7-8 breathing here)
Get help unwinding our delusions—either by reading books or working with a therapist or coach (you can work with me! Learn more here.)
Grieve and feel the pain of childhood
Make amends for the way we may have hurt others with our unconscious hurting
Develop our whole emotional selves by learning an emotional vocabulary for the emotional sensations in the body
Honor our emotional selves through constant self-acknowledgment through emotion labeling
Share our emotional selves with others by saying “I feel…” or “I felt…” or “I’ll bet you felt…”
Live from the integrated self. Notice how your choices, relationships, and boundaries naturally align with your values. Start to get into the flow of living from a place of safety and wholeness rather than reaction and fear. Notice reactions and stop them before they ruin things—before we fight or fly away. Lower stress and the stress response so we can help the immune system naturally heal. Find a balance between stress and rest. Feel an actual sense of control—instead of reacting we’re responding with options and clarity.
What’s The First Action Step?
To say, I’m going to start this healing thing, we need to start by learning how the fight-or-flight stress response system works and impacts the brain and body. That’s step 1.
What’s Going to be the Sneakiest Part of Trying to Heal?
Understanding neglect.
Neglect isn’t what happened—it’s the absence of what happened. We can’t see it or remember it because it didn’t happen.
People can live their whole lives feeling the negative effects of neglect and never understand why.
I highly recommend reading the book Running on Empty: Overcoming Childhood Emotional Neglect by Dr. Jonice Webb to start to conceptualize neglect and understand what so many of us didn’t get. It’s a great audiobook!
Full Circle…In Dating, What Does Healing Mean?
Coming back to the first quesiton about what it would be like to date someone on a healing path, this would mean that both partners understand the origins of fight-or-flight in the body, how their levels of childhood toxic stress (including invisible neglect) has created mental health or mental illness, and are taking steps to understand their delusions, false selves, complexes, and weird rationalizations so they can relate more authentically.
Ideally, partners would challenge each other to grow but mirroring each other and calling each other in around dysfunction. Healthy relationships are crucibles for change, growth, and personal transformation.
Check out our interview with Jayson Gaddis for more on this:
