We Can’t Heal What We Can’t Feel

 “We can’t heal what we can’t feel.”

I have repeated those words to so many people over the years.

Now they have become my own lesson.

As I sit quietly with my little girl, I feel her becoming more and more exposed.

Not exposed to shame.

Exposed to love.

She is slowly revealing what she has carried for so long.

I feel her pain.

I feel her loneliness.

I feel her fear.

I feel her desperate longing to escape feelings that were simply too overwhelming for a child to bear.

There are moments when it feels almost unbearable to witness.

Part of me wants to make it stop.

Part of me wants to rush her through this painful place.

But another part of me understands something important.

The more she trusts me enough to reveal herself, the greater the opportunity I have to truly reach her.

For so many years, she survived by hiding.

Now, perhaps healing begins because she no longer has to.

This is an uncomfortable season of my life.

Some days it feels as though every hidden wound has come into the light at once.

There are moments when I wonder why so much has surfaced now.

Then I remember.

You cannot heal what remains buried forever.

Perhaps what feels like falling apart is really an invitation to become whole.

So I will stay.

I will listen.

I will feel.

And I will trust that every tear, every memory, and every feeling that finally finds its way into the light is one more step toward leaving the past where it belongs.

Not forgotten.

Not erased.

But no longer carrying the same power over my life.