Some Hurts Can’t Be Healed

In our world, February is a month of grief.

February was one of the few occasions in our abuse history when a perennial event (or nearly perennial event) occurred. The accumulated force of repetition has stained this month with a permanent patina of loss.

And over the years, it has seemed like February just tends to collect losses of every kind.

In truth, loss happens to me with the same randomness that it happens to everyone else – but I feel it more keenly when it happens in this month. February is the month of grief.

It seems like so many of us hope that healing will make things stop hurting, or take away the pain of what happened to us – and yet, it rings false if anyone actually says they can do that. The pain is so deep-dyed and just part of who we are… if someone could really take away all our pain, would there even be anything left?

This kind of puts us in a quandary when it comes to therapy. If therapy can’t lessen our pain, then what’s the point of doing all that work?
And yet, how stupid and naïve would we have to be to think that anything could really make existence less painful when we know that it’s always going to hurt?
It sounds like a dilemma…

But February is also a month when we remember that this apparent dilemma is not as unanswerable as it seems. Some of the hurts we have sustained will cause us pain forever, that is true… but still, some of the things that cause us pain really can be resolved. The key is to distinguish between what can be “fixed” and what can’t.

Healing does not take away the pain of what happened to us – that simply isn’t possible. Those events were painful when they happened, and they still are, and they always will be. Nothing can make them not have happened, and nothing can make them not hurt.

What healing does is help us to connect to our various feelings about all things, and then integrate the feelings and reactions that result from trauma into all the other feelings and reactions we have, so that the trauma stops dominating our lives and becomes just one of the many things that make up who we are.

February is a time when I remember that therapy is not a panacea, and it’s not a feel-good endeavor… and “being healed” does not mean never feeling pain again. It just means feeling pain in balance with everything else.

There was a time when February was a perennial disaster for me. Self-injury happened on a daily basis, usually several times a day. Some years I was intensely suicidal. Every year, the month passed in a haze of dissociation, and yet I was still in pain for every second of every day. I drove away friends, I lost a job, I failed classes by putting myself so far in the hole that I couldn’t recover. In the years when I was using drugs, my usage during February would triple or quadruple. I’ve heard stories about things I said and did during various Februaries that I hope I never actually remember, because just hearing about them is shameful or embarrassing enough.

Regardless of where I was and what I was doing, my whole life came to a screeching halt in February.
Every single year, when February arrived, I would fall apart.
And every year, around mid-March, I had to pick up the pieces and find a way to limp on through the wreckage I’d created.

And I had no idea what the problem was. Why was February a disaster every single year? Why did my best intentions to stop it, prevent it, mitigate it, avert it, never make any difference? I had no clue. February was a predictable disaster that I felt utterly powerless to change, and I didn’t understand it at all.

And yet, change and healing have come, even to February – primarily because now I do understand what the problem was, and is. I know where the feelings come from, and why they’re there, what happened to create them, what traumas are associated with them, and what else in the more ordinary course of my life has connected in to these traumas and reinforced the feelings of grief and loss already present.

Originally, I didn’t even understand that grief was what I was feeling. So it took a lot of work to reach a point where I had enough understanding to change even the smallest part of the February disaster, let alone resolve it – but understanding was the basis on which change and resolution were built.  Understanding the true reasons behind the annual crisis (rather than the exhaustive list of pseudo-reasons I had compiled over the years) allowed me to make changes where previously no effort to change had made the slightest dent.

The issues involved were immensely painful, and looking at them honestly was not easy. And at the time, it seemed pointless – nothing else had ever worked, I didn’t believe this would work, so why drag up such a huge series of hurts that I hadn’t even known existed until someone had to go and tell me about it?

Well… I might not have known the facts, but obviously that hadn’t protected me from suffering the fallout. My life had fallen into crisis every year even when the facts were still unknown to me. Learning the facts didn’t create the pain, even though it certainly felt that way at the time. It simply explained the pain I was already feeling.

And the first time a February rolled around… and passed… and in the wake of its passing, my life was not an unmitigated disaster of smoking wreckage… then, finally, it seemed worth it.

Resolving the issues that were present in February does not mean I don’t still feel the grief associated with this stretch of time. I still feel it, because I still have all the same reasons to feel it. The original reasons still exist, and the losses have continued to accumulate, both from the same old perennial event and because life is just like that.

No amount of therapy or healing can take that away. An event that rightfully causes grief (or pain or anger or any other natural reaction) will always be capable of evoking that emotion, and the point of therapy is certainly not to teach us how to become better automatons, more separated from our emotions, less in touch with the natural emotional reactions to various events.

But healing has brought balance where previously there were only wild weather-vane swings from one extreme to another.

Physics experiments prove that, the further apart two things are, the harder it is to find a balance point between them, and the more vulnerable they are to being knocked off balance by any little thing.

Therapy lessened the distance I needed to keep between myself and the truth of what happened to me – and in keeping with the basic principles of physics (but contrary to all of my beliefs beforehand), this actually made the truth easier to balance.

The truth is terrible, but survivable.
The truth will always hurt – but in understandable ways that I can acknowledge and address, even if nothing can really make it go away.

Keeping my distance from the truth – that was a problem that I might not have survived, given some of the destructive behaviors I used to maintain that distance. And it hurt, in ways I didn’t understand and couldn’t do anything about.
That problem, that pain, that terrifying descent into uncontrolled misery – that was something that therapy could help to resolve, if I was willing to put forth the effort required.
I did put forth the effort, and the therapy has worked.

My life doesn’t fall apart in February any more. I’m no longer being consumed and dominated by an emotional crisis I can’t even identify, let alone change. And I’m not wasting all my energy on not really wanting to know what it’s all about and just trying to make it go away. That fight was exhausting, and it was never even remotely successful. It never spared me a second of pain, and it never kept my life from being crushed by the very juggernaut I was trying to avoid or repel or escape. It was a complete exercise in futility.

I understand the feelings now; I know what they are and why they’re there. I’m not denying the truth any more – and in turn, the truth doesn’t have to smash my life to pieces in order to get through my denial and grab my attention.

Today I can acknowledge that I feel terrible, and I have a damn good reason for it.
And then I can get on with the rest of my day, my week, my month, my life.