Or: Why Healing Is a Multi-Level Game
People often misunderstand what healing means.
They may think that being healed means never getting angry again, never blaming anyone, and forgiving everyone.
People misunderstand forgiveness too.
You can forgive someone and still be angry.
You can forgive someone and never let them near you again.
And you can let go without ever forgiving.
That is okay too.
Because every person gets to decide for themselves what is acceptable and what is not.
Healing, to me, is not about making the anger disappear.
It is about doing the inner work with a calm mind and eventually being able to clearly separate responsibility:
This part was mine.
This part wasn’t.
Here I was right.
Here I wasn’t.
This is my responsibility.
And this is not.
There is also a big difference between guilt and responsibility.
A person can do something without intending to do it.
In that case, it may be difficult to call them guilty.
But that doesn’t remove their responsibility for what happened.
Many people call inner work overthinking. But it isn’t.
During my twin flame journey, people tried to make me take responsibility for things that were not mine.
But we cannot take responsibility for someone else’s choices.
If a person chooses and creates the reality they live in, the responsibility for that reality belongs to them — and no one else.
Of course, people can interfere with almost anything.
Especially when they have certain wounds that make them behave that way.
At first, those wounds spoke through me too.
I wanted to explain myself.
But that passed quickly.
I realized that everyone has to carry their own responsibility.
All we can really do is build our own reality — the one we actually want to live in.
Healing doesn’t make us someone else.
A calmer person.
A wiser person.
A person who never gets triggered, never gets angry, never goes back, never doubts herself, never makes the same mistake twice.
Basically, a person who has somehow transcended being human.
Quite the opposite.
We can still notice our triggers.
We just gradually react to them less.
We don’t become less emotional.
Suppressing emotions is not healing.
We simply learn how to work with them and direct them.
I learned to direct mine into creativity.
I wrote a book, Empath Diaries, that I still want to read again and again.
We remain the same person.
We just seem to grow another level.
And what could completely throw us off before no longer has the same power over us.
Some people might call that wisdom.
I call it training.
Because I think that comparison fits much better.
When we heal, sometimes we choose to stay silent — not because we want the conflict to die down, but because we genuinely don’t see the point in speaking.
There is a huge difference.
And with every new level we reach, we often have less and less desire to explain ourselves at all.
Because we understand:
Everyone has to take responsibility for their own actions.
And arriving at that understanding is something everyone has to do for themselves too.
I made plenty of mistakes on my own way there.
At first, I wanted everything to be over as quickly as possible.
I studied a huge amount of information about healing childhood wounds.
The more I learned about healing, the more I sometimes felt like I was failing at it.
Because I still had reactions.
I still got hurt.
I still had days when something touched an old wound and suddenly I was not the perfectly detached, enlightened version of myself I thought I was supposed to be.
I kept thinking I was doing something wrong.
So I tried one method after another.
And eventually, there came a day when I had tried everything.
That was when I realized:
Maybe that was never the point.
Maybe I don’t need to react differently.
Maybe the reaction itself isn’t the problem.
Maybe it’s about the intention behind it.
Maybe before, I reacted because I wanted to be heard.
And now I simply don’t want to be.
Maybe I don’t need to react differently.
Maybe I just need to do what I actually want — and stop doing what I don’t want in my life.
Maybe I was reacting correctly all along.
Healing doesn’t require you to erase the person you were.
There is a difference.
You don’t have to become someone who never feels anger.
You can become someone who knows what to do with her anger.
You don’t have to become someone who never gets triggered.
You can become someone who notices the trigger without immediately letting it drive the car.
You don’t have to become someone who never feels insecure.
You can learn not to build an entire story around the insecurity.
And you don’t have to become endlessly forgiving.
If forgiving everyone were the right thing to do, we wouldn’t need a criminal code.
Sometimes healing looks like saying:
No.
Not from revenge.
Not from bitterness.
Not because you need someone to understand why.
Just no.
I think we sometimes turn healing into another performance.
We create this image of the healed person:
peaceful, soft, detached, unbothered, endlessly compassionate, completely self-aware.
And then we judge ourselves every time we don’t look like her.
But healing isn’t about becoming aesthetically pleasing to our own spiritual expectations.
You are still allowed to have a personality.
You are still allowed to be intense.
You are still allowed to be funny, emotional, stubborn, passionate, dramatic, ambitious, private, loud, quiet, complicated.
You don’t have to remove every sharp edge from yourself just because someone once got hurt by it.
Healing is not personality correction.
It is learning which parts of you actually belong to you —
and which parts were built as survival strategies.
For me, healing during my twin flame journey didn’t look like forgiveness.
It looked very simple:
I quietly walked away from the situation, stopped communicating, and chose not to interfere with someone else’s reality or someone else’s choices.
I simply started creating my own.
Maybe you don’t need to become less sensitive.
There is something indescribably beautiful about being emotional and sensitive.
A person who doesn’t feel emotions isn’t really living.
They are existing.
Maybe you simply need to stop giving everyone access to your sensitivity.
If you let everyone who wants to touch the petals of a rose put their hands on them,
there will be nothing left of the rose.
No wonder roses have thorns.
Maybe you don’t need to become less emotional.
Maybe you need to stop treating every emotion as an instruction.
An emotion doesn’t tell you that something is wrong.
It simply tells you that you are capable of feeling something.
Maybe you don’t need to become more detached.
Some people understand our boundaries perfectly well.
They simply don’t care about them.
Maybe you need to become more rooted in yourself.
And maybe you don’t need to become a completely new person.
Maybe you just need to become the person you were before you learned that you had to disappear to be seen.
That doesn’t mean going back.
It means taking yourself back.
The child who was too sensitive.
The woman who was too much.
The version of you who made mistakes.
The version who stayed too long.
The version who trusted the wrong people.
The version who didn’t know what she knows now.
You don’t have to hate her to prove that you’ve grown.
You can look at her and say:
You did the best you could with what you knew.
Because real healing isn’t becoming unrecognizable.
It’s becoming recognizable to yourself again.
Not perfect.
Not permanently peaceful.
Not untouched by life.
Just no longer willing to abandon yourself every time life becomes uncomfortable.
And maybe that’s enough.
Maybe healing was never supposed to turn you into a different person.
Maybe it was supposed to bring you home to the person you were underneath all the things you had to become to survive.
For me, healing doesn’t mean putting new layers of armor on myself.
Quite the opposite.
Healing means taking off the layers that made it difficult to breathe freely.
We stop clinging to the things that were destroying us simply because they feel familiar.
And as we take those layers off, we can move up another level.
And another.
And another.
Maybe that’s why people say that, at some point, we can look at a situation from the outside, as if it were behind thick glass.
At least, that’s what happened to me.
We don’t become someone else.
We don’t become “above” it.
We simply become the version of ourselves that no longer matches that reality.
And perhaps that is what healing actually is.
Not becoming someone new.
Not becoming someone better.
Just becoming fully ourselves again.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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