Finding Joy Through Personal Healing

Gifts come in many different packages.

Source: Courtesy of Mary Allen

Maybe it's the fact that I've lived long enough for my expectations to wear off, or maybe it's all the therapy I've done, including whittling away at my childhood trauma with eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). Still, I'm finally in a place to enjoy the holidays.

Partly, it's a matter of simplifying: I'm only giving gifts to a few people, staying close to home. In the last two weeks, I've been slowing down, letting myself off the hook a bit more than usual, not pressuring myself to clean the house or do errands hanging around on my list. Instead, I've been getting together with friends, making time to catch up with people I'm often too busy to see.

And it helps a lot that I have a partner I love and trust to spend Christmas with, looking forward to the holidays instead of dreading them like I used to.

But mostly, I know my newfound ability to enjoy the holidays is a result of the healing I've received from all that therapy I've done.

I've learned that true healing is possible, although it has happened very slowly in my life. I've been getting help from therapists for most of my adult life and have been doing EMDR with one of them for many years. And it has worked; just recently, I've noticed there seems to be some kind of watershed happening, where I suddenly feel much better overall, perhaps even on a cellular level.

When I think of this, of the healing that has taken place gradually, sometimes haltingly or invisibly but persistently, even purposefully, inside me, I feel something almost religious. I think of warmth and white light, light appearing out of darkness, even a kind of holiness.

But at the same time, something in me feels like it's not quite safe to announce that I've arrived at true healing. I guess I'm worried that people will think I'm exaggerating or bragging. I'm not. It's taken me a long, long time to get here, and I don't expect to be "done." And I'm also kind of superstitious about saying what I'm saying, as if talking about it will have some magical effect of making it go away.

But another part of me knows that nothing can take this away. It's a gift I've received as a reward for all my work.

At this time of year, when gifts are at the forefront, I feel almost weepy to think of my healing as a gift. And I feel even weepier to think of how everything, all the hard things in my life that led me, even forced me, to pursue healing and keep at it. The broken relationship with my mother started when I was an infant when my mother had postpartum mental illness and continued throughout my childhood and onward, taking on a life of its own inside me, influencing my thoughts and feelings; the suicide of my fiancé in 1991, which was excruciating and forced me go even deeper in finding and healing what was broken inside me; all the various tragedies and mishaps over the years that I worked through and gotten to the bottom of with the help of my therapist.

Now, I see all that as a series of gifts, too. At some point, I noticed that almost everything hard that was happening to me somehow mirrored some old, maybe even forgotten, traumatic event or condition in my earlier life and that I could use the present-day bad feelings to get to and heal, the old terrible feelings—the traumas "frozen in the mind-body" per EMDR developer Francine Shapiro—that were lodged and hidden deep inside me.

Seeing those almost magical connections between the past and the present in my life—as if stuff was happening to draw my attention to the old stuff that still needed to be healed—gave me an even deeper sense of some gift-giving going on, on the part of a higher power or the universe or karma or whatever you want to call it—I think of it as simply life.

What comes next? I find myself wondering. Am I done? Does this mean I'm going to die? Some superstitious part of me asks. I want to address that part of me, publicly and unequivocally, now, with the following: No. You're not going to die. Now, you get to live a happy, normal life.