Healing isn’t about learning to tolerating pain. Healing is about learning to feel happiness and joy without fear. This article may include affiliate links – 10 Minute Read
What if I had been thinking about healing wrong?
I had in my head that healing was about accepting the pain that trauma caused me. Maybe it was because I had adopted someone else’s version of healing, maybe a lot of someone’s version of what it was like to learn to live with what happened. Wasn’t it about managing anxiety? Getting better at functioning? Tolerating the echoes?
But what if, and hear me out, healing is for joy. Not getting used to trauma.
There’s no getting around the fact there is a level where we need to be accepting of what has happened so we are able to move past it. But, for me, healing is much much more than getting used to having trauma in my past. I have adapted, I have survived, and I am here.
But surviving, or being a survivor, isn’t my ceiling. Joy is not a bonus feature I’ve unlocked after I ticked every other box.
It is the actual point.
This is me writing about what healing is about from my perspective. How I made peace with the way trauma shaped me without getting stuck in it and how you can begin to find your way back to the kind of life you want.
You're Already Used to Trauma. That's the Problem.
Let’s start at the beginning.
You don’t need to get used to what happened to you. You are already used to it. Completely.
That is the problem. How you function is based on your past experience. It is why you are stuck and where you live by default, because you understand it, know it, and it feels normal to you.
To be clear, I know it’s not where you want to be. I didn’t want to be here either. Your body is constantly in stress and awareness mode, scanning the room, reading the tones, bracing for a shift that may or may not come.
That’s what chronic abuse does. It creates your own personal war zone, and you have to be tuned in at all times, and it’s horribly hard to let go. Reading moods. Managing expectations. Working out how to protect yourself from the next outburst, the next silence, the next set of rules that changed without notice.
Once I left my abusive relationship, I just shifted this methodology of living to other relationships in my life, personal and work.
An abusive and relentless environment teaches you, deep down in your nervous system, that other people’s feelings are your responsibility to manage. That you are accountable for their reactions. That accountability is a one-way street; it applies to you and your actions, never to theirs. I applied this everywhere. Even once I was safe.
It’s not true. You are only responsible for yourself. You know this deep down, but your body and the actions you have lived by, sometimes for years, don’t know it yet.
Managing the emotions of those around you is a consequence of your threat detection and management system. It is a way you have learned to keep yourself safe. It is part of your system to stay alert, to read the room, and prepare for what happens next.
Trauma research shows that prolonged abuse dysregulates your nervous system to a physiological level. Your brain is rewired this way to keep you safe in a dangerous environment. It’s an extraordinary adaptation to a horrible situation.
But managing trauma, accepting it, is not healing, and it is not where you need to stay.
So What Is Healing Actually About?
Healing is about turning your alarm off.
It’s about dialling back that protective layer gradually, at your own pace, and allowing yourself to feel something genuinely different.
Not just the absence of danger, but the presence of joy. Rest. Perhaps some ease. The ability to stop and relax without your body treating stillness as a threat. Being able to trust the safety you now have.
Healing is for joy. It’s not about getting used to trauma. That joy is going to look different for everyone. For some people it;s the first time they’ve laughed at something stupid without bracing for a mood turn from someone else. For others its simply chosing something they want, like what to have for dinner, without the anxiety that they are making the wrong call.
These joyful moments are small. They sneak up on you. They warm you when they show up, and they are exactly what you are building towards.
This is what healing is about:
- Hypervigilance be gone! Learning that you don’t have to read every room, manage every tone, or prepare for every possible version of what someone else’s mood might mean for you.
- Discovering what you actually enjoy. Many survivors arrive on the other side of an abusive relationship without a clear answer to the question “what do I like?” because they spent so long prioritising someone else’s preferences. Healing makes space to discover your wants, likes and needs.
- Reconnecting with people. Friendships, family, community. The relationships you may have been isolated from or slowly distanced from during the abuse. Relearning how it feels to be with people who actually want you around.
- Considering your own future. Goals, plans, dreams. Not someone else’s vision for what your life should look like. Yours. With full autonomy to build it however it makes sense for you.
None of these things are luxuries; they are your right. None of these things is something you get once you have recovered; they are what recovery and healing include.
Do We Try to Forget the Trauma?
No, that’s not how healing works.
Forgetting isn’t possible. Trauma becomes woven into how we think, how we respond, what sets off our nervous system, what we instinctively scan for in a new room. Pretending it didn’t happen, or that it no longer affects you, isn’t healing. It’s suppression, and suppression has a way of surfacing sideways through anxiety, emotional shutdown, internal conversations that won’t stop, or relationships that start to feel familiar in all the wrong ways.
But “living because of trauma” isn’t the goal either. Defining yourself entirely through what happened, measuring every choice against it, staying inside the story of it, that’s also a kind of getting stuck.
The version that actually supports healing is living in spite of it. Accepting that it happened. That it was real, that it was not okay, that it shaped you, and also recognising that it doesn’t have to be the only lens through which you understand who you are or what’s possible for you from here.
This process does involve a kind of reckoning with your past. You will need to look at it honestly. Acknowledge what you’ve been through. In doing that, you may start to notice what you’ve built through surviving it all. The perceptiveness, the strength, the tenacity that got you out or through. Those belong to you. They were hard-won. But they don’t belong to your abuser, and claiming them doesn’t mean what happened was okay or useful. We learn through all of life, especially the hard bits, as long as we realise the lessons.
There is one point I do want to make here, and that is around the very common idea that healing requires forgiving the person who hurt you.
There is no research consensus that forgiveness is necessary for trauma recovery, and for many survivors, the pressure to get there before they’re ready, or ever, actively gets in the way.
Trauma recovery should focus on the survivor’s relationship with themselves, not with their abuser. Forgiveness is a choice, if and when it ever makes sense to you. It is not a prerequisite for joy.
How Do We Let Go of the Fact Trauma Has Shaped Us?
We don’t, entirely, and we don’t have to.
The goal isn’t to shed who you became through the experience. It’s to stop that experience from being the loudest voice in the room, the one that runs the decision-making, controls the fear responses, and quietly limits what you allow yourself to want or feel.
What begins to shift that, gradually, is accumulating evidence that safety is real now. Your nervous system can’t be argued or pushed into calm. It can’t be reasoned with. But it can be taught, through repetition, through small experiences of rest and ease and genuine connection, through moments where nothing bad happened and you noticed.
The letting go happens slowly. Often backwards. Often two steps forward and one confusing step sideways. That’s what nervous system rewiring looks like when it’s happening.
How Do We Find the Joy We're Looking For?
Slowly. Imperfectly. Without waiting until you feel ready, because that particular feeling tends to arrive after the doing, not before.
Joy after abuse is rarely the exuberant version. At first, it’s quieter than that. It’s being somewhere and not dreading what comes next. It’s making a small decision for no reason except that you wanted to, an afternoon where you didn’t think about them once.
There are some things that help:
Notice what your body responds to. Not what you think you should enjoy. Not what seems like the appropriate kind of healing activity. What actually creates a flicker of ease or interest. That’s the signal. Follow it,even if it feels small or silly or completely disconnected from “healing.” If it’s ten pin bowling, then it’s ten pin bowling…Go with it.
Let yourself want things. Goals, plans, preferences, daydreams about the future. These are not you wasting your time. They’re part of rebuilding your sense of self after a relationship that slowly eroded your right to have one. Imagining a future that belongs entirely to you is healing. Start there.
Build a baseline. Building a happiness baseline isn’t about manufacturing positivity. It’s about intentionally creating conditions where your nervous system can begin to register calm as normal, and joy as something you return to, not something you chase. Removing what drains you, or hurts you, matters as much as adding what nourishes you.
Give yourself permission to be helped by more than one thing. Therapy, journaling, movement, creativity, comfort, rest, connection, healing is rarely one-dimensional. Your path will look different from someone else’s. There is no correct version. The TRB resource library exists precisely because different tools work for different people at different stages.
Start very small. One walk. One journal page. One book. One honest conversation. One evening where you let yourself do exactly what you feel like doing without justifying it to anyone.
Healing is for joy, not to get used to trauma, and that joy accumulates in the smallest moments long before it becomes something you can name.
What Healing Is Truly About
Healing is about accepting joy back into your life. Not as a reward at the end of some checklist. Not after you’ve earned it in some way. Not as something you get to once you’ve processed everything. But as your right. Something that was always meant to be there and that was taken from you, which you are now taking back.
It involves acknowledging the past and what it built in you. It involves learning how your nervous system works and giving it experiences that teach it safety. It involves figuring out who you are when no one is controlling the answer. It involves, over time, building a life that is genuinely yours, with goals, people, pleasures, and plans that exist because you want them.
Trauma has shaped you. That is not in question. But it doesn’t have to be the whole story. You survived it. That is not nothing. In fact, it’s everything, and it means the next chapter is entirely yours to write.
If you’re just getting started and not sure where to begin, The Resilient Blueprint Start Here page can help you find your footing.
FAQs
Q: What is healing truly about after an abusive relationship?
Real healing is about more than managing your symptoms or getting through the day. It’s about reconnecting to joy, rest, and a sense of self that belongs entirely to you. That means learning to regulate your nervous system, rebuilding your sense of identity and autonomy, and creating a life, through small, consistent choices, that you actually want to be living.
Q: Do we try to forget the trauma, or is healing about living in spite of it?
Neither forgetting nor staying defined by trauma is the goal. Healing is about integration. Accepting that what happened was real and that it shaped you, while gradually building a present that isn’t controlled by it. You carry your history, but it doesn’t have to set the ceiling on what’s possible for you from here.
Q: How do we find joy again after an abusive relationship?
Joy after abuse tends to be quiet at first. It shows up in small moments, a decision made just for you, a laugh that catches you off guard, an afternoon without dread. You find it by noticing what your body actually responds to, letting yourself want things again, and building small habits that give your nervous system evidence that calm is safe. It comes before you feel ready for it.
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Nadine Brown
As a survivor of emotional and physical abuse, I know firsthand how difficult the healing journey can be. I created The Resilient Blueprint as a passion project—an accessible resource hub designed to empower others on their path to recovery. My goal is to provide survivors with the knowledge, tools, and support they need to reclaim their lives.
