Healing Isn’t Linear

This past spring, I attended an event educating the public on sex-trafficking and its devastating effect. Throughout the event, and among the various speakers, a phrase was repeated over and over: “healing isn’t linear.” The concept seems simple enough. After all, we’re discussing victims of intense trauma and violence. Encouraging the public and potential care-givers to have patience, to expect relapses and struggles, and to commit to an unpredictable process of recovery teaches honest and responsible preparation. But as I listened to their advice, wisdom, and dramatic personal experiences, I recognized that their assertion of non-linear recovery promotes a truly radical concept.

The idea of non-linear process, and all that it suggests, offends our western mindsets, it confronts our ‘logical’ thinking habits. Taught from our youngest years to think linearly, we expect the processes of life to progress. Like our early educational journey, we move forward and up and we expect that same step-by-step momentum in all areas of our lives. We prefer growth (healing and maturity) sanitary and orderly. The steps of each should flow as smoothly as a solvable math equation: 2+2=4 and all is right with the world.

But healing isn’t like that. Nor is much else in life really.

Healing and growth aren’t precise or polished. They are better understood through nature and the organic, because they cycle. Life encompasses seasons of growth and blooming, and seasons of pruning, decline … even death. (But there is always potential for new growth and life, even in death. A seed dies to create new life. Cycles.) We lie to ourselves and tell ourselves we are well-oiled machines because we prize controllable efficiency and productivity. And if something isn’t “producing” we discard it. As a result, we pursue productivity in our humanity for fear of being discarded. But we are not machines. We are beautifully crafted works of art, carved and made splendid through the experiences of life. We take a lifetime to complete.

And as uncomfortable as we are with it, that lifetime of process will naturally have seasons of dormancy (when we need rest and recovery); or even – God forbid – damage, when we need healing and we need others to help us do for ourselves what we cannot. These seasonal shifts are inevitable and unavoidable. And they do not mean we have somehow missed the optimal standard of life recorded by the Psalmist: “He will be standing firm like a flourishing tree, planted by God’s design, deeply rooted by the brook of bliss, bearing fruit in every season of his life.” (Psalms 1:3, emphasis added) Rest bears fruit. Healing bears fruit. Even our willingness to receive help from others on a healing journey bears fruit, because we grow in maturity and strength as well as connection and value for others. Productivity and bearing fruit are not the same things. We will never arrive at a place where we don’t need rest, where we don’t need help, or where we don’t need connection, because we aren’t made to.

The cyclical nature of growth, maturity and healing happens across a lifetime, but also happens within a season or situational life experience. You could be in the process of healing from an emotional trauma (abuse, grief, betrayal, disappointment) and cycle between moments of true joy, where the future looks hopeful and life is worth living, to moments where fear speaks the loudest and hope feels crushingly absent. Cycling naturally builds resilience and heals your heart at deeper and deeper levels. Every time you weather a storm of negative emotion and find truth and hope again, you build strength.

To be candid though, I don’t think we lack knowledge regarding the benefits of working through negative emotions, nor is that what gets us frustrated. Peruse social media, cable tv, or any other advertisement saturated medium and it’s easy to see just how deeply invested people are in healthy coping strategies, living their best life, and being the most productive version of themselves they can be. People hunt, desperately, for happiness. People understand that mental and emotional health are critical to a joy-filled, satisfying life. But what we don’t understand is, if we’re doing all the right things, why then do we still have negative emotions, why does trauma and pain still surface and have to be dealt with?

Even if we are faith-filled. Even if we have a devoted and flourishing spiritual life.

Because healing and wholeness aren’t linear.

If you or someone you love is in a process of healing and you hit a moment where your eyes can’t focus on the good (especially if you’ve felt like things were going along well) don’t despair. And don’t beat yourself up with labels like “relapse” or “set back.” That kind of self-judgment zaps your courage and gets you stuck. Don’t view your journey as “two steps forward and one step backward,” and judge that you are losing almost as much ground as you gain. That’s linear thinking. That’s the kind of thinking that only value’s progress as measurable productivity. Instead, consider that you’re in a dance. That sometimes you step forward, pushing your heart to believe for more hope and joy than you did even yesterday. And sometimes you step back, to cry, rest, re-learn how to trust, or remember who you are. Which, in turn, prepares your heart for the next push forward into new hope and expectation.

Circles instead of lines. Seasons instead of progress. Art instead of machine: valuable simply because you exist, not for what you produce.