The first two posts in this series were about the wound and what it turned me into. This one is about the actual process of undoing it, and I want to be honest up front: it wasn't a single moment. It was years of unglamorous, repetitive work, and it started before I had any language for what I was doing or why it was working.
2021 to 2022: The Relationship That Put Me on This Path
I started therapy in 2021, originally just to deal with depression and anxiety. That same year, I entered a toxic relationship. We broke up, but I then went back in 2022. Getting out of it, with my therapist's help, was what put me fully on the path I'm still walking. Looking back, that relationship wasn't a detour from my healing. It was the thing that finally made the healing non-negotiable.
The Daily Practice
The real work started in March 2022. Meditation. Journaling. Practicing forgiveness and learning how to actually let go, not the performance of letting go, the real thing, which takes far longer and is far less dramatic than people expect. By November 2022, meditation had become the center of it, some days running up to eight hours. That's not a number I share to impress anyone. It's the honest amount of time it took to sit with everything I'd spent a lifetime avoiding.
February 2023: The Awakening
That consistency is what led to my spiritual awakening in February 2023. I started working with frequencies for chakra balancing, and I went deep into visualization work, the kind where I would sit with imagined conversations with my abusers. In those visualizations, I let my inner child say the things she was never allowed to say. I stood up for myself, fully, in a way the actual child never got the chance to. And then, only after that, I let my abusers speak too. I made space for their story, not to excuse anything, but because carrying their weight in silence was its own prison, and setting it down meant hearing it out loud, even in my own imagination, and choosing not to carry it anymore.
Healing wasn't one decision. It was a daily practice that eventually became a different way of existing in my own body.
I'm not going to tell you this process looks the same for everyone, because it won't. But I will tell you it's possible, because I'm on the other side of it, actually present in my own life for the first time. If you're a survivor and you're just starting this work, or you've been circling it for years without knowing where to begin, start with something as small as five minutes of stillness a day. That's where mine started too.