People make healing sound so simple.
“Just move on.”
“Let it go.”
“You have to forgive.”
“Stop looking backward.”
As though there is one wound, one decision to forgive, one moment when you finally put it behind you, and then you are healed.
But the longer I have walked through my own healing, the more I have realized that healing doesn’t look like a straight line to me. It looks like a tree.
There is the trunk – the thing that happened.
The betrayal.
The loss.
The trauma.
The moment your life divided into before and after.
But the trunk is only the beginning. Because growing out of it are branches. So many branches.
There is the branch of grieving what happened. Then there is grieving what should have happened. There is the loss of trust. The loss of innocence. The loss of relationships you never expected to lose. The people who disappeared when you needed them most. The realization that some people knew things you didn’t know. The memories you have to revisit because what you believed about them changed when the truth came out.
There is the branch of learning to trust people again, and another one for learning to trust yourself again.
Your instincts.
Your judgment.
Your ability to recognize what is safe and what isn’t.
There is the branch of anger.
The branch of forgiveness.
The branch of boundaries.
The branch of consequences.
And yes, those can all exist on the same tree.
There is the branch where you finally realize that someone else’s choices were never a measurement of your worth. The branch where you stop carrying shame that never belonged to you. The branch where you learn that forgiveness and reconciliation are not the same thing. The branch where you accept that closure may never arrive in the form of an apology. And sometimes there are branches you don’t even notice until years later.
You can be living a beautiful life.
Laughing again.
Loving again.
Building something new.
Genuinely happy.
And then something brushes against one of those old branches.
A song.
A text.
A photograph.
A conversation.
A milestone.
A relationship you still miss.
And suddenly something hurts.
People may look at that moment and think... "I thought she was over this."
Maybe you even think it yourself.
Why does this still bother me? I thought I healed from this.
But maybe you did. Maybe you healed one branch, and now you’ve discovered another.
That doesn’t mean you’re back at the beginning.** It means healing has branches.**
I think that’s one of the things we get terribly wrong when we tell people to “just move on.”
Moving forward doesn’t mean nothing behind you will ever hurt again. Forgiveness doesn’t erase memory. Healing doesn’t rewrite history. And gratitude for the life you have now doesn’t require you to pretend the life you lost never mattered.
You can love where God has brought you and still grieve what happened along the way. You can forgive someone and still believe there should have been accountability. You can release bitterness and still maintain boundaries. You can be healed and still have scars.
A tree that survives a storm doesn’t erase the places where its branches broke. Those places become part of its story. And sometimes something even more beautiful happens there.
New growth.
New branches.
New leaves.
New life growing from places that once looked completely destroyed.
Maybe that’s true healing.
Not becoming the person you were before it happened. Not forgetting. Not pretending. Not cutting down the entire tree because one part was wounded. But allowing God, over time, to tend every branch.
Some need pruning.
Some need strengthening.
Some need to be released.
Some need time.
And some places that once looked completely dead begin producing life again.
So if you discover another branch that still hurts, don’t assume you’ve failed at healing. Don’t let anyone convince you that you should “be over it by now.” Maybe you’ve simply reached a part of the tree you haven’t tended yet.
Sit there awhile.
Tell the truth about what hurts.
Let God meet you there too.
Because healing isn’t one moment.
It isn’t one prayer.
It isn’t one act of forgiveness.
Sometimes healing is a lifetime of allowing God to touch one branch after another. And when I look at the tree of my life now, I don’t only see what was broken. I see what survived. I see what grew.
I see places where I thought nothing beautiful could ever live again, and somehow, there is new life there.
The scars are still part of the tree, but so are the blossoms.
I think that’s the part of healing we need to talk about more.
The goal was never to become untouched by the storm.
The goal was to keep growing.