Time Does Not Heal All Wounds

Hi everyone and welcome to a long-awaited— I don't know if it's been awaited or not, but it's just been a long time since I've made a YouTube video— video of Hannah Reads About Things. I hope all of you are doing well. I don't know how people have found this page during quarantine, but I've noticed new subscribers. If you're seeing this somewhere like on LinkedIn and you are not subscribed, subscribe now! It should be a button right here, and if it's not right here, then it's right here. Today I'm not doing the bells and whistles with the microphone and the ring light and the, you know, I'm just not doing any of that. I am in between clients and I was just thinking, you know what, it's been a long time since I've made a video and I want to. And the one that was really kind of like sticking out to me today was the concept of time healing all wounds and how complete bullshit that is. And so I wanted to read an article that I wrote for Psychology Today, and this is from July 31st of 2019, and it is called Time Does Not Heal All Wounds. The healing benefits of time don't apply to us if we aren't doing the work. Now, this is such an important concept, I think, especially during this pandemic and during this quarantine. A lot of people's old wounds have been triggered and activated, and so we tell ourselves these narratives like, well, time heals all wounds, you know, I'm 50 years old, I should be fine, or yeah, that happened 20 years ago, you know, it's been decades. And the reality is time doesn't do anything but pass unless we actually lean into the work and deal with those wounds. So I'm sure I wrote that somewhere in here, so I'm just going to read it. Ah God, I haven't done a video in so long. Also, I'm still playing the ukulele. Um, if you haven't watched it, you can watch the video of me struggling to learn the ukulele, but that has nothing to do with mental health except for it has to do with my mental health and self-care. Also, I have purple hair now. What's up? So without further ado, time heals all wounds. We hear this phrase time and time again, but I hadn't really thought about how inaccurate it is until recently. The reality about time healing all wounds is this: unless we are truly willing to process our deeply rooted irrational beliefs about ourselves, such as "I am not good enough" or "I am unlovable," time doesn't do anything. Hey, I'm making a YouTube video! I'm making a video! Just so you know. Okay, bye. When I was in high school, two of my friends died in a car accident. 7 years later, after 4 years of sobriety, I began to actually feel the weight of that grief. I learned the hard way that we don't actually flow through the stages of grief when we're in our active addiction. And that can have to do with substances, and that can even have to do with self-destructive relational behaviors and addictions. It can do with compulsive gambling, shopping, sex, porn, really anything. And essentially what that means is that if we're not emotionally healthy and aware and willing to feel the feelings that are coming up, we don't go through the stages of grief. We actually put that off without meaning to. For me, it was alcoholism, but for you, it may be something else. Time did not heal my grief. Time just passed while I continued to drink it away. In 2015, I decided that I needed to seek out good therapy. And I say good because not all therapy is beneficial. I've heard countless stories about friends or patients seeking therapy for years and simply venting for an hour while their therapist listened. That is not good therapy, in my opinion. I will— it's not really prefacing because I started already, but I will insert this here— everything that comes out of my mouth is my opinion. And so if you're hearing this and it doesn't resonate with you, that's okay. Just because I'm the one in the YouTube video does not mean that I have a monopoly on what is true for you. I'm just speaking from my experience, both personally and professionally. But again, that does not mean that I'm telling what it should be like for you. If something resonates with you, awesome, listen to that. If you feel very defensive and angry, also listen to that, because when I'm secure about something, I don't get defensive or angry. I'm kind of just like, yeah, that's not true for me. So yeah, oh, venting for an hour for me is not therapy. If a client is just gonna vent to me week after week and we're not getting anywhere, that's not therapy. Good therapy, in my opinion, is an exchange. There's the therapist challenging and encouraging and reflective and listening and all these different things. Reflecting, and it should be more of an exchange than just, hey, I'm gonna sit here and vent, because you can do that to anyone. I do believe there's therapeutic value in venting and having a safe space to do that, but where is the growth if we're just essentially sitting in our own shit? Okay. I believe that therapy should be challenging, collaborative, and at times uncomfortable. It needs to be more than me hearing myself talk for an hour while someone listens with a blank expression on their face. But that's just me. It was in therapy that I discovered an enormous amount of unresolved grief, childhood and adolescent trauma, which of course I had minimized, and a massive barrier that I constructed between myself and genuine connection. In the last 5 years of incredible therapy, I've uncovered so many more core underlying beliefs and complexes that I had no idea existed. My insight and awareness availed me nothing. I have my bachelor's degree in psychology, I have my master's in clinical mental health counseling, and at this point I've been in the field for over 6 years. But I still couldn't make the connections on my own. Over a decade after my first experience with rejection, I still am on the lookout for coping behaviors like seeking attention or putting my walls up. I have to continuously unlearn old patterns of thinking and acting on a daily basis, or else I so subtly can sink back into them. If one experienced trauma at age 5 and they never dealt with it appropriately with professional help, That trauma is still alive and well when they are 55. If I chose not to jump headfirst into my own emotional experiences and combat my fears with an open heart, there is no way that I would be able to be in a healthy relationship today. Absolutely no way. And I wouldn't have a healthy relationship with myself, which is cliché as it is. And I have a whole nother article and I have tons of videos on this. I can love other people if I don't love myself, but I cannot accept love if I don't believe I'm worthy of it. There's a great quote, I say it all the time, but we accept the love we think we deserve. And that's from The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a great book and movie by Stephen Chbosky. The reality is this: time doesn't heal anything except like superficial wounds. Like if I have a scrape. Time presents us with the opportunity to bury our pain as deeply as we can. That is the human experience. The kicker though is that the pain will undeniably manifest in other destructive ways in our lives, even if we think there is no correlation. So if you're sitting back, letting time go by so you can feel better about a certain experience, stop. Maybe the point isn't to feel better. Maybe the point is to feel. I challenge you to look inward, to lean into the discomfort, and to process your deepest and most vulnerable thoughts and feelings. Make the most of our time. Create space to journal, find a therapist, confide in a close friend, or pray. Allow yourself to speak the part of you that hasn't been heard, hasn't been seen, and hasn't been validated. If you subscribe to these narratives about yourself, like, yeah, that I'm just, you know, I'm bad at uncertainty, or I'm not good at commitment, or I'm a people pleaser, like, how long are you going to sit back and resign to those truths rather than actively do something about it? Because we don't have to live that way. My boyfriend actually says something great to people he works with sometimes. He'll say, you know, it's not nearly as bad as you want it to be. And I'm like, damn, because it's true. Like, for me, I was the victim of my own life, but I was unwilling to take action and change We don't just grow out of these things. I took a great training years ago, and it was about relapse prevention and core personality issues in therapy. And the trainer said, you know, we take these behaviors with us from womb to tomb. So like what we learned in early childhood, we cannot think our way out of. We have to actively work through. We all have parts of ourselves that have been buried so deeply that we've consciously forgotten that they are there. Subconsciously though, they're running rampant. So I hope this article ruined your day. I hope it awakened you to a truth so deep that you've neglected to acknowledge it for years or even decades. Because if you're feeling that discomfort, that means I've touched something in you that didn't, that didn't want to be found. That means you've resonated with the words on this page and your defense mechanisms are in full swing. Consider this your flashlight. Look inward and remember, be gentle with yourself. So yeah, it's one of my favorite articles, um, that I wrote because again, because of my own personal experience of not knowing that I had things buried so deeply, of not knowing that we take these things from womb to tomb, of not knowing that no matter what guy comes along, if I don't do this internal work, I'm going to exhibit the same behaviors over and over and over again. And it doesn't have to be that way. So again, I kind of encourage you to look at those truths that you have constructed and that your narrative that you subscribe to. What are the things about yourself that you wish were different? Okay, well, what are you willing to do to make those things different? That's the cool thing, is we actually have the autonomy and capacity to change. So less than a 10-minute video, might be a world record of a short video for me. But hi again, I've missed making these videos. I'm gonna try to make more, um, and be well. Okay, bye.