Healing as remembering who we are

I spent 11 years of my career in human resources working in the healthcare industry, and I have been on my own healing journey for over 25 years. Over time, my relationship with health and healing has evolved deeply.

For much of that journey, I didn’t realize I was on a path of healing. For me, it was a quest to answer deeper questions: Who am I? Why am I here? What am I here for? It was a journey of trying to become my best self. Healing, as I understood it then, was about fixing something that felt broken, wrong, or inadequate.

Today, I see healing differently. I experience it as the process of revealing my true essence, and health as the authentic expression of who I am. I’ve come to notice that the more I stay true to myself, the more my body, emotions, and mind find balance—and the more aligned I feel with the purpose I came to live.

One of the key shifts in this understanding came through learning about trauma and the intelligence behind it. In simple terms, trauma can be understood as an experience that is too overwhelming for us to process at the time.

In such experiences—when something happens that exceeds our capacity to process it, or when something essential we needed, such as safety, connection, or care, was not available—a trauma response arises.

This response is not a failure. It is an intelligent way our nervous system protects us.

One way to understand this is that parts of our experience become held outside of our conscious awareness and are stored in the body and unconscious mind until we have the capacity to meet them. In that sense, we leave parts of ourselves “frozen in time.”

From this perspective, healing becomes a journey of gently meeting and integrating those parts—of becoming whole again.

This journey can take many forms, and each person finds their own way. Yet, in my experience, there are some qualities that support this process and allow healing to unfold:

A sense of safety and connection

A willingness to welcome what arises

The capacity to be with things as they are

A genuine curiosity to listen.

Even though these places may live outside our conscious awareness, they often make themselves known through what we experience as triggers.

One way I’ve come to relate to triggers is with greater compassion and appreciation—seeing them as signals from parts of me that are waiting for a need to be met.

And when I listen more closely, I notice that these needs are deeply human: safety, connection, love, being seen, belonging, authenticity.

In that recognition, something softens.

I begin to see that I am not alone in this journey—that we all carry versions of these same needs. That we can support each other in meeting them. And that there is nothing inherently wrong with us.

We are, each in our own way, on a healing journey of remembering who we are.

And every part of us we left behind holds a piece of that essence.

And this journey is not only personal.

Perhaps what we are learning to meet within ourselves is also part of something larger that lives between us.