Healing Isn’t Linear
The process of healing is one that can feel like a never-ending pendulum between pain and acceptance. The work of healing is not linear, and just because you’re doing this work doesn’t mean you’ll never experience the slings and arrows that life throws at us.
In reality, healing is more like the stock market. Now, I'm really getting into uncharted territory when bringing up the stock market...that is my husbands jam, literally he is a CFP (certified financial planner) and is always dealing with the stock market. I on the other hand can barely keep all of my accounts and portfolios straight. So, I'm going to do my best to draw the analogy between the stock market and healing keeping in mind I'm not exceptionally market savvy.
A lot of people have gotten into the stock market in the past year. In many ways, investing and trading can be similar to the healing in my opinion, stay with me now.
When we think about our healing process we often picture it as a linear progress. We hope that with every day that comes, we're gonna feel a little bit better. One little step at the time until we reach our goal, whatever that might be. (Let's be honest, if our investments looked like this that would be amazing right?) That goal might be acceptance, inner peace, the improvement of a certain symptom or just overall health.
But why is it so hard to accept that healing comes with ups and downs?
When you are recovering from an injury of a chronic condition, even if you are doing everything right, you will have up days and down days.
On up days, it's easy to convince yourself that you are "fixed" or cured. It's easy to become complacent and sometimes take our "foot off the gas" of improving. When we feel good we aren't as motivated at times to keep doing what got us there because we think we are "done."
On down days, it makes you think that your condition is hopeless and you'll never get better. It's uncertain how you will feel tomorrow, in a week, in a year. Living with a certain level of uncertainty can be very hard to handle. Not knowing how you are going to feel in a week, or a month, can be very scary. Having your investments tank can also elicit uncertainty.
Sometimes we have to zoom out to see where we have come from in order to know if we are going in the right direction.
Our healing process will always be full of ups and downs. There will be times where we feel better, and times where we feel worse. But one thing is for sure- after every bad phase there will be a good phase again. After every down comes the up. Everything bad will pass at some point.
The progress of healing is never a linear one and the sooner we learn to accept that, the easier it will get.
In our office, we like to look at the trend of someone's progress. We like to see if a person is having more good days than bad, and if their ability to cope with bad days gets better. Flare ups can happen, especially with chronic dizziness, fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis.
It's hard to keep the energy to focus on progress when you don't feel well, but it's really important to develop that resilience so you don't give up on your recovery too soon. Sometimes things happen, that are beyond your control. Sometimes you do everything right, we try our very best, and we still get worse. And that is scary and hard to accept. But the sooner we learn to accept this, the better we will get at handling these situations.
And if things like that happen feelings of guilt or being angry at yourself isn't going to make the healing process any easier- on the contrary! You can help your healing process much more if you learn to be empathetic with yourself and focus more on self-care instead of self-hate and guilt. If you find yourself in a bad phase, try to make the best out of it. Take as much self- care, that you can. Surround ourselves with the best people and accept all the help, that you can get, because you deserve it!
Remember, that it is important to know that you are making the right investment into your health. Don't treat your body like a meme stock that will shoot up 1000% overnight but has a high chance of crashing. Keep investing into the things that have proven benefits over time, and your health portfolio will continue to grow.