We can mistake carrying something for coping with it. They're not the same. But finally allowing ourselves to feel something we have carried for years can be the first step towards healing. Allowing ourselves to feel doesn't necessarily mean we immediately feel better. Sometimes, at first, we feel more exposed. And that's not always a bad thing. Sometimes it's what healing asks of us.

We often imagine healing as a release: letting go, moving on, becoming lighter. But in its early stages, healing can make us more aware of the weight. We notice what hurts. We recognise what was missing. And we begin to understand things differently. Understanding doesn't automatically make the hurt disappear. It simply makes it clearer.

I know we can heal. But I also know that healing can take time. For some of us, it can take years. For others, depending on what they have experienced, healing may come more quickly. There is no single timeline for it. So much depends on the nature of the trauma, how long it was allowed to continue, and how long we had to carry what happened before we ever felt safe enough to begin making sense of it.

In terms of my own trauma, I think one of the things I am learning is that surviving something and healing from it are not the same thing. We can carry an experience for years, in my case decades, without fully understanding what it has done to us. Sometimes it is only much later, when there is enough distance or safety, that we begin to recognise the weight of what we have been carrying.

And perhaps that is what I am beginning to understand about my trauma. What happened belongs to my past, but understanding its impact belongs to my present. I cannot change what happened or how long it was allowed to continue. But I can decide what happens to everything I was left carrying. For me, that is where healing begins. 

There can be enormous relief in finally putting words around what we feel. Talking about how we feel gives shape to feelings that have lived inside us. It allows anger to exist without apology, grief to have a voice, and questions to be asked even when the answers take time to come. But there also needs to be somewhere safe for those questions – and the truth behind them to land.

We need to be able to tell the truth about what we feel without becoming frightened by the strength of those feelings or by what might happen if we express them. Because healing cannot only be something we excavate. It also has to have a home.

There are things we want to understand and things we need to say. We have the right to make sense of what happened. The right to give language to it. The right to say how we feel. And the right to heal from it, particularly when we have experienced abuse.

Healing can mean allowing what we think and feel to exist without needing anyone else's permission or validation. Sometimes it's recognising that a powerful feeling doesn't always require us to have an answer. It simply needs us to acknowledge that it's there.

And sometimes healing is about building enough safety around ourselves that telling the truth no longer feels quite so heavy. What you feel doesn't need someone else's permission to exist.

For me, part of healing is learning how to give my thoughts somewhere safe to land – and learning to feel comfortable enough to let them stay there.