My Phases of Healing
Healing is often spoken about like it’s linear. Like it has a start, a middle, and a neat ending where everything is resolved and peaceful.
That hasn’t been my experience.
For me, healing has moved in phases states of being I’ve lived inside, sometimes for long stretches, sometimes circling back again. Not because I wasn’t healing, but because I was changing at a depth that doesn’t move in straight lines.
These are my phases of healing.
Broken
This is where everything collapses inward.
Nothing makes sense anymore.
You’re surviving more than living.
In this space there is disconnection from yourself, overwhelm in the body, confusion, grief, numbness. Everything feels too much, or nothing at all. You question everything you thought you knew.
Nothing is built here.
Only awareness that something has to change.
Repairing
This is the slow beginning of putting pieces back together but not in the way things were before.
This is unfamiliar. Unsteady. Honest in a way you may not have been allowed to be before.
You start to notice patterns. You start to name things. Therapy, reflection, silence, and small moments of clarity begin to thread through the chaos.
You’re no longer only surviving.
You’re starting to observe.
And that alone is a shift.
Cocoon
This is the in-between space.
The hidden part of transformation.
From the outside, it can look like nothing is happening. But internally, everything is rearranging.
Withdrawal becomes necessary. Silence becomes medicine. Solitude becomes where you meet yourself without interference.
There is confusion here too about identity, direction, and who you are becoming.
But underneath it all, something is forming.
Becoming
This is where change starts to quietly take shape.
Not fully formed yet. Not fully visible. But real.
There are moments where you catch yourself reacting differently. Thinking differently. Choosing differently. And you don’t fully know why yet but something in you is no longer who you used to be.
This phase is subtle.
But it is powerful.
Because you are no longer only unraveling
you are emerging.
Angry
This is the truth rising to the surface.
Anger is often misunderstood in healing, but for me, it has been clarity. It is what came when I could no longer unsee what had been done, repeated, or ignored.
Rage. Grief. Frustration. Protection.
Boundaries begin forming here sometimes clumsily, sometimes fiercely, but always honestly.
This isn’t regression.
It is awareness with weight.
Anger says: I see it now.
And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
Understanding
This is where the chaos starts to make sense.
Not in a way that excuses anything but in a way that brings context. Patterns become visible. Cycles become recognisable. You begin to understand how things were shaped, and how they shaped you.
Self-blame begins to loosen. Perspective begins to arrive.
You stop asking only “why me?”
and start understanding “how this happened.”
And that changes everything.
Creating
This is the rebuilding phase but not of the old life.
This is the building of something new.
A life aligned with who you are now, not who you had to be to survive.
Boundaries are no longer just ideas they are lived. Choices become intentional. Identity begins to feel like something you are actively participating in, not something you’re trapped inside.
Purpose starts to emerge.
Relationships shift.
Life reshapes itself around truth.
This is where you begin choosing instead of reacting.
Closing Reflection
Looking back, I can see something I couldn’t see while I was in it.
I wasn’t stuck.
I was moving through phases I didn’t have language for yet.
Broken didn’t mean the end.
Angry didn’t mean I was going backwards.
Cocoon didn’t mean nothing was happening.
It all meant I was becoming someone new.
And even now, healing continues not as perfection, but as alignment. Not as erasure of the past, but as a life no longer controlled by it.
I am not who I was.
And I am still becoming who I am.
But for the first time
I am creating a life that is mine.