Healing is not fixing, but integration.
This journey holds reflections on mental health, physical illness, and spiritual injury—including my experience with cancer, long-term formation, and the ways trauma reshapes perception, identity, and faith.
Healing here is not understood as fixing or curing, but as integration: learning to live honestly within limits, losses, and ongoing realities.
Some wounds explored here were inflicted unintentionally by family, religious systems, theological frameworks, or well-meaning communities—making discernment and re-formation part of the healing itself.
This journey attends to:
– mental and emotional health
– living with chronic and life-altering illness
– trauma and attachment patterns
– spiritual injury and re-formation
– practices, assessments, and tools that support integration
For much of my adult life, I carried a sense that something was wrong inside me—a persistent ache I couldn’t name. Over time, that ache showed itself in my inner life and then my body: in anxiety and vigilance, in strained ways of relating, and eventually in physical illness that could no longer be ignored.
I went searching for help at thirty, but for many years I moved through misguided therapy, spiritualized shaming, poor counsel, and, at times, real harm. Only later did I encounter something different: good help—the kind of therapeutic presence that sees the whole person, understands how our histories shape us, and meets wounds where they were formed.
Along the way, I was also confronted with cancer. I am not healed; I am in remission—for now. Facing the possibility of death reshaped my relationship to time, money, control, and what ultimately matters. It also marked a quiet turning, away from scarcity and domination and toward abundance, trust, and shalom.
This journey grows out of that long passage—learning to listen more honestly to mind and body, to live within limits and loss, and to let healing unfold as integration rather than cure. Questions of faith and hope are never absent, but here they remain quiet companions, not conclusions.
Reflections on Healing
A reflection on care that supports integration rather than control.
This reflection explores the difference between help that harms and help that heals. After years of confusing, constraining, and sometimes damaging forms of care, I began to recognize what good help actually looks like—presence that honors agency, understands history, and supports integration rather than control.
What follows reflects that discernment, and the slow learning required to trust help again.
Further Reflections Along the Way
A reflection on why certain phrases trigger resistance—and what that reveals about power, safety, and responsibility in care.
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