So much of what we struggle with is subconscious. Our memories are hardly the tip of the iceberg. There were moments in our childhood that caused us to perceive life differently. Moments that seem insignificant can fundamentally change the course of our lives and how we see everything.

With most therapeutic modalities these days, we try to get to the root by addressing childhood. Rehashing the past and trying to bring to the surface what caused us to go wrong in the first place.

But how do we rationalize what was never remembered? What we couldn’t comprehend?

The emotion that we felt in that exact moment where things started to change. A moment where pain consumed you and the only way to survive was to swallow it. Impacts that caused the shade of the lens through which we see life to darken.

You were too young to understand what it was or what it meant. Too inexperienced with life to understand how impactful that pain could be.

We try to rehash and subject ourselves to something we never understood in the first place. This is why it takes so long for us to heal.

We are trying to search for something deep within us. Dissecting emotions and the meaning behind it all.

Yet, pain does not ask of this to be released.

What we don’t understand doesn’t always need to be understood. Pain doesn’t need to be dissected. We don’t need to determine the exact cause of everything to free ourselves of all the weight we have been carrying.

There were many periods of my life that I spent wondering how to improve myself. How to alleviate myself from the depths of my own mental health. I spent so many nights wondering how I could fall so far.

My life could have been worse. It was difficult—which was made clear by many people’s perspectives that I met throughout my life. Yet, as a child, it all seems normal. Your circumstances and the soil in which you grew were all that you knew. What else exists?

It’s not until the comparison of others that we start to deduce our own limitations.

I lost my mother to suicide when I was young. I grew up with a depressed father. I was left alone the night she chose to end her life, with no one caring for me.

Everyone understood that losing a mother to suicide is brutal. What they didn’t understand—what I didn’t understand for years—is that it was the trauma I experienced as an infant affected me just as much, if not more, than her actual death.

The abandonment. The neglect. The moments my nervous system registered as “I am not safe” and “I am not worthy” before I had language to describe it.

My entire early life was shrouded in sadness. It was the first language I truly understood. And it became my baseline.

From that baseline, I created even more pain in my life. I became a sucker for punishment that was bred from my own self-hatred. Depression. Drugs. Self-destruction in every form I could find.

I didn’t have many answers growing up. I didn’t want them. I didn’t want the clarity because I didn’t understand how much it would have helped me.

I spent so much of my life knowing so little about the early years. I had no memories of my childhood. To this day, I can barely remember any of it.

This is what made healing so frustrating.

Therapists would ask me to remember. To process. To understand the root cause. I started to resent the question “And how does that make you feel?”.

It made me feel terrible. A lot of the time. The pain was so deep and so subconscious. The memories weren’t accessible to me as my brain did not want to go there. They were stored in my body, in my nervous system, and expressed themselves as unknown forces that would take hold of the steering wheel of my life.

Talk therapy always felt like a waste of time. I knew it was never going to get me there.

You can’t talk your way out of pain that has no words. You can’t rationalize trauma that happened before you had the capacity to rationalize anything. I spent years dissecting my mother’s death, my father’s depression, my choices. But none of it touched the deepest pain. The pain I couldn’t remember. The pain I couldn’t name.

The weight just stayed there. Heavy. Relentless.

For years I punished myself. Resenting the person I was while portraying someone bubbly and happy on the outside. I could only exist as my character for so long before I would end up in a period of depression where I could hardly get out of bed for days or even weeks.

There were many times that I begged for life to be easier. For the relentless weight on my chest to feel lighter, even for a short time. It was in these moments that I truly understood why people take their own lives.

In these moments of pain, I understood the decision my mother made.

And somehow, that understanding led me to forgive her.

Which led me to forgive myself.

What changed everything wasn’t another therapy session. It wasn’t finally remembering some repressed memory or having some breakthrough insight.

It was the simple practice of releasing what didn’t serve me.

Not understanding it. Not processing it endlessly. Not analyzing why I was the way I was.

Just releasing it.

I had help along the way with breath work, somatic massage, frequency healing and sound therapy. But more than anything, it was the intention to leave behind what I didn’t want to bring with me.

To release all that did not serve me.

For the first time in my entire life, I felt physically lighter.

Not metaphorically. Actually, tangibly lighter. Like I’d been carrying weight I didn’t even know was there, and suddenly it was gone.

I started to feel in control again.

The weight was not so heavy. I could finally see myself becoming someone other than the person I had been.

Healing is being okay with how it all looks—no matter how ugly. No matter how dark. No matter how far you strayed from yourself.

It’s not about understanding every cause and effect. It’s not about remembering every moment or processing every feeling.

It’s about witnessing what’s there without needing to dissect it. Giving it space to move through you and leave.

The pain doesn’t need your analysis. It needs your permission.

Permission to be released. Permission to stop carrying it. Permission to let your body finally rest.

I know now that my body was holding everything my mind couldn’t remember. That my nervous system was running programs installed before I could walk or talk.

I know now that no amount of talk therapy was going to reach those places. Because they don’t speak in words. They speak in sensation. In frequency. In the language the body understands.

I know now that healing doesn’t always look like understanding. Sometimes it looks like crying in the middle of nowhere and having no idea why. Sometimes it looks like finally feeling lighter without being able to explain what lifted.

I know now that you don’t have to remember to release.

You don’t have to understand to heal.

You just have to be willing to let it go.