I’ve lived in Indiana all my life. There are positives and negatives about any place. One of the negatives of Indiana is the road construction every summer. I absolutely love the warm weather, but I hate the road construction. However, it is necessary because the freezing and thawing temperatures during the winter do a number on the asphalt roads and we are left with potholes everywhere. Some of these potholes can not only take out a tire, but axles, suspensions and so much more. Not fun.
The thing with the construction everywhere is that it seems to take forever to complete. There are detours that take you to other detours and there have been times that it would almost be honest to say, ‘you can’t get there from here’. It sometimes seems like the whole city is under construction. It is especially frustrating when it appears that no one is ever working. After sitting in outrageously long backups, because the highway goes down to one lane, you then pass by the construction area and not one worker is there! And it happens a lot. The problem with the frustration, though, is that there is often a very good reason no one is there. The crews might be working at night to not have to be there in the heat and humidity of the day, or they’re waiting for the utility companies to relocate their utilities or the concrete to cure and so on.
There’s a lot to road construction that most of us do not have any idea is being done behind the scenes, but each item is necessary for the job to be completed correctly. The same is true for healing. Healing is a lot like being under construction. There are a lot of different factors that go into healing from anything. From illnesses to injuries, friends moving away to deaths, a loss of a marriage to a loss of a child, abuse, addiction and so on, there are a lot of situations from which to heal. Every situation is also different for every individual. Some will heal quickly while others seem to never quite get through to the other side. Often, in tough situations, nothing will ever be back to the old normal. There is now a new normal. Some losses take a part of your heart away and you have to learn how to move forward with that piece missing.
In healing from abuse, especially a lifetime of it, there is a lot to work through and even learn what you need to heal from. What have you experienced all your life you didn’t even know wasn’t normal? Often you will not heal at the rate someone else thinks you should. People get frustrated with you. This has happened in my life quite a few times. I’ve gotten frustrated with myself many times. It does get old, but when I took a moment to pray and think about it, the timeline became clearer.
After Matt’s death, there was still active abuse in my life until early 2021. I was so busy trying to function during it that there wasn’t much time to try to heal from the past abuse. After the abuse had stopped, it took me about a year to get to the point where I wasn’t living on guard from any attacks that might come my way. There is no way I could have had the capacity to sort through and heal from the abuse while in the midst of it. It was just not possible for me.
So, in 2022, I was able to actually start chipping away at the abuse in my life and when I started going through the calendars, things got real. I sometimes feels like I’m right back in 1995 reliving it with Matt. Going to Asheville, NC, only added to the emotional turmoil since it was where we went on our honeymoon and came back to many times with his family and with friends. It wasn’t exactly a great time for me and I struggled to stay present with the people I was with on the trip. I failed miserably, but God did free me from the memories of Asheville and gave me clarity that there never really was anything good with Matt and me. Not really. But it helped because I also realized that any marriage Matt would have been in would have probably been a disaster. It wasn’t that I wasn’t enough or not worth loving. It was that I was married to an addict who did whatever he could to keep up appearances to the outside world, but self-destructed and took me down with him when he was home.
I’ve made a lot of progress in the last year and I’m thankful for it. The frustration I see in others towards my still working through this is hard to see. Worse yet, I’m not even able to explain it to them because, I guess, no matter what I say, they just see it as me being stuck and allowing Matt to dominate my life. However, I’m not. It’s just that I’m only now to the point of being able to start getting him out of it and working through it all. My timeline for healing has been way too long for some around me, but I can’t help that for them.
You can’t allow others to tell you how and when you need to heal. You have to do it in your own time. Listening to others and gauging whether you are stuck or not is important. You do not want to stay stuck! That is so difficult and it keeps you trapped. In the same vein, you can’t force healing to happen on a different timeline. You may have to mix up what you are doing to help get to different parts of the pain. The truth is, for some, it may be a lifetime of healing, but as long as you know you are healing and getting better over time, that is a success!
I pray your journey will take you to living the life you are supposed to live.
~ Joanna Lynn
