When Healing Is Too Slow for Those Around You
The hardest part isn’t always the pain. It’s the time it takes.
I always thought I had a happy childhood.
And in many ways, I did.
I looked forward to becoming an adult.
I imagined freedom, independence, clarity.
But nobody makes it out of childhood without a scar or two.
Some of those scars live on the surface.
You can name them.
You can point to them.
Others are buried deeper—under your skin, inside your chest, threaded into the way you respond to love, fear, abandonment, silence.
They don’t disappear
They resurface
Not to punish you
But to be witnessed
To be held
To be finally understood by the adult you have become
We say children are resilient
And they are
But that resilience often goes unnoticed because their language is different
Their grief, their confusion, their attempts to make sense of the world can get lost in translation
And when adulthood arrives, many of us are caught off guard
We built a present that felt manageable
And then the past showed up
Not as a memory
But as a symptom
As a tension in the body
As a repeated dynamic
As a fear we can’t name
There is this idea that life moves in one direction
That we are meant to grow forward
Achieve
Move on
Evolve
But my experience has been different
You go forward
And then back
You stay in place for a while
You find yourself repeating patterns
You stumble onto a grief you thought you buried
You fall apart even while holding everything together
Healing is not linear
It does not move at the speed of your ambition
Or your plans
Or other people’s comfort
And that, I think, is the hardest part for many of us
Not the pain itself
But the time it takes
The fact that it doesn’t follow your schedule
The way it disappoints people who want you to be better
Who say
You should be over this by now
You should be back to your old self
You should let it go
As if healing were a race
As if pain had an expiration date
As if grief were something you choose to keep
Sometimes the biggest obstacle to our healing
Isn’t what happened
But our resistance to the slowness of repair
The way we shame ourselves for not being farther along
The way the world mirrors that shame back at us
But healing is not a performance
It is a re-remembering of who you are
It is a dismantling
A rebuilding
And a permission to live in your own time
If it’s taking longer than you expected
You are not doing it wrong
You are moving at the speed of truth
And that kind of movement may not be visible
But it is real
And it is enough.
Adrian Molina is a trauma educator, somatic practitioner, and writer with over 20 years of experience supporting individuals and communities at the margins of traditional care. Born in Buenos Aires and now based in South Florida, he works one-on-one and in group spaces with people navigating trauma, grief, and transformation. He writes at Warrior Flow on Substack.
If you are curious about working together or collaborating, feel free to email me.