Dear Lily:

I understand you feel the way you feel, but our feelings don’t always indicate reality. In the very beginning our feelings indicate reality: we feel scared because we really are in danger, we feel hurt because someone really hurts us.

Later on in life, following the early years, our feelings often do not indicate reality: we feel fear when there is no danger, we feel hurt even when no  one is hurting us. You feel that you “cannot recover from the damage”, this is a feeling that does not indicate reality. In Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) this is called Emotional Reasoning. It is a category of distorted thinking, believing that what we feel necessarily indicates reality.

There may not be a complete recovery from what you experienced. There is none for me, a living after as if significant damage did not occur. But there is a whole lot of healing available. Healing is a power in nature. If you walk in the woods, you will see those bent, or broken trees that Margarita mentioned and you will see that although the trees broken remain bent, there is a whole lot of growth happening after the break.

In nature, if a plant or an animal gets injured, healing immediately starts happening, right after the injury. Same for us, if we avail ourselves to that healing process.

anita