People love to romanticize healing. They’ll tell you it feels like peace, like sunlight breaking through the clouds, like finally breathing after being underwater for years. They’ll tell you that once you get sober, or cut out toxic people, or find therapy, or meditate long enough, you’ll feel free.
Nobody tells you the truth.
Healing doesn’t feel like peace. It feels like grief.
It feels like death. Like burying pieces of yourself, people you loved, illusions you clung to for survival. It feels like a long line of funerals you’re forced to attend, one after another, while people clap for you because you look better on the outside.
Betrayal Leaves Ghosts That Healing Can’t Erase
When people betray you, the damage doesn’t end when they’re gone. The betrayal lingers. It haunts. It twists the way you see the world.
When my therapist abused me, it didn’t just break trust in her. It cracked something deeper. I had walked into her office believing she was a safe place. I handed her my pain. My trauma. My brokenness. And she used it. Manipulated it. Exploited it. Stole from me.
That’s not something you “heal” from and feel better about. That’s something you grieve. Because it wasn’t just money that was taken. It was the illusion that people who claim to care always will. It was the comfort of thinking help was real. It was the belief that if I just showed up and trusted, I’d be safe.
Healing from betrayal is waking up every day to the ghost of the person you thought they were. It’s mourning a version of reality that never actually existed but that your body still longs for. It’s grief on top of grief, because you didn’t just lose a relationship. You lost a version of yourself that believed in something.
Sobriety Isn’t Joy. It’s Grieving the Life That Numbed You.
When I got sober, people celebrated me. They congratulated me like I’d just been handed freedom. They said I must feel amazing. But sobriety didn’t feel like a sunrise. It felt like burying myself alive.
Because the truth is, alcohol was killing me, but it was also comforting me. It was silence when my head was too loud. It was false confidence when I felt like disappearing. It was the thing that made social situations bearable, pain tolerable, trauma survivable.
Letting it go wasn’t a victory march. It was a funeral.
I had to grieve the nights where I could drown out the memories. Grieve the version of me who didn’t feel everything so sharply. Grieve the numbness that kept me standing when everything inside me wanted to collapse.
Healing through sobriety is grief because it forces you to live with everything you’ve spent years running from. You think you’ll feel free, but what you really feel is the weight of everything you avoided crashing down on you at once.
Losing Relationships When You Start Healing
Nobody talks about this part. Healing costs relationships.
I lost Carey. I lost friends who wanted the old version of me, the version who played along, who didn’t dig too deep, who didn’t force them to look at their own shadows. I lost family who were more comfortable with silence than with the truth. People left. Or I had to leave them. Either way, the result was the same: loss.
Healing didn’t mean reunion. It meant separation. It meant saying goodbye to people I thought would be in my life forever. It meant facing the reality that some people loved the broken version of me more than the rebuilding one.
And that is grief. Pure grief.
Because as much as we like to pretend healing is about “growth,” the truth is it’s also about loss. You don’t just heal yourself. You cut ties with illusions. And sometimes, those illusions were people.
Death Compounds Everything
And then there’s the grief that healing doesn’t prepare you for. The grief of death itself.
People die while you’re trying to put yourself back together. Friends. Family. People you thought you’d have more time with. Healing doesn’t stop the world from throwing more funerals at you. It doesn’t protect you from the reality that while you’re learning to breathe again, life still takes people you love away.
That kind of grief layers itself onto the grief of healing. It becomes heavier. Messier. More unbearable. And the world doesn’t pause for you to catch up. It keeps moving while you’re dragging death behind you, one more weight on top of the betrayal, the sobriety, the losses.
Healing Steals Comfort Before It Gives You Anything Back
Here’s the truth nobody advertises: falling apart is easier.
Falling apart doesn’t demand you to feel. Falling apart lets you numb. Falling apart lets you stay in denial. Falling apart lets you drown yourself in substances, in distractions, in silence.
Healing demands everything.
It asks you to feel the betrayal. It asks you to sit with the grief instead of running from it. It asks you to stay sober when every cell in your body wants to escape. It asks you to keep living after people you love are gone. It asks you to become someone new while the old you is still clawing to survive.
That’s why healing feels like grief. Because it is grief. It’s the loss of who you were, the loss of what you believed, the loss of who you thought would stay. It’s the loss of illusions that once kept you alive.
Why Healing Still Matters
So why do it? Why keep going if it hurts this much?
Because grief means you cared. Grief means something mattered. Grief means that even after betrayal, after addiction, after death, after loss — there’s still a part of you that refuses to give up.
And here’s what I’ve learned after crawling through hell: grief isn’t proof that you’re broken. It’s proof that you’re alive. It’s proof that you loved. It’s proof that you’re still capable of building meaning, even after everything tried to take it from you.
Healing may feel like grief. But it’s also survival. And survival, for people like us, is everything.
The Brutal Hope
I won’t lie to you. Healing doesn’t get easier overnight. Some days it still feels like I’m losing more than I’m gaining. Some days it still feels like I’m dragging betrayal, death, silence, and sobriety behind me like chains.
But I’ve been through hell. I’ve been betrayed by the people who were supposed to protect me. I’ve been manipulated by people who swore they cared. I’ve buried people I loved. I’ve lost relationships that once meant everything. I’ve numbed myself with addiction and clawed my way back into sobriety.
And the fact that I’m still here, writing this, is proof that grief isn’t the end. It’s the bridge.
Healing isn’t joy in the beginning. It’s mourning. It’s loss. It’s grief disguised as progress. But if you stay with it long enough, something shifts. The grief doesn’t disappear, but it changes. It becomes softer. It becomes something you carry instead of something that buries you.
And on the other side of grief, you start to find something you never expected: yourself.
Not the broken version. Not the silenced version. Not the addicted version. Not the betrayed version. The you that was always buried under the weight of all of it.
That’s the brutal hope.
Healing feels like grief because it is grief. But it’s also proof that you’re still alive enough to keep going.
—Cody Taymore
Kill The Silence
This arrived, showed up as the first post for me to read today, because it was meant for me to see it, read it and breathe through it. I'm right smack in the middle of this as I try to heal from my divorce, my daughter leaving home, the loss of my job (so I'm building a business) and now, the grief of my father laying in a hospice bed ready to leave this earth while his body holds on. My mother drowning in her sorrow since they were together for 56 years. She knows no life without him. Neither do I. All this while for the first time not using all the numbing things I've used in the past, food, alcohol, distraction, busyness, running away. It is brutal and I was just sitting here feeling so alone and thinking how do people do this? Where are the people who have lived through this? What do I do? And I know the answer. I do nothing. I feel it. I cry. I don't hide. And yes, I try to keep living the best I can. One foot in front of the other. Grief is something we don't talk about enough and I started talking to my mom about it yesterday, knowing what's coming for her. I'm also doing the Grief Recovery Handbook with my best friend right now to try to help me navigate these times. Above all, I want to say thank you for putting this into the world today so I don't feel so alone. It is truly a gift. My heart thanks you!
Thank you for speaking the truth. My first year of sobriety was hell. I felt raw, emotionally and physically. My divorce was healing but painful. There is joy after a time, but that can take decades. Still, I’d rather heal than not.