When it comes to our mental health and our life, many of us are always looking to improve on ourselves and work on becoming the best version of ourselves. While we want to be happy, healthy, and loved, we are always trying to “fix” the parts of us we feel are broken. We oftentimes seek help to get that done .
While many of us go to therapy, we are seeking tools to work through our problems and issues.
Therapists are always talking about healing and growing, sometimes looking into our past and growing from there to get to a place of better mindset.
However, “healing” is not always what people think it is.
Some people think that healing has to happen overnight, is linear, or works in one specific way. In fact, it’s never that way. Healing is something that takes a different process for everyone who wants to do so.
No matter how hard we try, we can never be “perfect.”
People are constantly looking at others hoping to be just like them, seeing them as “perfect” versions of who they want to be. Sometimes, this means forgetting that we all have struggles and issues we deal with.
So often, we idolize healing.
We look at others on social media, see how happy they are, and hope that we can be that person or get there ourselves. We often neglect that they have their own bad days, too.
Instead of accepting our own, we start to push ourselves to become someone we are not.
No matter how hard we try, we cannot escape who we are deep down inside. We are one person, with all of our good, and bad, in different parts of ourselves.
One therapist on TikTok recently opened up online to share something else about healing that everyone should know.
Kobe Campbell , LCMHC, shared a TikTok video online that spoke about what healing truly is. So many people think that healing is becoming this “best version” of who you are. When we don’t get there fast, we feel bad.
Campbell said healing is totally the opposite of that.
Instead of working on becoming the “best version” of yourself, the therapist said that healing is really letting the “worst version” of yourself be loved instead. Being true to who you are.
Trying to be the “best” version of ourself can cause harmful restraints on ourselves in some ways.
“Some of us have turned healing into becoming this super perfect version of ourselves; that is bondage. That is anxiety waiting to happen.”
Campbell said healing is really letting every version of yourself be loved.
“Healing is saying: ‘Every single version of me deserves love, deserves tenderness, deserves grace.’ When we get to a place where we can see and empathize with every version of ourselves, even the version of ourselves that we can sometimes be ashamed of, that’s when we know that we are walking in a path of healing,” she said.
People online really enjoyed and resonated with the advice she gave.
Many online said that they had to cut ties with people who felt you always had to be “perfect.” “I had to unfollow people who thought healing was becoming perfect- I’m trying to heal the perfectionist, not become a new version of it,” one person said.
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Others shared they had never heard it being spoken in such a way before and it really opened their eyes.
Many TikTok users commented on Campbell’s video sharing that they did not ever see healing in this way and it changed their perspective on how they see themselves.
Some shared that we have to stop looking at ourselves as “good versions” or “bad versions.”
“My therapist told me to take the parts I need and release the parts that served their purpose. Not good/bad. More necessary and no longer necessary,” shared another person.
Others pointed out how “healing” has become a different thing today in order for people to use it for their own good.
“Healing has become actual work that can now be monetized, promoted, and branded. It’s supposed to be about growth. That’s it. Loving every phase,” one person said.
Some even shared they had “disassociated” from their own trauma in order to heal.
For so long, they felt they had to push their trauma away and disassociate from it, instead of actively facing it and dealing with it. They felt like Campbell’s version of healing was way better than what they have done.
Sometimes, it’s helpful to hear it from someone else to see the light.
After hearing Campbell’s healing definition, it’s safe to say that we are all looking at healing in a different way. Sometimes, it’s just loving who we are, no matter how hard that can be sometimes.
