A challenging aspect of working with patients is adjusting their expectations of healing. Many assume, or desperately wish to believe, that healing means feeling less pain every day. Telling them that healing itself contains pain and brings a different kind of injury can be difficult. Let’s call these adaptive injuries: injuries that actually indicate that healing is taking place.
Let's listen to Elena. The first night after leaving her marriage, she slept with the hallway light on. There was no one to criticize how she folded towels, question why she smiled at a message, or ask whether her dress was “appropriate for a mother.”
For 16 years, her husband, Mark, corrected her stories at dinner, laughed when she expressed an opinion—very often in front of their families and friends. He called her sensitive whenever she cried. After arguments, he could ignore her for days.
She learned to rehearse conversations before speaking. She deleted harmless texts to avoid interrogation. She stopped seeing friends who “put ideas in her head.” Eventually, she believed the problem was her inability to keep him happy.
In therapy, she at first wanted techniques to communicate better. Instead, she discovered how much of her marriage revolved around anticipating Mark’s reactions. Her therapist did not instruct her to leave but they explored her fear, her financial dependence, and the difference between compromise and coercive control. Six months later, she signed a lease on a small apartment.
She imagined freedom would feel like breathing after years underwater. Instead, she found herself crying in supermarket aisles because she could not decide what cereal to buy. Without Mark's approval or objections, even trivial decisions felt dangerous.
When you leave the darkness, the first thing that hurts is the light.
Their friends stopped calling. Some believed Mark’s account that therapy had made her selfish. Others preferred not to choose sides. The family home remained his; her daughtet, Lucy, moved between two addresses, carrying a schoolbag that never seemed unpacked.
One Sunday, she refused to leave her father’s house. “Dad says you broke the family because you wanted to be happy,” she told her mother over the phone.
Elena wanted to tell her about every humiliation, every silent dinner, every apology extracted from her. But Lucy was a child, not a witness she could summon to defend herself.
In therapy she asked, “If healing is supposed to save me, why has it cost me everyone?”
What Elena mourned was complicated: Mark’s good mornings, the holidays, their shared jokes. She missed having someone to call when the car broke down. She missed the family photographs in which everyone appeared happy. She even missed the version of herself who could believe the marriage would improve if she tried harder. And she felt ashamed of missing him.
Her therapist told her, “Leaving a prison doesn’t necessarily mean you enter freedom. Sometimes you enter a bigger prison labeled ‘freedom’ whose rules are unknown to you, and you miss the smaller prison. However, one day, you wake up and notice that stops. That is the day you know you are free.”
Over time, she began to understand that attachment does not disappear when someone recognizes mistreatment, and that recovery doesn't guarantee immediate peace.
Therapy introduced its own difficult work. As Elena learned to notice anger, she sometimes snapped at Lucy. When she started saying no, she occasionally mistook every request for a threat. Freedom was unfamiliar, and her first attempts to use it were imperfect.
A year later, Lucy came to the apartment and asked if they could bake a cake. Elena opened a cupboard stocked with ingredients she had chosen herself. The daughter who once watched her mother disappear now watched her make decisions, hesitate, and sometimes change her mind.
Elena still grieved the marriage, and some relationships remained fractured. Healing had freed her from one kind of injury while leaving her to bear others: the grief of an imagined future, the guilt of disrupting a family, and the frightening responsibility of becoming herself.
Recovery was teaching her that being visible could hurt, too.
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