The Gift You Are Trying to Get Rid Of

So much of the healing world is organised around getting rid of things.

Fixing what's broken. Removing what's wrong with us. Clearing the blocks, releasing the trauma, healing the wound, as though the goal of a life is to arrive at some smooth and finished version of yourself with all the difficult parts sanded away. I understand the appeal. When something inside you has caused pain, the most natural wish in the world is to be rid of it.

I've come to believe this approach quietly works against us.

What You Resist Tends to Persist

Whatever you try to get rid of tends to get stronger, because you are feeding it your attention. The very act of fighting a part of yourself keeps that part central. You end up living in a low-grade war with your own nature, organised around the belief that who you are is not okay, that there is something wrong with you that needs to be corrected before you can be at peace.

I've become suspicious of healing when healing means "I want this gone." Not because the pain isn't real, and not because growth isn't possible, but because the war itself becomes the problem. You cannot hate yourself into wholeness. The harder you push against a part of you, the more of your life it occupies.

There is a different way to relate to the parts of us we were taught to call broken. It begins with the recognition that most of those parts were not malfunctions. They were intelligent responses to the circumstances we found ourselves in, and many of them became the very capacities we now rely on most.

The Sensitivity Was Forged Somewhere

Think about the people you know who are exquisitely attuned to a room. The ones who feel the shift in someone's mood before a word is spoken, who sense tension before it surfaces, who know how to bring calm into a tense moment and create harmony where there was friction.

That sensitivity rarely comes from nowhere. More often than not, it was forged in an environment where reading the emotional weather was not a gift but a necessity. Where a child learned to track the people around them closely because safety depended on it. The attunement that looks like a natural talent in adulthood was, at the start, a survival skill.

I'm not saying the difficulty was good. I would never romanticise what people have been through, and I'm not interested in tidy stories that make hard things sound noble. But I am saying that the capacity that grew out of it is real, and it is yours, and it does not have to be thrown out along with the pain that produced it.

This is the heart of it. You can honour that something hurt, and at the same time refuse to let it be the end of the story. The two are not in conflict. Pain can become purpose. Not by pretending it didn't happen, but by letting what it gave you serve the life you're building now.

Two Kinds of Trauma

When people hear the word trauma, they usually think of the things that happened that should not have happened, the violations, the events that clearly left a mark. Most of us understand that kind.

The kind I work with most is harder to see. It's the trauma of neglect, the things that did not happen that should have. The attunement that wasn't there. The sense of being deeply felt, held, seen, and understood that some of us simply did not receive consistently over the years we needed it. This kind of trauma is difficult to detect precisely because it is an absence rather than an event. There's no single moment to point to. There's just a gap where something should have been.

One of the strange effects of neglect is that it tends to produce people who are extremely self-sufficient. If, early on, you learned that the attunement and care you needed weren't reliably available, a sensible part of you decided not to need them. You became independent, capable, sovereign, the kind of person who gets things done and doesn't lean on anyone. From the outside it looks like strength, and in many ways it is.

The difficulty is that you can't grieve what you never knew you were missing. If you adapted early to an absence, you often have no idea the absence is there. You just experience yourself as someone who doesn't really need much from others, and you build a whole life on top of that adaptation without ever questioning it.

Alchemy, Not Removal

So the work, as I understand it, is not removal. It's alchemy.

We take the things we were taught to see as dark, wrong, or broken, and rather than trying to cut them out, we embrace them, integrate them, and let them transform into something valuable. The sensitivity becomes a tool. The independence becomes a strength that no longer runs the whole show. The pain becomes a source of depth, creativity, and connection rather than something we are forever managing or hiding.

This is a different orientation to a life. The question stops being "what is wrong with me and how do I fix it" and becomes "what is here, and what might it be for." When you stop fighting your own nature, an enormous amount of energy that was going into the war becomes available for living.

And here is the part that surprises people. When you turn toward the parts of yourself you've been resisting, the past does not stay buried, but you meet it differently. The old material comes up, as it always will, but you meet it with resource rather than dread. You're no longer trying to outrun it. You're strong enough now to turn around and look at it, and in the looking, it begins to change.

We Don't Do This Alone

There's one more thing I want to name, because it matters and it's easy to miss.

Most of the wounding I've described happened in connection. In families, in early relationships, in the spaces between us and the people who were meant to hold us. And it makes sense that the repair happens in connection too. We are not designed to do this work alone in a room. Something becomes available in the presence of others that we cannot reach by ourselves, and the reconnection we're often most afraid of is also the thing we most need.

That's why I do almost all of my work in groups. Not because solitary reflection has no value, but because the deepest healing of a relational wound tends to happen relationally. We were hurt in connection, and it's in connection that we heal. The circle gives us back something we were not sure was safe to want.

Where to Begin

If any of this resonates, the invitation is simple, and it's not really about doing anything. It's about a shift in how you hold yourself.

Notice the parts of you that you've been quietly at war with. The traits you apologise for, the sensitivities you wish you didn't have, the ways you've decided you are too much or not enough. And rather than asking how to get rid of them, ask where they came from, and what they might have been protecting, and what they might become if you stopped treating them as the enemy.

That turn, from fixing to embracing, is where the real work begins.