The Real Reason Healing Feels So Slow (It's Not Because You're Doing It Wrong)

You've rested. You've named the anxiety.

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You've looked at the burnout pattern honestly.

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And some days it still feels like nothing has changed. I want to say this clearly before we go further. That does not mean you're doing it wrong.

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It means healing has never was never going to move in a straight line. and

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nobody told you that going in. Today, to close out the series, I'm talking about

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why slow is not the same as stuck and how to actually recognize progress that doesn't look like progress yet.

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There are three things I want to talk about to close out the series. First, why healing was never going to be fast, no matter how hard you worked at it.

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Second, what real change actually looks like while it's happening, which is usually nothing like what we expect. And

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third, how to recognize it's working even on the days it doesn't feel like anything is.

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First, healing was never going to be fast. Everything we've covered in this series, rest, anxiety,

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burnout, safety, lives in the nervous system. And the nervous system does not change on your timeline. It changes

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through repetition, through accumulated evidence, through hundreds of small moments where your body quietly updates

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what it believes is true. That is a biological process, not a motivational one.

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Expecting it to move fast is like expecting a broken bone to heal in a week because you really want it to. The

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wanting doesn't set the pace. The body does.

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Second, what real change actually looks like. It rarely looks like a breakthrough. It looks like noticing you

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paused half a second before saying yes to something you would have agreed to instantly a year ago.

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It looks like catching the anxious spiral one thought earlier than you used to. It looks like a bad day that used to

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take a week to recover from now only takes 2 days. None of that feels like a finish line.

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It feels like almost nothing. But almost nothing repeated enough times is exactly how a nervous system rewires itself.

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And third, how you know it's working.

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You look backward, not forward. Not am I fully healed yet, but compared to last

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to a year ago, does my body respond differently to the same kind of stress.

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That comparison is where the evidence actually lives. Healing isn't a doorway you walk through and arrive on the other

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side. It's a direction. If you're facing that direction and moving even slowly,

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even with setbacks, that is the whole thing working exactly as it's supposed to.

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And I want to talk about what this was for me.

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And I look at a lot of different elements. And part of what I dealt with was I had a water loss

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at my previous home and I was a mess. I was a total mess. I didn't know how to

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deal with anything. I I pretty much collapsed. I couldn't move forward. I couldn't really work. I couldn't think.

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I couldn't do a lot of things because it was too much. My house was in disarray.

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I had asbestous removal being done because it had to because it was a water loss and the house was full of asbestous. I mean, it was just a nightmare for me for several months.

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When I bought this house, we had an we had a water we had water penetration from a very bad storm that we had. I

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didn't know how to deal with that yet either. I was better, but I wasn't quite ready for it. And what I noticed is that

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I was going to stay happy regardless of what was going on because that was the MMO that I was choosing was I'm going to

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be happy no matter what. And I was happy. I just didn't know how to deal with it. And I put my head in the sand.

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I'll admit that. But I did also try to get quotes on what it would take to fix it.

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And I told the guy to um take a hike because at $25,000 that wasn't going to happen. and he wouldn't have fixed the

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problem anyways because he was in the wrong place of where it was supposed to be to begin with. So, I trusted my intuition.

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I felt better and I eventually dealt with it the way I needed to deal with it. And it did take some time to do it.

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When the water heater broke, no, then my father died. Okay, that's when the nervous system really kicked in and that

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is when everything shifted for me because it was a very complicated situation. I mean, how do you handle a

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perpetrator? You know, all of a sudden the first thing I realized is my shoulders are dropped. I'm in a better place. I'm going, "Oh, I'm free to walk

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about the cabin." And I didn't even know that I was bracing myself on that. I thought I had gotten over

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that because we were estranged. It was perfect that we were estranged. I didn't have any issues with it. And I kept

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But I that was when I really paid attention to the body in a way that I have never experienced in my life because I just figured it was that way.

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And how many times it's like, well, I can just get through this, you know, just grit your teeth and plow through it. And that's how I've always handled

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things. I had boundary issues that you know when I finally started to accept you know it's time to do boundaries and

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I was reminiscing that it was in Chicago in 2008 was the

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first time that I established a boundary and I listened to somebody just scream at me about how I wasn't supporting

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people. I wasn't I was being witchy and all these things and I just sat there

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and I wouldn't say anything. I wouldn't defend myself. I wouldn't do anything. I just let her rambled on because I knew

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what was going on. I knew that I was not excuse me. I was not in a safe place.

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I knew what was happening. there were darker forces around me and I knew that and I'm trying to protect people

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and the person that she claimed that I hurt her feelings or whatever it was that she said to me at that point I reached out and asked and she's like

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what? No, I never said that or felt that. So, I knew it was all a lie and it was okay.

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I also realized at that time that when she did that, she I think it was a month

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or two later, she comes back and a psychic had told her cuz I guess I was brought up,

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excuse me, that I was that she needed to back away.

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I was in the middle of something and I was trying to protect the people around me. So she did and she actually told me all this and I just looked at her and didn't say anything or do much.

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What I came to realize more today probably than I did then and throughout

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the last what 10 20 years from the book was that

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what she was wanting was she was hanging on to me for dear life.

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I was hanging on to myself for dear life and I have always been viewed as the rock of Jialter and I saw that and I understood it. Didn't like it but I

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understood it. I don't know why I created that for myself but it was now I look back and it had to do with

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protecting myself and trying to stay safe when I was a child. So I I understand a lot of things. I mean the clarity is unbelievable right now.

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When my mother died, she called she called me or I called her and she and I

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told her and she listened and I never heard from her again and that was okay.

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And I realized at that moment like today that

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when I set that boundary and even though I didn't know she was hanging on to dear life for me cuz if I was falling that means she was already

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drowning and when I set that boundary and we we get guilt we get shame we get

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all these things around the boundary that we put up.

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Maybe sometimes when you set up a boundary, it's so both of you aren't drowning.

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And that was pretty profound for me to to put into a thought process today because

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it makes sense. I mean, you can't hang on to somebody and expect them to make your life right. That was not my job. It

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was never my job. And yet, that's what I did. I was trying to make everybody's life right at the sacrifice of me. So

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boundaries became a big deal. But it also added to the nervous system where I was always braced because I figured if I'm taking care of everyone else,

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they'll leave me alone. That's how I always looked at it. I didn't realize I was compounding over and over and over

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and over again of what was going on. And when my father died and it was complicated and all this whirlwind of

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emotions going on that I couldn't even begin to comprehend what was going it was like a tsunami inside my body and people are like how you doing it's

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complicated and that's all I knew to say because it was like when they asked and be like yeah we're still having a tsunami inside.

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I didn't cry. I didn't care that he died.

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I was glad that he finally died. He needed to die. He was an a raging alcoholic and he was miserable and he died alone and I knew that. I predicted

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that in my 20s that nobody was going to be around the day he died and nobody was around the day he died. Nobody cared. He

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had alienated so many people because he was just creepy and that's all I can say about it. He was creepy.

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But I still had to deal with a nervous system that I didn't even know was out of control. And yes, I got angry. I went

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through the stages of grief. I got angry. I got a lot of things. And what I ended up doing and the the magic that

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was happening around at the same time was profound and I was calming down and I was feeling better.

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Then I decided to take this do this 90day detox. What was I thinking?

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I needed to do it. And it was perfect because again, what did this do? It activated the nervous system.

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So, here I am. I My nervous system is off the charts. I'm seeing that I used my wine to have a glass of wine to keep

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the edge off because I still had an edge. And I didn't understand why I had that edge, but I still had an edge. And

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being on this detox really got me to see it. It forced me to stop. It forced me to calm down. I had a doctor who I could

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talk to who was explaining some things to me. Not that we talked about the nervous system so much, but he understood what was happening and that this was another element of the detox.

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And I'm like, "Okay." So, I stopped. I stopped complaining. I stopped wanting wine. I stopped wanting everything. I thought, "Okay, I'm just going to live

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through this. I'm going to do what I need to do for whatever reason I need to do this." So, I did.

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The detox comes to an end. I have a broken water heater. And again, it was, "Oh my god, what is going on?" But see,

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instead of falling, putting my head in the sand or anything, excuse me.

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I was like, I'm going to call a plumber.

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S's cleaning up the water and we just were like mice just scattering. That's what it felt like that we just both took

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what we had to take. Now, that didn't mean our nervous system was in any good place because we were both when we got like the crisis was over. We got the new water heater.

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We were just both of us were out of it. I mean, we talked about it. We felt it.

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We experienced it. He's leaving for Texas for a month. He's nervous. I'm nervous. And I had to stop complaining

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about that too cuz I was pretty complainy about it. I really would just felt it was really bad decision to go a

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month. But you know what? It was the best thing he did cuz I finally surrendered and said, you know, there's a reason he's choosing to do this, whatever that reason is. And I wasn't

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afraid to be alone and I wasn't afraid of any of that. I just felt like I didn't know if I could hang on because

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of this water heater doing what it did and that desperation of oh my god what if what if what if which of course is a

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paradigm it's a pattern is what the nervous system did and I just breathe through it that's what I chose to do I just breathe through it so I spent that

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next month in May being still being quiet moving forward

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But I did a lot of resting, a lot of breathing, a lot of allowing whatever was going on in the nervous system to come up, old thought forms, old

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everything. And that's what I chose to do. And in that is when I discovered

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peace. Uh there was a sense of peace in my body that I never had before. And it was almost kind of

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like, whoa, what is this? And you're shaking my shoulders going, wow, what is this? And it wasn't leaving. It was for real. And it was like, this is awesome.

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What I have discovered since May, cuz I've had issues with things going on in my life, and I can be a Tasmanian devil.

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That's the kind word to say when I am.

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And I've noticed that the thought format, the thought programs that went along with that sometimes was,

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"Why are you doing this to me?" you know, pure victim mentality. I didn't feel victim mentality.

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What I did feel was I let my anger and frustration out on the people that it deserved to be.

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Instead of, you know, kicking the dog, killing the cat kind of thing and tearing up S. I I didn't do any of that.

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I took my frustration out on the people that it needed to be taken out on.

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But I also noticed that the angst that I would feel in

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days, I mean like weeks when I talked about that it would take weeks for me to calm down on something like this and I'd be just turning in my head, you know, over and over and over and again.

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That didn't happen anymore either. And I had another situation. I still get a little cranky, don't get me wrong. I

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still, you know, cuz I realize that the way the world is, there are moments that I get a little nervous and

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but it's okay because I'm aware of it. And so yesterday, I was on the phone with my

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mortgage company and what I've discovered and I started getting cranky and I realize I start getting cranky with people when they're not answering my question.

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I get very upset with that. It's like I asked a simple question and I expect an answer. Not going down some pipeline

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that I have have no idea what she's talking about. And I said, "Why are you talking to me like this? I what does this have to do with the question I just

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asked?" So, I started getting very angry. And she's like, "Well, I'm going to hang up." And it's like, "No, actually, you're not going to hang up and you are not going to do any of this.

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And you're going to explain to me what I'm asking. That's all I'm asking you to do is to tell me what's going on." So,

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she finally decided to stop and move into answering my question. And then she

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said, "Well, you know, I had to go to the other screen to do blah blah blah blah blah." And I'm like, "That's fine, but you didn't tell me that you're talking about something I have no idea

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what you're talking about when I'm asking why, and you're down some rabbit hole that makes no sense to the question

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of why." So anyways, we got it worked out and she and I apologized. I said, you know, I

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just apologized. I said, "I'm sorry that I got cranky, but you know, some days I can't take it and you're going down a rabbit hole. I didn't even know what

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that you weren't listening." And so I know that I still get very upset when people don't listen to me. I get that. I get that. I still have issues because

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that seems to be something that happens a lot. Like people are so preoccupied and busy

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that they don't really stop long enough and listen to what somebody is saying or asking.

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And I'm being calm as calm as I can be when that happens.

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And I don't want to come from a place of anger and I don't want to come from a place of frustration. But you know when somebody doesn't do what you're asking or listening to you and they're just

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reading a script because apparently in our society today problem solving if it's not on a piece of paper they don't know how to solve it.

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I I don't understand that because I was always problem solving. If somebody called and had an issue at work I would go out and get the answer. It may take me all

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day but I got the answer for them to the best of my ability. I didn't care if they liked it or didn't. I got an answer. I answered their question and

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they would be angry and they would be upset and they'd be frustrated on the phone and I would say, "Stop. Just stop.

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I need you to calm down and tell me what you want." And I would take it and I would re read it back to them. And I said, "I don't have an answer for this

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right now. Let me call you back. Give me your name and number. I will call you back as soon as I have an answer." And they would call them down. They would

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tell me. I would do everything. And I would call them back. and they just about fell over and died because I called them back

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because I wanted them to hear. I wanted to help them.

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And so if our society goes back and you know and I look at it now, I mean you look at the world and the world is insane. Everybody's nervous system is

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off the charts. I mean we got so much light. We've got out of control inflation. We have corporate greed. we have, you know, all these potential wars

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and everything is going on and it's too much for people. And that's why it's time for us to come back and take back

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our power. And the only way we take back our power is that we

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stop and breathe and go back to what's important. Because what's important is

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not how much money you make. It's not how many cars you have or any of that.

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It's about you being happy with you, you loving you, you finding the gifts that you're here to do and bring it to the world. And you're here for your family

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and friends, you know, where they bring you joy. Bring them back into your life rather than just this doggy dog and cutthroat stuff.

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And I think that's the biggest thing is that the way this world is I my capacity was shot.

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It's still not 100% but you know what I can keep moving even if I'm not at 100% capacity because this part the internal

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part of me is expanding. It's like I can do this and I don't have to have a glass

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of wine to get through it. I don't have to hide. I still do because I like it. I

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like being alone, but I don't feel like I have to do it to protect myself now. I do it out of choice. So, I'm getting a

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lot of things done. I mean, this this week, I've had all sorts of weird things happen and I've gotten so much done in the last two weeks. It's blowing my mind

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how much I've got done because it was I took the time for me. Everything always gets done. And what's interesting about

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what is happening now for me is that it's like I'm in alignment in a way I've never been in alignment. Like all of a

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sudden all these things I've been doing and creating and developing and wanting to get done, it's all happening starting

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October 1st. Like I'm in the final days of everything, you know, and it's exciting and it's like I didn't plan it

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this way. It just happened that way. But there's such a divine timing when we can stop, take care of ourselves, listen to

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our intuition, be alone with ourselves, breathe. And everything that I give to

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you on this podcast, I use and it kicks my butt. There are days

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when it just kicks my butt and I just laugh because I had no idea that something that simple can be that profound. And I'm still a high achiever.

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That is probably never going to change.

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But it's how I operate within it now that has changed where there's a peace inside. There's a calm inside. I'm not chasing after the next um what is it?

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The next carrot. I'm not chasing after that. I'm I'm focused in on who I am, what I want, what I want to say, what my

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message is. And it's taken a while to get there, folks. It really has. But see, now I know it and I understand it and I'm seeing so much more of it because of it.

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So if my capacity shot, my message hasn't changed and I'm not changing the next carrot.

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That's the difference because now that I'm in alignment, everything moves freely.

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So this is the last practice of the series and I want to make it count.

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So I want you to go ahead and close your eyes or soften your gaze. Whatever you can do right now.

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I want you to think about one thing that's genuine genuinely a little easier than it was a year ago.

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even something small. You don't have to prove it.

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You just have to let yourself notice it's true.

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Say out loud or silently to yourself, I am allowed to heal slowly.

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Slow is not the same as stuck.

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Say it one more time, but a little slower.

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I am allowed to heal slowly.

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Slow is not the same as stuck.

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Take a full breath in and let it out through your mouth

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until your stomach is completely emptied.

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You have already changed more than you're giving yourself credit for.

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This breath is proof you are still here, still doing the work,

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still moving in the direction that matters.

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That's the whole series. Start to finish.

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rest, anxiety, burnout, safety, and now patience with the pace of it all.

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None of this work has to happen alone, and it holds a lot better with support around it.

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That's exactly why I created the I am the light sanctuary is for real ongoing space to keep doing this slowre, real work together.

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I am offering a 7-day free trial to come in and check it out. If it feels good to you, I'd love to have you join. And if

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not, blessings on your way. But it's always here for you. And before I let

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you go, I want to share something I've been working on that I think is going to resonate deeply with you.

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If you've been listening to this show for any length of time, you know I talk a lot about the pattern of high achieving women who keep saying, "I've

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got it." Even when you're drowning, I don't need anyone. I should be able to handle this.

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I don't want to be a burden.

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That voice, you know the one.

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This Friday, October 2nd, I'm releasing something I've never offered before.

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It's called the head heart switch. It's a 4-minute practice that teaches you to pause right in the middle of that

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automatic thought and ask yourself the question most of us haven't in years.

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What do I actually need right now? That's it.

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That's the whole switch and it changes everything. It's $9,4

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and it drops this Friday. I'll put the link in the show notes the moment it goes live.

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If you know a woman who's exhausted from holding it all together, share this episode with her. She needs this.

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I'll see you Friday for this month's final permission slip and I'll see you back here in October for what's next.

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This is Kathleen Flanagan and you don't have to do this alone.