What If Healing Is Asking “What Did This Give Me?”

Ever notice how the loudest part of healing gets all the airtime while the quieter phase slips by unspoken? Today we sit in that softer space and trace a turning point: the moment the question changes from “what did this take from me?” to “what did this give me?” That small shift reframes a lost career, family tension, and the exhausting tenderness of caregiving into a fuller story that holds both cost and gift without denying either.

We talk candidly about leaving a dream job and the identity collapse that followed, then open the door to the complexity of caring for a parent with Alzheimer’s—anger when siblings don’t show up, grief layered on daily logistics, and the surprising moments that glowed anyway. From kitchen dances and long walks to the sacredness of routine, we reflect on how presence, patience, and humor became hard-won skills. This isn’t spiritual bypassing; it’s doing the deep work until the body is ready to see more. The lessons had to ring true in lived experience, not just in a stack of underlined books.

Panning for gold becomes our working metaphor. Early on, the pan is all mud—resentment, fatigue, shock. Keep shaking with therapy, boundaries, truth-telling, and rest, and flecks begin to appear: resilience, self-forgiveness, radical acceptance, a more generous definition of love. We reclaim the story in its wholeness, honoring both the debris and what glitters beneath it. If you’re revisiting old chapters, try the gentler inquiry and hold whatever answer arrives with care. Subscribe, share this with someone in the thick of it, and leave a review telling us the gift you found inside a hard season.

Transcript

Naming The Quiet Phase Of Healing

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Hello and welcome back to the Spiritual Shit Show. My name is Julie Wynne, and today we're going to be talking about being able to find the gold within the story. There's this place in the healing journey, which is where I am currently finding myself. And it's this part that nobody really talks about. You know, we can talk about doing the shadow work and um, you know, the journaling that comes along with it, and then the healing and maybe a lot of therapy. And this space where I'm at, it's not the beginning. It's not the part where everything hurts. I've already done that. It's not where I'm naming the pain for the first time. It's not where I am sitting in the truth bucket of it all. It's not even in the middle where the deep work and the deep unraveling and the deep transformation happens, the tears. It's this quieter place. It's softer, it's more subtle. It's this place where you start to realize I don't want to live inside the pain story anymore. And for a long time, my healing looked like untangling the story of what happened to me. When I left my business in 2016, the story I carried for years was this happened to me. This was really fucked up. My dreams literally were stolen from me. My life as I knew it was intentionally severed. And then when I was taking care of my dad who had Alzheimer's, which side note, it was the best, most rewarding, most like healing thing. It felt like um, I don't know, like taking care of my dad was the greatest honor of my life. Okay. And while I was doing it, I was also so angry because the other part of the story for me was my family's not helping me. I'm doing this alone. This is taking a toll on me and on my unit, my husband and my daughter. And nobody else in my family seems to be caring or wanting to participate in the care of my dad. So I uh cultivated a lot of anger and resentment to my other family members who didn't have the responsibility of being with my dad and caring for him and, you know, taking him to his doctor's appointments and all of that kind of stuff. And so even though I knew intellectually what a gift, especially taking care of my dad was, it was hard and it was exhausting. And so many times I just thought that this is so unfair that in most family units, the siblings come together in a joint effort, but that is not what happened. And that's the part that I want to talk about today, because where I am now in my healing, it's not about the rehashing about what happened to me. It's about asking a different question. And this is what I said, it just feels softer and more subtle. So the question is instead of what did this take from me? Because for so long, and it was like my dreams were taken from me, my career was taken from me, my money was taken from me and severed, my family unit was taken from me, my um my health in so many ways with taking care of my father, you know, really put a toll on my health. Which side note, I have so much compassion for caretakers, like so much compassion for caretakers. You just don't really know how hard it is until you actually do it. So anyway, so instead of, which for so long I sat in, what did this take from me? Now I am seeing and asking myself, but what did this give me? And instead of feeling stripped by these experiences, how can I really look at it all from a different frame, a different point of view, hopefully one from love, and see what did this actually give me? And I think this is one of the most important and tender parts of the healing journey because part of healing isn't just releasing pain, and it's definitely not bypassing, bypassing into the space of it's okay, we're just gonna look at the positive, because I needed to dance with the anger. I needed to dance with the resentment, I needed to dance with the truth of what was. It's like that saying the only way out is through. So the anger and the resentment, and you know, even sometimes the victimhood statements, those were all part of going through it. And now that I can see that the healing just isn't, again, it's not releasing the pain, it's learning how to see the gift that was woven into it. And the one thing that I know about spirit is spirit is subtle, spirit is patient, spirit is kind, and it will wait for you to be ready to see it. And if I'm being honest, I've been a little stubborn on my spiritual path. I used to joke that I take all spiritual lessons kicking and screaming. There's a part of me that wanted to figure it out on my own, not because I didn't believe the teachings that I've read and the thousand self-help development spiritual books that I have on my library shelf, but because there's a part of me I think that wanted it all, the lessons, the experience, I wanted it to ring true in my body. I wanted to know what it was like to have things fall apart. What is that to shift out of a career? What is that to courageously want to learn a little bit more about yourself? What is that like to have to really learn self-forgiveness, forgiveness of others, radical acceptance? Like, what does this mean to have freedom? What does this mean to be taken care of? What does this mean to not have a career? All scary, hard things. And what I'm realizing now is that this next phase of healing is about going back gently to the moments that once felt incredibly unfair. Oh, and I had so much anger around it all and hurt and pain. But allowing myself to go back to these moments and letting myself see them differently. Especially with my dad. Bringing my dad, who was deep into his Alzheimer's, into my home and caring for him full time was one of the hardest things I've ever done. And at like I said, at the time I was so angry, I felt alone, unsupported. I felt like everything was on my shoulders. And yes, we made beautiful memories, but there was also grief layered on top of grief, layered on top of grief and confusion. And now when I look back, I see the gift. What a gift it was to know my dad in a way I never had before. What a tender, beautiful gift. I was gifted honored to care for my dad at the end of his journey. What a gift it was to take him on walks and to dance with him and to feed him and to smile and laugh. He was so funny. And really, what did it give me? It gave me an opportunity to learn how to love deeply. It gave me an opportunity to heal parts of myself I didn't even know needed healing. It gave me an opportunity to truly see my dad, to honor him. Even now, when I look at my hands, I'm like, wow, I really have my dad's hands. But what an honor it is to shift from um pain from childhood. I mean, my dad was always great, but you know, there's just things that everybody kind of dances with as far as healing. And the gift that I got of being with my dad almost full time for the past two years or the last two years of his life, it it allowed me to be able to really know him and honor him and to love these parts of myself that I know I inherited from my dad. We also have so many joy-filled memories. I was gifted a tenderness for life, an understanding of how fragile and sacred it is. And none of that erases how hard it was, but it does complete the story, and it gives me an opportunity to be filled by the experience and not stripped by it. Healing, I like to think is like panning for gold. You keep shaking the pan, you keep shaking the trauma, you keep shaking the story, you keep shaking the debris for as long as it's needed. And at first, all you see is dirt, mud, rocks, the heavy things. But you keep shaking, and eventually there it is. That tiny glimmering fleck of gold. The healing isn't about the debris, it's about what remains when the debris falls away. And this is the space that I am in now. Every shadow holds a seed of light, every experience carries love woven through it, even when we couldn't see it at the time. And part of reclaiming your story is reclaiming it in its wholeness. Not the pain, not the loss, but the love, the growth, the gift. So if you are in a season of shedding, if you are revisiting old stories, maybe the invitation isn't to analyze them again, maybe it's to ask, What did this give me? And to let yourself hold that answer with tenderness. Because healing isn't about what you release, it's also about what you reclaim.