045: The Lies We've Been Told About Healing (And What Actually Heals Us)

All too often, we've been taught that healing means getting over it.

Getting over the divorce.
Getting over the betrayal.
Getting over the heartbreak.
Getting over the childhood wounds.
Getting over the disappointment.

But what if that's not what healing actually looks like?

In this deeply personal episode, Fredricka Davis explores a different perspective on healing...one that isn't about forgetting your past, but about changing your relationship with it.

Through stories from her own life, reflections on motherhood, and lessons she's learned over decades of coaching and helping others, she shares why your past doesn't have to define your future and how the meaning you give your experiences ultimately becomes your choice.

If you've ever found yourself carrying old hurts, wondering why they still surface, or feeling like you're supposed to be "over it" by now, this conversation is for you.

Because healing isn't about becoming someone who was never wounded.

It's about becoming someone who no longer lets those wounds determine who they become.

In This Episode You'll Learn

•  Why "getting over it" isn't a realistic definition of healing 
•  How changing your relationship with your past changes your future 
•  Why your hardest experiences can become roots instead of chains 
•  The difference between an experience and the story you continue telling yourself about it 
•  How your identity is shaped more by your choices than your circumstances 
•  A simple four-step framework for moving through emotional pain in a healthy way 
•  Why preparing ourselves and our children for life's storms is more powerful than trying to prevent them 

This Week's Reflection

What story have you been telling yourself that no longer serves the person you're becoming?

This Week's Reset

Take ten quiet minutes this week and journal through these three questions:

•  What experience in my life still carries more power over me than I want it to? 
•  What meaning have I been giving that experience? 
•  If I changed my relationship with it, how might my future begin to look different? 

Awareness is where healing begins.

Continue the Conversation

If today's episode resonated with you, I'd love to continue the conversation.

Visit FredrickaDavis.com to download your free Reset Guide, explore upcoming retreats and coaching opportunities, and join our free Limitless Living Community where women are learning to create lives that are rooted, resilient, and limitless.

Grab Your Free Reset Guide and more at www.fredrickadavis.com

Continue the conversation inside the here: Limitless Living community.

If this episode resonated with you, you can also send Fredricka a message through the Fan Mail link in the show notes. Your questions may be featured in a future episode.

And if you know someone who needs to hear this conversation, please share the episode with them.

Your reviews mean the world to Fredricka and help other women discover the show.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:37

Welcome back to the Limitless Living Podcast. I am your host, Frederica Davis, wellness expert, entrepreneur, speaker, coach, and creator of the Limitless Reset Method. Now, if you're new here, welcome. And if you have been listening for a while, thank you. It truly means more than you know that you choose to spend part of your day with me. This is Reinvention Saturday. And today, this is where we get to talk about yes, reinvention, but we also talk about identity, purpose, healing, and becoming. It's where we get to reconnect with ourselves and remember that no matter where we are in life, we always have the ability to write a new chapter. Today's conversation is one that has been sitting with me for quite some time, because I really think that one of the greatest lies we have ever been taught about healing is that healing means getting over it. And by that I mean getting over whatever hurt might be in there, whether it is divorce or betrayal or childhood hurts, traumas, pain, adult hurts, traumas, and pains, getting over heartbreak or loss or just disappointment. Because in my experience, that's just not what healing is. If you've ever loved somebody deeply, and if you've ever lost someone, if you've ever been disappointed by someone you trusted, then you already know something. You don't simply get over it. You grow with it, you grow around it. Those two things are very different than feeling like you have to get over it. So in my experience, healing isn't about becoming someone who no longer hurts. Healing is becoming someone who has changed their relationship with the hurt. Now that's a very different way of looking at things. So let me give you an example. Years ago, I was in one of the biggest relationships of my life. I love this man with everything I had. I truly believed we were building a future together. I believed we were going to spend the rest of our lives together and had this amazing vision for the rest of our lives. I, but somewhere along the way, his family's changed. Mine didn't. And if you have ever experienced that kind of heartbreak, you know exactly what I'm talking about. I found myself at that point kind of living in these two realities, you know. One minute I was in love deeply, deeply. And the next minute I was so stuck in grief and and the grieving of a relationship that I thought we had, one that I hoped would be a certain way one day. It was just an insane roller coaster of up and down and up and down. So if you can relate to any of this, I both loved and I grieved. I both hoped and I heard. And it's possible to live in these two different places. For a long time, I honestly thought that I had to choose one or the other and just stay in that, you know, either acknowledge the love, keep fighting, just don't give up, or acknowledge the disappointment and let go of the love, right? So, so my point to this is to remind you that it doesn't have to be an either-or, number one. We can live with and and is a big word, and you can literally remember all the good and remember all the hurt at the same time. And life really just doesn't work with the either-or because sometimes these things are true. Sometimes you have more than one thing that is true at the same time. You can love someone and still grieve what's missing. You can appreciate what's beautiful, but still mourn what never became a reality. Now, this is not all about relationships today, so bear with me here. But eventually, what happened for me was I reached a point where I had to ask myself a really important question. Was holding on to that hurt serving me? And was it really helping me build the future that I wanted? Or was it keeping me connected to a chapter that had already ended? Because here's the thing: even though the chapter ended, the love didn't just end that fast. So you don't just wake up one day and magically move on. You don't erase the dream, you don't erase the disappointments, you don't erase the heartbreaks. You choose your relationship with it. And that changes everything. Because had I stayed stuck there in the today it feels this way, tomorrow it feels that way, this hour it feels this way, and 10 minutes later it feels that way, I wouldn't have my daughter. I wouldn't have met my husband that I have now. I probably wouldn't be doing the work that I'm doing today. Not because the pain disappeared am I doing those things or having those things, but because I finally changed my relationship with the pain. So how do we actually, what does real healing look like? Because saying, oh, just move on or just let it go is not helpful. I don't care whether you are dealing with the loss of someone, a divorce, uh, a job loss. This can be a lot of things. People telling you to just move on, are you thinking you should just move on or just let it go? It really is not helpful. Healing is not pretending. Healing is not denying the feelings. Healing is not stuffing it down, burying it deeper and deeper until one day all of a sudden it explodes, or just simply starts bubbling up because it's so deep and it's so full that it can't take any more burying of anything. Healing starts by feeling the hurt, feeling the disappointment, feeling the pain, feeling the trauma. I know none of us like that. It's okay. I don't either. But it does start there. It starts by really allowing yourself to feel it. Not pretending that you're okay when you're not, not smiling when you're falling apart inside, not convincing yourself you should already be over it, but feeling it. Then when we name it, that begins the next level of power and shift. So naming it, is it disappointment? Is it grief? Is it abandonment? Is it rejection? Is it shame? Is it anger or fear? Because once you start naming something, you begin taking back the power that it has over you. Then comes the part most people skip. And this is where you decide. You decide what story you're going to continue telling yourself. Now, this is where your power really lives. Because we all have stories. Mine sounded something like, I'm not enough. People leave, I'm always the one who gets hurt, I'm always the one who gets left behind, I'm always the one who loves more. I could go on and on and on. Now, could those stories have been based on real experiences? Absolutely. In the moment that those stories came into my head, into my consciousness, could they have been true at that moment? Yes, they could have been true at that moment, and good chance they were. However, a real experience does not have to become a lifelong identity. Let me say that again. You can have a story like people leave, which likely came from a moment when somebody left you. Was that true then? Sure, it was true then. But does that have to be your story that you put on repeat over and over and over again? Nope, not at all. So you can have a story that's based on a real experience, but it's when you put it on replay that it becomes a lifelong identity. Now, these are not the same thing, but one painful chapter does not have to become the title of your entire life. At some point, you have to decide or you choose to decide, is this experience going to define me or is it going to develop me? Then comes the final step. You choose who this experience is going to help you become. Again, you choose who this experience, this feeling, this trauma, this pain, whatever it is that you've named, who is it going to help you become? Now we're talking about identity and we're talking about reinvention. And we're talking about it being your choice, and we're talking about bringing in your strength, power, and equilibrium again. Because your greatest disappointments, your biggest heartbreaks, your deepest losses, they absolutely become part of your story. The question is, what role are they going to play in the chapters that you have not yet written? So let me give you another way of looking at this. You've heard me talk before about trees. And I've just always loved trees. I grew up surrounded by them. To me, they've always represented strength and resilience and stability. And here's the thing: when storms come in, you can have, you know, gale force winds, and you can have driving pounding beat you on the back. Hard, hard rain. But a tree will survive because its roots have grown deep enough to hold it up. So it does not survive because it never experienced the pounding rain and the gale force winds. It survives because of the roots, because they've grown deep enough to hold them up. So I think we are a lot like that. With every disappointment, every heartbreak, failure, every loss or difficult season, we have the opportunity to allow it, to own it, to name it as part of our root system and integrate it. The question is whether those experiences actually become part of us, honestly, because when they happen, they instantly are part of us, whether we like it or not, whether we want them or not, they already have. The question is: will they become roots or will they become chains? This applies to traumas. This applies to a lot of things. Will they ground you or will they trap you? Now that is your choice. So when I became a mother, and and I've been a stepmother, a foster mother, an honorary mother, a four-legged mother, a mother to my mother, I mean, I can go on and on with motherhood. But when I became a mother, and especially with my daughter, like most moms, I'm betting if you're a mom and you're listening to this, you're going to relate. I wanted nothing more than to protect my daughter from everything. I just wanted to always have her be joyful and happy and light and free and beautiful and untainted and all these wonderful things. And I didn't want her to ever feel deep heartbreak. I didn't want her to be disappointed or to have to struggle. I wanted to protect her. I wanted to fix everything every single time. But, and yes, there's a but in this. I also knew that that would not serve her for her life. And as a mother, my greatest job, whether it's a hard one or not, sometimes, is to raise her to be this amazing human being who can stand on her own two feet, who knows how to navigate life, and yes, can feel joy and wonder and all these other things, but who knows how to handle the struggle, who knows how to move through life and understands that disappointment is part of life, failure is part of life, loss, all of these things, pain, it's all part of life. So when I parented her, and when I do now, too, uh, she's 21, and it never stops. I don't care how old they are, it never stops. Um, it just changes. Instead of me focusing on how do I protect my daughter from pain, I chose to focus on how do I prepare her to walk through it. Because here's the reality one day I won't be here. That's just reality. My real job isn't preventing every storm for her. My real job is helping her grow her own roots, deep, strong, vast, helping her understand that it's okay to hurt and it's okay to cry, and it's okay to be disappointed, it's okay to ask for help, it's okay to not have all the answers. And am I perfect at all of this? No, okay. Come on, ladies, are you? No one listening to this is perfect. This is what I focus on, and most importantly, I wanted her to know she never had to hide those things from me. Not because I could always fix them. Sometimes I can't. Not because I should always fix them either. Sometimes that would rob her of her growth. So it's the same for us. When we try to fix things, we try to bury things, it robs us of our growth. But with my daughter, I really wanted her to know she never had to carry any of it alone. Maybe one of the greatest things we can do as parents is not pretending that we've got it all together and not trying to look like we're perfect or not trying to be perfect, just trying to do our best that we can every day and allowing our children to see us heal, see how we move through things. Maybe it's allowing them to see us process life in healthy ways. And that means the hurt, the recovery, the reflection, the growth, and how we choose again. Because they are watching not just what we say, but they more importantly, most definitely, they are watching what we do. So are the people in your world that are around you. So the more I thought about this too, as I was preparing this podcast, I just kept thinking about this. And the way we approach healing applies to so many areas of our life. And this is not just about parenting, it's not just about relationships in our lives, it's about marriages, friendships, leadership, business, community, all of it. And imagine if you are a leader. What if you were the kind of leader that doesn't shame someone for making a mistake, but you actually help them learn from it? You help them own it, you help them understand it, you help them move through it and become better for it. Imagine being that kind of a friend or the kind that you know that can tell the truth to your friends without fear of judgment, or can tell the truth to your friends without without fear of them judging you. Imagine being the kind of spouse who creates enough emotional safety that the hard conversations become possible, or creating relationships where people don't have to pretend. And you can actually have the real deep, meaningful conversations. When I was in Costa Rica teaching at the retreat, it one of the most amazing things about being at a retreat is the connection and the open conversations where people just really have the real connections instead of that, you know, superficial. Hi, how are you? What's new with the kids? How's work? How's the weather? Kind of conversation that most of us have all around us in the world every day, even with the people that we're close to. That often tends to be what happens, right? So when we look at healing differently and healing ourselves differently, we leave an impact on those around us. And as I look back over my entire career, it's boldly obvious that I have worked to build a scenario of growth and safety and strength in a similar way. So when people walk into my wellness center, massage wellness and beyond, we are not just helping them feel better physically, have better health, or look better and so on. It's actually a career, uh what I've actually created is a place where people walk in and they can breathe. They can exhale, they can feel 100% seen and heard and have the real conversations, often deep real conversations that they can't they don't have with the people that are closest to them in their lives. Or they can just be in silence and be whatever it is in the moment that they need. So when somebody joins me for a retreat, it's the same, it's you know, a similar situation. I'm not there trying to erase their past. I'm there to help them change their relationship with it. So when I coach someone, I'm not trying to remove every one of your painful experiences that you've ever had. I'm helping you discover that those don't experiences do not have to define who you become next. I'm not there to fix every business problem you have or every life problem you have or every wellness problem you have. I'm there to guide and help you discover that those experiences don't have to define who you become next, that those problems do not define you. Those failures do not define you. I'm also not there to fix that. I'm there to guide you in knowing how to move forward and self-correct. Because healing isn't about removing the past, healing is about reclaiming your future. So here's what I want you to remember as I close this up: you do not erase your history. You can't just deny your history or deny what's happened to you. You don't erase heartbreak, you don't erase betrayal, you don't erase disappointment or grief or trauma. You can't erase loss. These things are part of your history. Whether we acknowledge them or not, they have become part of our story. So the choice is what kind of roots will they become? The goal is not to become someone who has never been wounded. And honestly, those wounds can be reopened even when you have challenged and changed that relationship and you've moved forward. And at those moments, it's another opportunity for you to redefine the relationship again and move forward again. It's nothing more than that. It's something to feel, it's something to go through that process again with and to grow from. The goal is to become someone who no longer lets the wound decide who you are. So this week I want you to ask yourself three questions. Question number one What story have I been telling myself that no longer serves me? Even if it was true in the moment, this is gonna be likely a story that you have on repeat. Number two, what kind of roots are my hardest experiences in my life creating? And number three, who am I choosing to become because of them? Because that's where healing begins. It's not by getting over your past, but by choosing the relationship you are going to have with it moving forward. If today's conversation resonated with you, I would love to hear from you. Come join us inside the free limitless living community for women who are becoming the links are in the show notes, and this is where we continue conversations just like this every week. You can also visit me at fredericadavis.com, shoot me an email, let's connect. And I look forward to continuing with you on your own journey of healing, growth, and reinvention. Until next time, be rooted, be resilient, and be limitless.