There is a craft to reshaping our lives after hard things happen to us. And the beginning point to any craft is time—a rhythmic, carefully paced, faithful carving of time. Making time is your first bit of work.

We need an invitation to an actual dot on the map, four walls that offer us a place of safe containment to sort out the hard things. We must show up to a place, over and over, to do our steady work.

Rarely, mostly never, can we read our own stories accurately. We need the presence of a fiercely kind witness—someone to testify to the suffocating weight of our losses and to the unnamed beauty of our goodness.

We lose access to language in the face of trauma—both in the original moment, and often in the days and months to come when the injury is triggered. Trauma is less about the thing that happened and more about the lasting imprint it leaves on us. Accurately languaging our story is part of the healing path out. Words can hand us back our agency, offer us a means of connection, and undo the aloneness of what we’ve suffered.

Trauma, loss, betrayal, powerlessnes or unspeakable circumstances in any form—it all disrupts the imagination. We can’t create without first imagining. Forming our lives into lives we want to live takes intentional creating. When our imaginations get hijacked by all the bad stuff that happens, we might just need to borrow the imagination of another for a bit to begin to craft a life of flourishing.

Trauma disrupts our relationship to our bodies—chronic illness, panic attacks, hating a part of ourselves. The body can become an enemy as it remembers what the mind forgets, reacting unexpectedly to our environment in unwelcome ways. Healing must include making friends with, coming home to the goodness of, our physical selves—learning to listen to and live at peace with the bodies we inhabit.