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Healing from a painful past takes strength, determination, and courage.

We need courage to face painful thoughts, feelings, and memories.

Courage is a resource that can be developed, like mindfulness or compassion.

As you work on healing from a painful past, there is a key resource that is often overlooked: courage. If you have been hurt in relationships, perhaps by an uncaring parent or bullying sibling, it takes courage to make friends, be sociable, and seek romantic relationships. If you have been criticised and shamed for expressing your opinions, it takes courage to keep showing up and speaking out, even in small ways.

If you have experienced severe trauma, it takes courage simply to keep living, which may not be a smooth ride for you but a daily struggle to cope with a frazzled nervous system, constant jolts of anxiety, and a profound sense of danger and threat as you move through the world. With this much trauma in your system, sadly life can be gruelling, so it’s a huge achievement just to keep putting one foot in front of the next.

Whether your trauma was milder or more severe, it takes courage to keep trying to change, heal, and grow. Reading posts like this, having therapy, listening to podcasts, reading self-help books, meditating, and being in community with others. It may not seem courageous to do these things, but it is, because so many people give up when the going gets........

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