Childhood trauma doesn’t vanish.
It lurks in the space between inhaling and exhaling.
After all, It is what a child perceives.
The river breaks the dam,
a flood unleashed without warning.
Tears fall like rain on cracked heart,
each drop a memory, heavy and cold.
Sorrow arrives first, cloaked in silence,
then pain follows, barefoot and burning.
Confusion, dressed as contentment, moves in,
wears your smile like a borrowed coat,
sits at the table, laughs too loud,
while shadows gather in the corners of the mirror.
The familiar blade becomes a confidant,
its edge a whispered promise,
a language only the wounded understand.
Not out of weakness, but from a hunger
to feel something they can name.
Self-sabotage becomes the rhythm of survival
the push away before being left,
the fire set before the home is built.
And those who reach for us,
their hands outstretched in love,
feel the wounds bloom beneath their touch.
Healing is not a straight road, nor a steady harvest.
When the night swells louder than your breath,
a hand appears on the deck, warm, unasked.
Their eyes are a lantern,
holding the beam long enough to see the pier
instead of the crashing tide.
In that pause the storm loses its edge,
and for a heartbeat you are simply seen.
Yes, healing is a lighthouse in a storm.
It lives in every choice:
to speak instead of silence,
to stay instead of flee,
to believe, that softness is not surrender.
The manifestation of our choices,
this is the pulse beneath the skin,
the rhythmic beat of becoming.
Fluid, not perfect, and persistent.
Our thoughts give birth to the world we see,
a universe shaped by the lens of old scars
and new courage.
But within that power lies the key:
to choose the light,
even when the familiar dark feels like home.
And in that choosing,
we begin to recognize,
not the pain, but the strength that carried us through.
We recognize the hands that held on,
the voices that whispered stay,
the quiet moments where joy slipped in, uninvited, and stayed.
Revealing true, meaningful connections,
this is healing.
Not the erasure of the wound,
but the reclamation of the self.
Learning to swim,
and remembering,
the river remembers,
but it does not define the shore.