I think we have a tendency to talk about healing as though, if we do it well enough, we will eventually become very difficult to hurt.
We learn the patterns. We identify the wounds. We regulate our nervous systems. We develop boundaries. We become more discerning about who gets access to us. We learn to recognize the red flags earlier. We stop abandoning ourselves to keep other people comfortable. We learn when to leave.
All of this matters. Some of it can save our lives.
But I think there is a question we don’t ask often enough: What happens when healing becomes another way of trying to make sure the fire never reaches us again?
Because fear is intelligent. Give it enough therapy, enough spiritual language, enough self-awareness, and it does not necessarily disappear. Sometimes it just gets better at explaining itself.
It learns to call itself discernment. It learns to call itself standards. It learns to call itself independence. It learns to call itself protecting your peace.
And sometimes, that is exactly what those things are.
But sometimes what we call healing is fear with better branding.
That is an uncomfortable thing to say in a culture that has become very good at teaching us how to protect ourselves. It is also something I have had to confront in myself.
Because there is a point at which protecting yourself from what has hurt you can quietly become protecting yourself from anything with the power to matter.
And those are not the same thing.
When you’ve been through a fire, it makes sense to study how it started. You want to know what you missed. You retrace your steps. You examine the decisions you made, the things you tolerated, the instincts you ignored. You learn about yourself. You learn about other people. You promise yourself that next time, you will recognize the smoke sooner.
There is wisdom in that.
The problem begins when the lesson you take from the fire is that your job is to make sure there is never another one.
So you begin fireproofing. You build a life around certainty. You keep an exit close enough to reach. You become careful about what you need and even more careful about whom you need it from. You learn how to anticipate disappointment so that it can never surprise you. You stop taking certain risks. You become suspicious of anything that disrupts the equilibrium you worked so hard to create.
And because much of this happens after periods of genuine healing, it can be extraordinarily difficult to distinguish wisdom from fear.
That is what makes fireproofing so seductive.
It doesn’t always feel like hiding.
Sometimes it feels like growth.
There is a version of self-trust that says: I trust myself because I have become very good at preventing bad things from happening to me.
I know what to look for now. I know better now. I won’t make that mistake again. I won’t let someone treat me that way again. I won’t put myself in that position again. I won’t need that much again. I won’t want something I cannot control again.
There is power in many of those declarations.
But there is another version of self-trust that I think is much harder: I trust myself even when I cannot guarantee what happens next.
That version doesn’t offer nearly as much certainty. It cannot promise that you will never misjudge someone. It cannot promise that a relationship will last because you chose more wisely this time. It cannot promise that the thing you build will succeed because you did the work on yourself first. It cannot promise that the family you create will never carry wounds of its own. It cannot promise that you will never lose something you love.
It can only promise that you will still belong to yourself when you do.
And I think that is where healing begins to become something other than self-protection.
A few months ago, during a hapé ceremony in Peru, I saw a vision of a life I had spent the previous two years insisting I didn’t want.
There was a house surrounded by land. I was in a deeply loving relationship. There were multiple children around me—my children.
What jarred me wasn’t the image itself. It was the joy I felt inside it.
Because I had very good reasons for not wanting children. I knew what family trauma could do across generations. I knew love alone did not guarantee that I would be a good mother. I had convinced myself that perhaps the most responsible thing I could do was simply refuse to take the risk of continuing what had come before me.
I also had very good reasons for not wanting another relationship. After the pain, trauma, and abuse of my last one, I had built a life in which being alone wasn’t something I merely tolerated. I genuinely enjoyed it. I had learned how to fulfill myself. I wasn’t searching for someone. I didn’t want to.
And I was proud of that. I still am.
The ceremony didn’t suddenly make any of that healing false. It showed me something much more uncomfortable.
I had mistaken being afraid to want something for no longer wanting it.
Somewhere along the way, I know I can be fulfilled without these things had quietly become I do not allow myself to want these things.
Because wanting children meant accepting that I could become a mother and get things wrong. Wanting love meant accepting that another human being could become important enough to hurt me. Wanting either meant surrendering the illusion that I could build a life whose most important outcomes remained entirely under my control.
And for the first time, I could see that I hadn’t only been building a fulfilling life.
In some places, I had been building a fireproof one.
I don’t think the answer is to tear down every boundary we’ve built. I don’t think healing requires us to become indiscriminately vulnerable. I don’t think every fear is secretly an invitation to do the thing that scares us. And I certainly don’t believe suffering is inherently sacred, that abuse exists to teach us lessons, or that every fire should be thanked for what it destroys.
Some things should never have happened. Some people should never be given access to us again. Some doors are supposed to remain closed.
Discernment matters.
But discernment and fear ask different questions.
Discernment asks: Is this right for me?
Fear asks: Can this hurt me?
And if the second question becomes the standard by which we construct our lives, we have a problem.
Because almost everything capable of making a life meaningful can hurt us. To love is to create the possibility of grief. To belong is to create the possibility of loss. To create is to create the possibility of failure. To be seen is to create the possibility of rejection. To want is to create the possibility of disappointment. To change is to surrender the certainty of who you have already been.
There is no amount of healing that changes those terms.
And perhaps it was never supposed to.
This is where I think some of our conversations about healing become dangerously incomplete.
We talk endlessly about safety. Creating safety. Feeling safe. Choosing safe people. Building safe relationships. Protecting our energy. Regulating ourselves back into safety.
Safety matters enormously, particularly for people whose bodies and minds have learned that the world is not safe.
But I don’t believe the purpose of healing is to create a life in which we never feel endangered by uncertainty again.
Because safety and certainty are not the same thing.
And if we confuse them, we can spend years trying to regulate ourselves out of one of the fundamental conditions of being alive: we do not know what happens next.
Sometimes the person who feels safe today will disappoint you tomorrow. Sometimes the thing you were certain would last will end. Sometimes you will make the most informed, self-aware, discerning decision available to you and still get hurt. Sometimes you will do everything “right” and the fire will come anyway.
That does not mean your healing failed.
Maybe the fire was never the test.
Maybe what matters is your relationship to yourself when you find yourself standing inside it.
I used to think the evidence of healing would be how much harder I became to destroy.
Now I wonder if that’s still too close to the language of survival.
Because the fire is not only the terrible thing that happens to us.
Sometimes the fire is the truth we can no longer avoid. Sometimes it is the identity that stops fitting. Sometimes it is the desire we buried because admitting it would rearrange our lives. Sometimes it is the relationship that exposes the places where our healing has not yet reached. Sometimes it is the opportunity that asks us to become visible before we feel ready.
Sometimes the fire does not arrive to punish us.
It illuminates. It exposes. It burns through the structures we mistook for ourselves.
And sometimes the very thing we’ve spent years protecting ourselves from is the thing capable of showing us where we are still not free.
That doesn’t mean we go looking for suffering. It means we stop treating the absence of disruption as proof that we are healed.
A life can be peaceful and still be built around fear. A life can be independent and still be built around fear. A life can have impeccable boundaries and still be built around fear. A life can look extraordinarily healed from the outside and still be organized around one quiet rule: Never again.
Never again will I need someone that much. Never again will I want something that badly. Never again will I give life that much power over me.
I understand that rule. I built parts of my life around it.
But “never again” is a difficult foundation on which to build a life you actually want to inhabit.
Because eventually, avoiding the fire requires avoiding everything combustible.
Desire. Love. Hope. Ambition. Intimacy. Change. Faith. The unknown.
Life.
I don’t want healing to make me fearless. I don’t think that’s possible. And I no longer want to measure my growth by how little power anything outside of me has to affect me.
I want something harder.
I want to know that I can love without requiring a guarantee that I will never grieve. I want to want things without first needing proof that I will receive them. I want boundaries that protect my ability to participate in life, not boundaries that protect me from participating in it. I want discernment that helps me choose—not fear dressed up as wisdom choosing for me.
And when the fire comes, in whatever form it comes, I want to trust that I do not have to know in advance exactly who I will be on the other side of it.
Maybe healing isn’t learning how to keep the fire from reaching us. Maybe it’s realizing that a life built entirely around fireproofing can become its own kind of cage.
Maybe freedom begins when we stop asking life to guarantee that we will never burn and start trusting what happens when we do.
Because the fire is not always the end of the story.
Sometimes it is where the story finally becomes honest.
You cannot fireproof a life you actually intend to live.