What Healing Actually Looks Like

If you've been with me these past weeks, you know the story: left behind in Nigeria at one year old, reunited later, and a body that had already decided you are the one who gets left. The abandonment wound. That old chestnut. 

I call it that with affection now. For most of my life, I couldn't have called it anything because I didn't know it was there. That's the thing about a core wound — it doesn't announce itself. It just quietly runs the show. 

This week, I want to talk about what healing actually looks like. And I want to begin with a warning, therapist to friend: I am not going to prescribe anything. What healing looks like for me will not be what it looks like for you. Anyone who hands you a universal checklist for healing is selling you something. Your wound has its own fingerprint, so your healing will too. All I can do is show you mine, and trust that seeing one honest picture helps you recognise your own when it starts to appear. 

So here is mine.

For me, healing looks like not second-guessing myself.

That's it. That's the headline. Not fireworks, not a mountaintop, not a version of me who floats through life unbothered. Just this: I make a decision, and then I don't spend three days reliving it at 2 am.

If that sounds small to you, then bless you, the second-guessing was never your cross to carry. Because for me it was everywhere, and for decades I never once connected it to that little girl left behind. It was simply the water I swam in. 

Look at what that wound did, quietly, without my permission. A child who learns I am the one who gets left grows into a woman who assumes every room is one mistake away from leaving her too. So she checks. And rechecks. She over-prepares for everything because being caught unprepared feels like handing people the excuse to go. She reads pauses in conversations like tea leaves. She second-guesses the job she took, the thing she said in the meeting, the boundary she set with a friend — not because the decisions were wrong, but because certainty felt dangerous. Certainty is what you have just before life pulls the rug.

And of course, trailing along behind the self-doubt came its loyal companion: impostor syndrome. That other old chestnut. I collected qualifications the way some people collect insurance policies. I sat in rooms I had absolutely earned my place in, waiting for the tap on the shoulder. When people praised my work, some part of me filed it under they haven't found out yet. The wound had a simple logic: if the people who made you could leave, then anything good is provisional. Everything can be revoked. So keep proving. Keep earning. Never, ever rest.

None of this was conscious. That's what I most want you to hear. I was not walking around thinking about a departure lounge in Lagos. I was just making choices, about work, about love, about how small to keep myself — and the wound was in the room for every single one of them, voting.

Healing, for me, began the day the wound had to raise its hand and identify itself. Once I could say, " Ah, that's not wisdom talking, that's the abandonment, the spell started to weaken. Not break. Weaken.

Because here is the part nobody puts on the inspirational posters: I am not done. Some of it is still in place. There are still mornings the impostor arrives before my coffee does. My mother's death handed me the matriarch's seat, and there are moments I look at everything now resting in my hands and hear the old whisper: " Are you sure you're the one for this?

I used to treat those moments as evidence that I'd failed at healing. Now I treat them the way I'd treat a client who came to me with the same confession, with compassion. Of course, it's still there. A wound that spent fifty years learning its lines doesn't forget them in a season. Healing isn't the wound falling silent. It's the wound losing its casting vote.

There's a name for wounds like this one: the Chironic wound. It comes from Chiron, the centaur of Greek myth, a healer so gifted he taught the gods' own physicians, yet carrying a wound of his own that never fully closed. He couldn't cure it. So he did something more interesting: he let it school him. Everything the wound taught him, he poured into healing others. The wound that wouldn't close became the source of his gift. You don't cure a wound like that the way you'd cure an infection. You come into a relationship with it. And this is where the strangest, most beautiful reversal of my life has happened: 

The wound that cost me the most has taught me the most.

Think about it. The abandonment made me hypervigilant — and hypervigilance, turned toward good, became the attunement that makes me a therapist. I can feel the shift in a room because I spent my childhood reading in rooms for survival. The wound made me terrified of being left, and that terror, composted over decades, became a ferocious commitment to making sure other women feel seen and kept. It is not a coincidence that I built Silver Sirens, a community whose whole purpose is that no woman walks into midlife and elderhood alone. I built the thing I needed. We so often do. 

The wound became the teacher. The teacher became the work. The work became the healing, mine, and I hope, in some small way, other people's, too. The very thing that broke me is now what I use to help hold others together. That is Chiron's whole story, lived rather than read. It used to strike me as a bit romantic. It doesn't anymore. It strikes me as simply accurate. 

So no, I won't tell you what your healing should look like. But I'll tell you what to look for: the small, unglamorous change. The 2 am court adjourned early. The decision is made. The old voice is still speaking, but from the back row now, not the judge's bench. Not a wound erased, a wound, like Chiron's, finally put to work. And underneath it all, this question, which I offer you gently:

What has your wound been trying to teach you — and who might you become if you finally let it? 

With love,

Faith & the Silver Sirens

Routines and Rituals That Held me this Week

This week it has been my meditation altar. I sit there in the quiet with images of my mother, and I play the soft lullaby in our native Ijaw song that was sung at her funeral. And as it plays, I let myself simply observe the shape of our family — watching it change, morphing into whatever it is becoming now, without Mummy, without my brother Michael. I don't rush it or name it. I just sit with the question of what family we are turning into, and let the song hold what I can't yet.