The Price Of Healing
Healing gives us so much, but we rarely talk about what it can cost us along the way. **The Price of Healing** explores the people, relationships, and old versions of ourselves we sometimes lose as we find our way back to who we are.
The Price of Healing
We talk a lot about what healing gives us.
And rightly so.
Healing gave me back my voice.
It gave me autonomy. Clarity. Confidence. Boundaries. Self-respect.
It taught me that my needs matter. That my feelings are valid. That I don't have to make myself smaller to make somebody else comfortable.
It gave me the ability to trust myself again.
Perhaps most importantly, it gave me back me.
But there is another side of healing that we don't talk about nearly enough.
Because healing has a price.
Sometimes, finding yourself means losing people.
And sometimes the people you lose are the ones you never imagined living without.
When You Start to See Differently
There is something strange that happens when you begin to understand unhealthy relationship dynamics.
You start seeing them. Not just in the relationship you left.
Everywhere.
You begin to recognise behaviour you now understand as manipulation, where you once saw concern
You notice guilt where you once saw obligation.
You recognise triangulation, conditional affection, passive aggression, emotional withdrawal, blame-shifting, and the subtle ways people can make you responsible for their feelings.
You notice how often you've kept quiet to keep the peace.
How often you've apologised when you hadn't actually done anything wrong.
How often you've explained yourself to people who had already decided not to understand you.
How often you've accepted behaviour simply because it was familiar.
That doesn't mean everybody suddenly becomes abusive.
Human relationships are far more complicated than that.
People carry their own wounds, learned behaviours, insecurities, and survival strategies. Sometimes people repeat unhealthy patterns without consciously understanding what they're doing.
Healing isn't about diagnosing everybody around you.
It's about recognising what you can no longer participate in.
And the more I walked towards peace, the harder it became to remain in relationships that required me to abandon myself to maintain them.
Sometimes Healing Changes Your Family
For me, healing meant looking at dynamics that went back much further than my marriages.
Back to my childhood.
When I began understanding why I had tolerated certain behaviours in intimate relationships, I also had to ask where I had first learned to tolerate them.
That was painful.
Because some of the patterns I was trying to heal weren't new at all.
They were familiar.
Eventually, I made the decision to walk away from relationships within my own family, including my father and my sisters. Today, I have no contact with my family.
I don't say that lightly.
There is grief in that.
There is grief in accepting that sometimes the people you love are also people you cannot heal alongside.
I didn't walk away because healing taught me to hate them.
I walked away because healing taught me to stop abandoning myself.
There is a difference.
Sometimes distance isn't punishment.
Sometimes distance is protection.
And Then There Are The Friends You Lose
This was another price I hadn't expected.
When my marriage ended, I lost friendships too.
People I had laughed with. Socialised with. Trusted. People I genuinely believed would always remain part of my life.
Looking back, I understand that many of them had been his friends before they became mine.
I never expected anyone to choose sides.
Actually, I didn't want them to.
But I think somewhere inside me I expected something much simpler.
I expected them to ask if I was okay.
I expected someone to wonder whether there might be another part of the story that they hadn't heard.
Most didn't ask.
And there is something incredibly painful about realising that people have reached a conclusion about your story without ever asking you to tell it.
You cannot understand an entire story when you've only ever listened to one narrator.
One friend did come to me.
I trusted her.
I told her things that had happened within my marriage because I genuinely believed I was speaking to someone safe. In some ways, I hoped she might even help me navigate what was happening.
Later, things I had told her privately began appearing in conversations with him. Things I know I hadn't shared with him myself or anyone else. Eventually, I began to believe that the information I had shared with her was finding its way back to him.
That hurt.
The information I had shared with her in vulnerability found its way back to somebody I was trying to separate myself from. And it didn't simply stay as information. It was used against me. It became another way of manipulating what was already an incredibly difficult situation.
I don't know why she passed it on. Perhaps she believed she was being loyal to him. Perhaps she didn't understand how the information would be used. Perhaps she didn't see what I experienced as a betrayal in the same way that I did.
I will probably never know.
What I do know is that I trusted her. And that trust was broken.
After that, I no longer felt safe.
Why I Eventually Cut Those Ties
Eventually I blocked and deleted people connected to that friendship circle.
Even people I had once imagined knowing for years.
It wasn't because I wanted them to hate him.
It wasn't because I needed them to choose me.
It was because I realised I couldn't truly step outside the relationship and heal, while leaving doors open through which information could continue to travel.
How could I heal while still wondering:
What can I say?
Will this get back to him?
Who will repeat this?
How do I behave around them?
What will be made of something completely innocent?
That wasn't freedom.
It was another version of walking on eggshells.
And after spending so long learning how to stop doing that, I wasn't prepared to recreate it inside my friendships.
So I closed the doors.
Not because those friendships had meant nothing.
But precisely because they had meant something.
And losing them hurt.
Healing Can Be Lonely
I think this is one of the least glamorous parts of healing.
There can be a strange space between the life you've outgrown and the life you're building.
Old relationships fall away.
Old roles stop fitting.
As you stop over-giving, over-explaining, forgiving endlessly, or living without boundaries, some relationships may begin to change too.
And sometimes you look around and realise your circle has become much smaller.
That can feel lonely.
But I've learned something important:
Loneliness and peace are not the same thing.
I would rather experience moments of loneliness in a peaceful life than feel lonely surrounded by people who make me feel unsafe, unseen, or unheard.
You Lose More Than People
Healing brings other losses too.
You lose the fantasy that one day someone will finally become the person you needed them to be.
You lose the belief that if you explain yourself perfectly enough, someone determined to misunderstand you will suddenly understand.
You lose roles you once built your identity around — fixer, rescuer, peacekeeper, people-pleaser.
You lose familiarity.
And sometimes familiarity is incredibly difficult to surrender, even when it hurts.
You can even grieve versions of yourself.
The woman who tried harder.
The woman who believed the promises.
The woman who kept hoping.
The woman who thought love meant staying.
I don't hate those versions of me.
I understand them now.
They were doing what they knew how to do.
But I don't need to be them anymore.
What Healing Gives Back
And perhaps this is where the price begins to make sense.
Because although healing has cost me relationships, illusions, roles, and versions of myself, look at what it has given me.
My voice.
My boundaries.
My intuition.
My self-respect.
My ability to say no without writing an essay explaining why.
My ability to recognise when something doesn't feel right.
My right to choose who has access to me.
My ability to leave situations that cost me too much.
My confidence.
My worth.
My peace.
Myself.
Healing didn't teach me that everyone is dangerous.
It taught me that I am allowed to decide what feels safe for me.
It didn't teach me to cut everybody off.
It taught me that access to my life is not an entitlement.
And it didn't make me cold.
If anything, healing has allowed me to love with far more honesty — because love no longer has to mean tolerating what hurts me.
The Price of Healing
There are people I miss.
There are relationships I wish could have been different.
There are friendships whose endings still make me sad.
Healing doesn't erase that.
You can know that leaving was necessary and still grieve what you lost.
You can love somebody and know you cannot have them in your life.
You can understand someone's wounds and still refuse to be wounded by them.
You can wish somebody well from a distance.
That is one of the hardest truths I've learned.
The price of healing can be high.
You may lose people.
You may lose familiarity.
You may lose the version of your story you desperately wanted to come true.
You may even lose the person you once had to become in order to survive.
But somewhere amongst all of those losses, something extraordinary happens.
You stop losing yourself.
And perhaps that is the real exchange.
I lost relationships I once thought I couldn't live without.
But I gained a relationship with the one person I actually have to live with for the rest of my life.
Me.
And this time, I'm not abandoning her again.
Love Molly x