When Healing Feels Like Falling Apart

There are seasons in healing where things feel more emotional, more complicated, and more overwhelming than we expected. Instead of feeling stronger, it can feel like parts of us are unraveling.

In this episode, Kim reflects on what it looks like when healing begins to uncover patterns that were formed years earlier. Through personal stories about therapy, nervous system responses, and learning to ask for help, she explores the surprising truth that sometimes the season that feels like falling apart is actually the season where God is quietly rebuilding something deeper.

If you’ve ever wondered why your emotions surface unexpectedly, why your body reacts strongly in certain situations, or why healing sometimes feels messy before it feels peaceful, this conversation offers reassurance and hope.

Sometimes the work of healing doesn’t mean something is breaking.

Sometimes it means something stronger is being rebuilt.

Expanded Show Notes

There is a moment in many healing journeys when emotions begin surfacing in ways we didn’t expect. Instead of feeling stronger or more settled, we may feel more sensitive, more aware, or more overwhelmed by situations that once seemed manageable.

In this episode, Kim shares how her own healing journey began revealing patterns that had formed long before she understood them. Through therapy, forgiveness work, and the support of trusted friends, she began recognizing how her nervous system had learned to respond to perceived conflict by shrinking, appeasing, or withdrawing in order to keep peace.

She shares a powerful story about a simple text message sent to her pastor asking for help in ministry—an interaction that revealed just how strongly her body still expected reactions that had been learned in past environments.

Through these reflections, Kim explores the connection between emotional healing and nervous system responses, and how many people unknowingly carry survival patterns that were formed earlier in life.

The episode closes with a powerful image Kim uses to understand her own story: the idea that every challenge we walk through earns another “tiger stripe.” Some stripes are visible, like the scars from brain surgery. Others are invisible, formed through seasons of hardship, growth, and resilience.

Together they tell the story of a life that has been stretched, strengthened, and rebuilt.

If healing has ever felt messy or confusing for you, this episode offers a gentle reminder:

You may not be falling apart.

You may simply be in the middle of being rebuilt.

Transcript

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Hey friends, there's a strange moment in the healing process that nobody really prepares you for. It's a moment that can feel incredibly unsettling when it first begins to happen, because instead of feeling stronger or more put together, you start to feel almost the opposite. Things that never used to bother you suddenly feel heavier. Emotions surface at unexpected times. Your body reacts to situations in ways that you don't fully understand. You find yourself needing more space, more quiet, or more time to process things you once moved through without thinking twice. And somewhere in the middle of all that, a question starts forming that can feel a little alarming when you say it out loud. Why does it feel like I'm falling apart? If you've ever had a season where that where that thought crossed your mind, you're not alone. In fact, I think many people who are doing the real work of healing eventually pass through a stretch of life that feels exactly like that. It's confusing because we tend to assume that growth should make us feel stronger right away. We assume that the healing should look steady, confident, and forward moving. But sometimes healing doesn't feel like forward motion at all. Sometimes healing feels messy. Sometimes it feels emotional. Sometimes it feels like things inside of you that were once tightly contained are suddenly much closer to the surface than they've ever been before. And if you're someone who spent most of your life being the strong one, the one who keeps going, the one who keeps things together, the one who doesn't cause problems, that shift can feel incredibly disorienting. Because suddenly the version of strength that you relied on for years doesn't seem to work in quite the same way anymore. What I've come to understand over the last few years is that this experience is far more common than we realize, especially for people who have spent a long time surviving difficult seasons with quiet resilience. When life finally slows down enough, or when we find ourselves in environments that are safe enough, the parts of our old story that we once pushed aside sometimes begin to surface. And when that happens, it can feel like something inside us is breaking. But what I want to explore together today is the possibility that something very different might actually be happening in the happening in those moments. Because sometimes what feels like falling apart is actually the beginning of being rebuilt. One of the things I started noticing over the last couple of years is something that still surprises me when some it happens sometimes. Even now, when I'm recording some of these podcast episodes and telling parts of my story that I've already worked through and healed from, my body will react in ways that almost feel like I'm reliving the experience in real time. I'll be sitting here talking to the microphone, completely calm in my mind, fully aware that these moments are in the past and no longer have power over my life, and yet my body will start doing something entirely different. My heart will start pounding a little faster. I'll feel an adrenaline rush in the middle of a sentence. Sometimes I'll notice myself sweating or needing to pause for a moment to catch my breath before continuing the story. It's an interesting thing to experience because emotionally I know the story has been healed. I'm not trapped in it anymore, but my body still remembers what it felt like to live through those hard seasons. That realization has been part of a much larger process that has unfolded for me over the last few years through therapy and through some meaningful work in freedom and forgiveness ministries. That work began helping me name things from my past in ways that I had never really done before, not because I needed to dwell on them or relive them endlessly, but because I was beginning to understand something important about forgiveness. Forgiveness is not really about excusing what happened or pretending that something didn't hurt. Forgiveness is about releasing the power those things still have over you. It's about letting go of the weight of constantly managing the outcome yourself and allowing God to hold it instead. That process of releasing things piece by piece started changing the way I saw parts of my story. And that has happened, as that happened, emotions that had been tucked away for a very long time started surfacing in ways that sometimes surprised me. There were seasons where I found myself slipping into patterns of isolation or depression without fully understanding why. I would withdraw from people I actually love spending time with. I would feel overwhelmed by situations that on the surface didn't seem like they should have that kind of impact on me. Thankfully, during those seasons, God placed a couple of people in my life who could see things that I couldn't see yet for myself. My friends Debbie and Rachel have both been incredible gifts in that way. They're the kind of friends who can hear what you're saying and understand the deeper layers of what you mean without having to explain every detail. There were conversations with both of them over the last few years where they gently helped me recognize some of the reactions I was having in the present weren't really about the situations happening in front of me. They were connected to experiences or patterns that had formed much earlier in my life. And that realization was life-changing because for most of my life I had always believed that the things I went through weren't really that significant. My internal comparison was always the same. Things could have been so much worse. There were no visible bruises, there weren't dramatic scenes that would make someone instantly recognize what was happening. What existed instead were subtle patterns, personality shifts, ways of responding to conflict or pressure that slowly shaped how I moved through the world. And those patterns can have an enormous impact on the person's life, even when they're hard to see from the outside. Some of the strongest physical reactions I experienced during those years actually showed up in professional environments. And one job in particular stands out in my memory because it was one of the most intense workplaces I've ever been a part of. The environment was extremely high pressure and often emotionally abusive. In fact, the stress in that office became so overwhelming that my immediate supervisor eventually had a nervous breakdown while trying to manage it. That vice president we worked under created an atmosphere where nothing you said could really resolve a situation. There was no version of an explanation that would lead to understanding. If something went wrong, or even if it simply appeared to go wrong, it was always your fault in one way or another. During those same years, my life outside work was already carrying enormous weight. We were navigating adoption. I was moving through pregnancy. It was one of the most emotionally complex seasons of my life. And when I was trying to get all a hold of all of it together while functioning in a workplace that constantly felt like an emotional minefield, eventually the pressure would boil over. There were moments during intense conversations or confrontations in that office when I would suddenly start crying and just simply couldn't stop. Once it started, there was no controlling it. My body would just release everything at once until the wave of emotion finished moving through me. And instead of responding with compassion or curiosity about what might be happening, that vice president would shame me for it. I still remember one comment she made during one of those moments where she looked at me and said, Don't give me those big, sad cow eyes. And at the times those words landed with the kind of sting that makes you question yourself. They reinforced the belief that something about my reactions was wrong, that I was weak, overly emotional, or somehow incapable of handling pressure the way everyone else did. What I understand now is that those reactions were never really about that office alone. They were the result of years of pressure, years of being the strong one, years of learning to keep things contained until my system simply couldn't hold it anymore. Ironically, that same vice president eventually gave me what turned out to be one of the greatest gifts to my mental health. After my second maternity leave ran two weeks longer than the 12 weeks protected under FMLA law, the company used that technicality to terminate my position. At the time, it felt like another painful blow in an already overwhelming season, but looking back now, I could honestly say it was one of the greatest gifts I could have received. It removed me from an environment that had been steadily eroding my well-being for years and opened the door to a much healthier chapter in my life. What I didn't fully understand yet during that season was that my body had been trying to tell me something important all along. And it would take a few more years, along with some very honest conversations with two dear friends, before I began to understand what those reactions were really about. Rachel was the first person who gently named some of the things in my past for what they really were trauma. Hearing someone say that out loud shifted something in me and eventually led me to begin pursuing therapy and to understand my own patterns more deeply. And my Debbie, the one one of my closest friends that I've had since the boys were born. She has walked alongside me through so much of the healing process, helping me see patterns and encouraging encouraging me as I began to untangle where some of those reactions were even coming from. One moment in particular stands out to me now when I look back on those early stages of therapy and healing because it showed me just how deeply some of the patterns were still operating beneath the surface in my life. At the same time, I was serving in children's ministry at church, and I loved that role. Being able to pour into the kids and families had always been something that brought me a lot of joy. But I was also beginning to step into some of the major deeper work of therapy, and those layers started surfacing. I found myself feeling overwhelmed in ways that surprised me. It wasn't that I didn't care about the ministry anymore. It was that emotionally I was carrying more than I realized. I had reached a point where I needed some help. I needed space to do some of the work that was unfolding in therapy without feeling like I had to keep performing at the same level I always had. But asking for help was not something that came natural to me. In fact, the idea of bringing that up to Kevin felt almost impossible. Kevin has always been incredibly supportive and compassionate as a leader. He is someone that genuinely wants the best for the people serving alongside him. But even knowing that, I found myself bracing for a reaction that I had experienced in other environments for most of my life. My brain kept running through the same script over and over and over. What if he thinks I'm failing? What if he thinks I'm letting everyone down? What if this creates conflict? So instead of sending a simple message asking to talk, I did what my nervous system has done many times before when I'm afraid of how someone might respond. I overthought it. I drafted and redrafted the text several times, trying to word it in a way that would cause the least possible amount of friction. Every sentence felt like it carried enormous weight. Every phrase felt like it might trigger a response that I didn't know how to handle. At one point, I even asked Rachel to read it and help me edit it. I wanted another set of eyes on the message to make sure that it sounded as calm and reasonable as possible. Looking back on it now, it almost feels a little funny to admit how much energy went into composing what was in reality a very simple request. But at the same time, it didn't feel simple at all. Eventually, I stood in my kitchen holding my phone, staring at the screen, trying to gather the courage to press send. And when I finally did, the moment the message left my phone, I felt an immediate wave of regret and fear wash over me. My mind started imagining all the ways this conversation might go wrong. So I did the only thing my nervous system could think to do in that moment. I turned my phone off. I literally set the phone down on the counter and walked away from it. Then I went and sat on the couch in the living room and tried to slow my breathing down. My heart was pounding and I could feel that familiar rush of adrenaline moving through my body. I needed a few minutes to settle myself before facing whatever response might come back. To distract my mind, I waited and I started scrolling through funny reels on social media, anything lighthearted that could help shift my focus long enough for my system to calm down a little. After a few minutes, when I felt like I could breathe again, I walked back into the kitchen and turned my phone back on. And what I found waiting there was not the explosive reaction that my body had prepared itself for. Kevin responded with kindness and openness. His response was calm, reassuring, and practical all at the same time. He was completely willing to walk through the situation and figure out what kind of support I needed. Later, when we actually talked about it in person, I shared with him how terrified I had been to send that message in the first place. I told him how afraid I was that bringing up my struggle would create conflict or disappointment. And I will never forget his response. He looked at me and said very simply, I've never done that to you. And he was right. Kevin had never responded to me in the explosion, explosive, emotionally unpredictive ways that my mind had been bracing for. The reaction I was preparing myself for didn't belong to him at all. It belonged to patterns I had learned long before I ever met him. And that moment became one of the clearest examples in my life of how our nervous systems can continue reacting to old environments even when we're standing in entirely different new ones. In my mind, Kevin knew that Kevin I knew was the safe leader, but my body hadn't caught up with that reality yet. The moment with Kevin ended up becoming an important turning point for me, not because the conversation, the conversation itself was difficult, but because it revealed something that I hadn't fully understood about my own reactions. Standing there in my kitchen that day, bracing for a response that never actually came, I realized my body had prepared itself for a completely different environment than the one I was standing in. Kevin had never treated me that way that my mind expected him to. He had never responded with the kind of unpredictable or explosive reactions that my nervous system was preparing for. But the truth is, our bodies don't always respond to the present moment as quickly as our minds do. Sometimes they are still operating from patterns that were formed in completely different seasons of our lives. That realization eventually led to some really helpful conversations with my therapist as we began unpacking why certain situations caused such intense physical reactions for me. I described to her how sometimes in conversations, especially the ones where I felt like I might disappoint someone or where conflict might be possible, my mind would suddenly feel like it went blank. I would struggle to breathe normally, my thoughts would disappear, words that I knew perfectly well how to say would feel impossible to find in the moment. And she explained something that helped me understand these experiences in a way, a completely different way. She said that when my brain perceives a potential threat or danger, even if that threat isn't actually present in the moment, my nervous system can move so quickly into protection mode that it essentially forgets how to do the normal things that help conversation flow. Breathing steadily, thinking clearly, and forming responses. In other words, my body is trying to keep me safe. But the way that I had learned to do that wasn't by fighting or running away. Instead, the rep response I had practiced for years was something closer to what many therapists call a fawning response. Shrinking, appeasing, trying to keep the emotional environment calm so that conflict never has a chance to escalate. When she explained that to me, it felt like someone finally turned on a light in the room that had been dim for a very long time. Because for most of my life, I had simply assumed that those reactions meant something was wrong with me. But when you start looking at them through the lens of survival patterns, they begin to make a lot more sense. For most of my life, I learned to shrink emotions, reactions, and requests in order to keep the peace in all situations. I avoided conflict until I simply couldn't anymore, and then emotions would spill out in ways that often surprised me. Tears would show up at strange moments, or pressure that I had been holding inside would finally find its way out. Writing eventually became one of the safest ways for me to process things because it gave me space to think before responding. Even now, that pattern still shows up in small ways. If John and I have one of our rare disagreements, about 99% of the time that conversation happens through text messages rather than spoken words. It's not because we're avoiding the issue, it's because writing allows me to slow down, process my thoughts, and respond in a way that feels calmer and clearer than trying to do it in the middle of a heated moment. And sometimes those nervous system reactions still appear in unexpected places. My brother-in-law Robert is one of the kindest people that I know, and I genuinely enjoy spending time with him. But Robert also happens to love deep conversations. He's the kind of person who asks thoughtful questions and likes to dig into the deeper layers behind a story or idea. And every time those conversations start going deeper, something interesting happens inside my brain. I stop breathing. My thoughts disappear, and suddenly I'm standing there feeling like a deer caught in headlights while my nervous system tries to decide what to do with the situation. It's almost funny when I think about it now, because I know Robert is not a threatening person in any way, but my body is still catching up to the reality that not every deep conversation leads to conflict or emotional chaos. Healing doesn't instantly erase the patterns our nervous systems learned in earlier seasons of life. But it does begin helping us understand where those patterns come from. And that understanding is often the first step towards something deeper beginning to change. One of the things I've come to understand through this journey is that many of the experiences that shape us the most are the ones that don't leave visible evidence behind. When people think about trauma, they often imagine dramatic moments that everyone around you would recognize as painful or dangerous. They imagine situations where the harm is obvious, where the story is clear, where the wounds are easy to name. But a lot of things that shape who we become don't look like that at all. Sometimes they look like years of learning to read the emotional temperature of a room before you speak. Sometimes they look carefully, like carefully choosing your words because you're trying to avoid a reaction you've experienced before. Sometimes they look like quietly carrying responsibilities that were never really meant for you in the first place. From the outside, none of those things look particularly dramatic. There are no visible bruises. There's no moment where someone watching from the outside would immediately say, that's trauma. And yet, those experiences shape the way our nervous systems learn to move through the world. They shape how we respond to conflict. They shape how safe we feel expressing emotions. They shape whether we speak freely or whether we instinctively start calculating the emotional consequences of every sentence before it leaves your mouth. For a long time, I didn't recognize those patterns in my own life because I was constantly comparing my experiences to situations that seemed far worse. I would think to myself, other people have been through far more difficult things than I have. And while that may be true in some cases, comparison doesn't actually help us understand what shaped us. It just teaches us to minimize our own story. What I've learned now is that healing doesn't require us to prove our experiences were the worst possible versions of something before we're allowed. Allowed to acknowledge their impact. It simply asks us to tell the truth about what happened and how it affected us. And when I look back now at the younger version of myself who lived through so many of those seasons, I find myself feeling a mixture of things all at once. There's a deep respect for the strength that it took to keep moving forward through situations that were confusing, painful, or overwhelming at the time. There were seasons in my life where I carried more emotional weight than I even realized. And yet, somehow I continued building a life, forming relationships, pursuing dreams, and showing up for the people around me. But alongside that respect, there's also a quiet recognition that some of those earlier versions of me were carrying things that no young person should have to carry alone. Some of the patterns that formed in my life began long before I had the maturity or understanding to recognize what was happening. They were simply the ways my mind and body learned to survive the environment in which I was in. And that realization has brought a surprising amount of compassion into my life. Compassion for the younger version of myself who didn't yet have the language to name what she was experiencing. Compassion for the teenager who was still trying to figure out who she was while navigating relationships that were sometimes confusing and painful. Compassion for the young adult who believed that shrinking herself was the best way to keep peace in the environments that she found herself in. And when I look back now, I don't see someone who was weak or overly sensitive. I see someone who was adapting, someone who was learning how to move through the world with the tools she had available at the time. And in many ways, those survival patterns did exactly what they were designed to do. They helped me make it through seasons that could have easily hardened my heart. But one of the things I'm most grateful for today is that those experiences didn't ultimately make me bitter. They didn't turn me into someone who stopped believing in people or stopped believing in healing. If anything, they planted the seeds for a different kind of calling on my life. A calling that would eventually lead me to become someone who wants to sit with others in their own healing journeys and remind them that their stories still matter. Even the parts that once felt confusing, even the parts that once felt overwhelming, even the parts that once felt like they were breaking us. As I've spent time reflecting on all these different seasons of my life, one image has come back to my mind again and again. Years ago, I heard someone use a metaphor about pregnancy stretch marks. She described them as tiger stripes, marks that represent the strength that it took for the body to grow, stretch, and carry life. I remember hearing that idea and thinking it was such a beautiful way to look at something that many people thought were taught to feel embarrassed about. Those marks aren't flaws. They were evidence of what the body had done. Over time, that image started to grow into something a little different within my own mind. Because when I look at my life now, I can see all the challenges that I've walked through have left their own kind of stripes behind. Some of them are visible. The scars on my head from brain surgery are a very little, literal reminder that my body has fought through things that I never expected to face. Every time I catch a glimpse of those stars and stars, scars in the mirror, I'm reminded that my life could have taken a very different path. And yet somehow I'm still here. Other stripes are invisible. They are the experiences that shaped who I became long before I understood what was happening. The difficult seasons, the painful relationships, the moments where life didn't unfold the way I hoped or had planned. Each of those seasons has left its own mark on me. And for a long time, I think I interpreted those marks as evidence that something in my life had gone wrong. But the perspective that I carry now is very different. Now, when I look back over the story of my life, I see those marks as evidence of survival. Every challenge I've walked through has earned another stripe. Not because the pain itself was good, but because somehow I kept moving forward through it. Somehow my heart stayed soft. Somehow my faith continued growing even in seasons where things felt confusing or overwhelming. Those stripes tell the story of a life that has been stretched, tested, and refined in ways that I never would have chosen for myself. And yet they also tell the story of a God who never stopped working in the middle of those seasons. When I think about the younger versions of myself, the ones who were trying to navigate environments that they didn't fully understand, I no longer see someone who was weak or overly emotional. I see someone who was learning how to survive. Someone who was developing instincts that would eventually help her recognize when something wasn't healthy. Someone who is slowly becoming the person God would later use to sit with others in their own healing journeys. Because the truth is the work that God does in our lives rarely happens in neat, predictable ways. Sometimes it happens in the middle of confusion, sometimes it happens in the middle of pain. And sometimes it happens during seasons that feel overwhelming or so overwhelming that we wonder if we're falling apart. But what I've come to understand is that those seasons are often the very places where God is quietly rebuilding something deeper inside of us. He rebuilds our understanding of who we are. He rebuilds our ability to trust. He rebuilds the parts of our hearts that once learned to shrink just to survive. And over time, the very experiences that once felt like they were breaking us begin to become part of the story that equips us to help someone else. Those tiger stripes begin to tell a different story. Not a story of failure, not a story of weakness, but a story of resilience, a story of grace, a story of healing that unfolds slowly one season at a time. And if you find yourself in a season right now where things feel messy or unfamiliar, where emotions are surfacing in ways that you don't fully understand yet, where your body is reacting to things that don't seem to make sense, I want you to hear this clearly. Thank you for spending time with me today. One of the things that means the most to me about this podcast is the opportunity to create a space where real stories can be shared honestly. The parts that are beautiful, the parts that are messy, and the parts that are still unfolding. Healing is rarely a straight path. More often, it looks like a winding road where we slowly begin to understand things that once felt confusing. If today's episode encouraged you, one of the simplest ways you can support the podcast is by following the show in your listening app. Whether you listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, iHeartRadio, or any other platform. Following the show helps new listeners find these conversations more easily. You can also now find the podcast on YouTube if that's the platform that you enjoy using. For now, the episodes are there that are there are the same audio conversations you hear here. Just in another place to listen if that's convenient for you. And if you're someone who likes to sit with these themes a little longer, there's a free devotional called Quiet Authority available that walks you through some of these ideas in a slower, more reflective way. You can find that link in the show notes if you'd like to download it. As always, I'm grateful that you're here. Until next time, keep practicing hope out loud.