We Don't Heal in Straight Lines: Trauma, the Spiral and Coming Home to Ourselves

This morning's Capricorn Full Moon arrives alongside the beginning of Mercury Retrograde.

Whether you see astrology as a spiritual practice or simply enjoy the symbolism of living alongside the seasons, both invite the same question:

What are we building our lives upon?

The Full Moon is often associated with culmination. A moment of clarity and deep pause before the next chapter begins. Mercury Retrograde, meanwhile, is often seen as an invitation to revisit rather than rush. To start to reflect rather than react and to notice the stories, patterns and conversations that continue to shape us. Perhaps that's why this week's somatic studies have stayed with me so deeply. One idea, in particular, has continued to unfold in my mind.

The image of a spiral

Healing doesn't move in straight lines

So many of us approach healing as though it's a destination. We imagine we'll eventually arrive at a place where old wounds no longer ache, familiar fears no longer return and triggers become a thing of the past.

Then one day we find ourselves crying over something we thought we'd already processed.

The same relationship pattern appears, the same shame resurfaces and the same fear quietly returns. In these moments it's easy to believe we've gone backwards.

But what if we haven't?

What if healing was never meant to look like a straight road?

What if it was always a spiral?

The spiral of karma

During my studies, karma was described in a way I'd never heard before. Not as reward or punishment and not as "good things happen to good people." Instead, karma was introduced as patterning. The habits of body, mind and heart that become familiar through repetition. Whether or not you hold spiritual beliefs about karma or previous lifetimes, I find the image deeply meaningful.

Our nervous systems also learn through repetition. An experience becomes a pattern. A pattern becomes protection. Protection becomes identity. Over time, we stop choosing those responses consciously. We simply become them and the spiral continues.

Trauma reveals the spiral

I want to be careful here. I don't believe trauma is something that happens because we somehow needed to suffer. Many experiences are simply painful, unjust and undeserved.

But trauma can reveal the places where our nervous systems have organised themselves around survival. It shines a light on the protective patterns we didn't even realise we were carrying.

Hypervigilance

People pleasing

Perfectionism

Avoidance

The constant feeling that we must earn love, safety or belonging

These aren't personality flaws, they're often intelligent adaptations. They're the bodies way of saying,"This helped us survive once"

Interrupting the pattern

One of the most beautiful ideas I encountered this week came through the practice of Maitri.

A Sanskrit word often translated as loving-kindness or unconditional friendliness towards ourselves. Healing, then, isn't forcing ourselves to become someone different. It's learning to sit beside the parts of ourselves that developed in order to survive.

Breathing

Walking

Journaling

Resting

Feeling

Tapping

Not because these practices erase our past but because they gently interrupt the automatic spiral. They create just enough space to choose a different response. Not every time but sometimes and sometimes is enough.

Returning as queer people

As I reflected on the spiral, I couldn't help thinking about queer identity. For many LGBTQ+ people, shame isn't always taught directly. Sometimes it's communicated through silence.

It's rooted in hesitation and in the assumptions about who we'll love. It's in noticing which relationships are celebrated and which are quietly ignored and it's felt through subtle shifts in energy long before anyone says a word.

Children don't simply learn through language. Our nervous systems are constantly reading the room, watching, listening and feeling. For many of us, coming out isn't the beginning of our story. It's the moment we begin consciously unwinding patterns that started years earlier.

Perhaps that's why coming out can feel so profound.

Not because we're becoming somebody new but because we're risking belonging as our truest selves. In every honest conversation and every hand held rather than dropped in public. In every moment we essentially choose authenticity over hiding. Each one gently interrupts the old spiral and each one whispers something our nervous systems may never have heard before.

"You are safe to be seen."

Becoming more ourselves

Perhaps this is what freedom really is. Not a life without pain or grief or where fear never returns. But a life where we no longer abandon ourselves in order to feel safe. A life where our protective patterns are met with compassion rather than shame. A life where we understand that returning to an old wound doesn't mean we've failed. It simply means we're meeting it with more awareness than we had before.

Think of it like climbing a spiral staircase (I had one of these in my little childhood bungalow), we may find ourselves facing the same view again and again. Yet each time we return, we do so from a slightly different place.

A little higher.

A little steadier.

A little more able to hold ourselves with kindness.

Perhaps that's what coming home really is. Not becoming somebody new but slowly remembering who we were before survival asked us to become someone else and maybe that's the foundation we're really being invited to build.

If this resonated with you, I'd love to invite you to stay awhile

Continue exploring through my newsletter, blog and social spaces. I write about the nervous system, nature, queer identity, slow living and the quiet process of coming home to ourselves.

In time, this space will also grow to include trauma-informed somatic counselling. A place forever rooted in compassion, curiosity and the belief that healing begins when all of us is finally welcome.

Until then, I hope you'll stay connected. You don't have to walk the path home alone.