The Redemption of Time: How Healing Trauma Restored What Was Lost

There was a time in my life when I couldn’t see a future for myself. I didn’t know how long I would live, and I wasn’t sure if it even mattered. The past felt inescapable, like a loop I couldn’t break out of, and the future was nothing more than an empty space I couldn’t picture myself in.

Trauma has a way of distorting time. It doesn’t just steal moments—it makes time feel heavy, relentless, and impossible to move through. Even when I wasn’t actively thinking about the pain I had endured, my body remembered. My nervous system remained stuck in survival mode, my gut was inflamed, and my mind was constantly scanning for threats that no longer existed.

Time wasn’t something I was living in—it was something I was trapped inside of.

Subscribe to my newsletter for practical tools, spiritual reflections, and behind-the-scenes stories from the healing journey. It’s where I share what doesn’t make it to social media—real, raw, and rooted in truth.

I Want The Weekly Newsletter

The Feeling of Time Slipping Away

For years, I felt like time was slipping through my fingers, yet at the same time, I was suffocating under the weight of it. I’d look in the mirror and barely recognize the person staring back at me. It was as if I had been robbed of my own life, existing more as a collection of past wounds than as someone with a present, let alone a future.

Every day felt like survival. I was constantly waiting—waiting to feel better, waiting for relief, waiting for life to feel like something I wanted to participate in again. But while I was waiting, I was also escaping, numbing, avoiding, and dissociating—doing whatever I had to do to escape the weight of what I had become.

I felt crushed under the weight of the present, so I did everything I could to avoid it. There was enormous tension for me in the here and now. Why couldn’t I just sit still with myself? Why couldn’t I just be present and content?

The answers eluded me for decades while I stayed preoccupied with the busyness of life—working, striving, keeping myself distracted from the stillness I feared. I convinced myself that moving forward meant I was okay, but in reality, I was just running from a past that had already caught up with me.

Healing: The Redemption of Time

It took years before I realized that healing wasn’t just about physical recovery or overcoming emotional pain. It was about something much bigger—it was about redeeming time itself.

For so long, I thought I had lost time—years spent suffering, caught in cycles of trauma responses, unable to be fully present. But healing didn’t just give me more time. It gave me a new relationship with it.

When I began integrating trauma release work, nervous system regulation, and immune health into my healing, something inside me shifted. My body no longer felt like it was bracing for an attack every second of the day. My breath deepened. My gut relaxed. My thoughts stopped racing toward a future I feared or clinging to a past I resented.

And then, something unexpected happened.

Time slowed down.

For the first time in years, I felt present.

Conscious Presence: Where Time Becomes Timeless

There’s a reason why deep meditation, prayer, and presence feel timeless—because in those moments, we step outside of the constraints of the past and future. Conscious presence is timeless; that’s why you have to physically check a clock to see how much time has passed.

I used to live only in the linear self—the version of me bound by space, time, and survival. But healing brought me into something deeper: my nonlinear self, my spiritual self, the part of me that exists beyond time.

And I found something I had been longing for—a place to abide in timelessness.

There’s a deep yearning in all of us for this—to no longer be ruled by time, to exist in a space where we are fully alive in the present. Even though time itself keeps moving, healing allows us to experience it differently—not as something we are running out of, but as something we are deeply immersed in.

Healing Makes Time More Valuable

One of the greatest lies trauma tells us is that we’ve lost time—time stolen by pain, by suffering, by dissociation. But healing reveals a truth far greater: nothing is truly lost.

The time I thought was wasted wasn’t gone—it was just waiting to be reclaimed. And when I finally stepped into healing, I didn’t just get my time back; I got something far more valuable. I learned how to be present inside of it.

I used to feel like I had lost years of my life to suffering. Now, I see that those years weren’t stolen. They were the soil from which something new could grow.

Healing is the redemption of time. It is the restoration of presence, the return to timelessness, and the gift of living each moment as if it truly matters—because it does.