After Healing: Grief, Capacity, and the Lives We Reimagine - Part Two

18 Jan

Written By RI Ali

Part Two

Even when this is spoken to briefly, it is often misunderstood.

There is a moment that arrives for many people — parents, trauma survivors, highly sensitive people, neurodivergent people — when healing has worked, and yet life still does not resemble what was once imagined. Regulation has improved. Insight is present. Language exists for experiences that were once overwhelming.

And still, something does not settle.

This moment carries grief. Not only grief for what happened, but grief for who we thought we or our children would be. Grief for the imagined ease, the imagined capacity, the imagined nervous system that could move through the world without cost.

This grief is rarely named. More often, it is interpreted as resistance, lack of insight, or unfinished healing. Another meaning is possible here.

Mourning the Imagined Self

Many people carry, often unconsciously, an image of an ideal self. An ideal mother. An ideal child. An ideal nervous system. Calm but productive. Flexible but resilient. Sensitive, but not too sensitive. Regulated, yet endlessly available.

Even after years of therapeutic work, this image often remains intact. When lived experience no longer matches it, grief accumulates quietly.

For parents, this may involve mourning the child imagined before difference or trauma became visible. For adults, it may involve mourning a version of the self that could tolerate pace, noise, pressure, or relational complexity without collapse.

This grief reflects the gradual relinquishing of an image shaped by spiritual and cultural expectations and social conditions that many bodies cannot sustainably meet.

Capacity in a Changed World

We live in conditions of increased load. At a basic sensory level — noise, speed, information density, social complexity — contemporary life places demands on nervous systems that differ markedly from those of previous generations.

For people shaped by trauma, chronic stress, or heightened sensitivity, this load is cumulative. Adaptations formed in earlier contexts do not dissolve simply because they are understood.

When someone reaches a point of naming their capacity, this is often framed as resignation or limitation. As though choosing within capacity means giving up on growth.

Capacity, however, is not a moral position. It is a physiological and relational reality.

Bodies adapt within limits. Those limits are not static, but neither are they endlessly expandable. Recognising capacity is not the same as believing it cannot change. It is acknowledging where regulation is possible under current conditions.

Reimagining Growth Without Optimisation

Trauma-informed discourse can quietly assume that the window of tolerance should continue expanding. In practice, many people arrive at a stable but bounded range of capacity.

Within this range, life may be manageable. Outside it, collapse becomes more likely.

Growth at this stage does not necessarily involve expansion. It often involves alignment. This may mean shaping life around fewer demands held more sustainably, slower rhythms that allow depth rather than depletion, relationships that require less performance, and work that aligns with energy rather than overriding it.

For parents, this can involve re-imagining what a good life looks like for a child — not as approximation of a norm, but as lived wellbeing within who they are. For adults, it can involve releasing the expectation that healing will eventually produce a nervous system capable of enduring environments that remain misaligned.

This is not settling. It is discernment.

What Becomes Possible After the Image Loosens

When the imagined self loosens, re-imagining does not begin with aspiration. It begins with perception.

People often report noticing different questions emerging. Not how do I become more, but what can be sustained without cost. Not how do I fix this, but what conditions allow something to take root.

A different sense of self can start to form — one less organised around overcoming and more organised around responsiveness. Identity becomes less about consistency across contexts and more about coherence within them.

This can allow lives that are narrower in some dimensions and richer in others. Less exposure, more depth. Less visibility, more continuity. Less self-monitoring, more presence.

For children, this can mean environments that privilege rhythm over readiness, relationship over performance, and regulation over output. For adults, it can mean work, caregiving, and intimacy that are shaped around reciprocity rather than endurance.

What emerges here is not a diminished life, but a differently scaled one. A life that can be inhabited without constant negotiation with the body.

How Life Begins to Organise Itself

What follows the loosening of old images is not clarity in the usual sense. It is rarely a new plan for living, or a revised understanding of self. More often, it shows up as a shift in attention.

Without the ongoing pressure to approximate an ideal — of self, of nervous system, of life — different things begin to register. Small exchanges that once went unnoticed. Rhythms that repeat quietly enough to hold the body. Forms of care, creativity, and connection that do not ask to be justified or extended.

This is not a redemptive turn. Nothing is being resolved or made whole. And yet, there is often a subtle fidelity in what remains — a way of staying with what is actually present, rather than with what was once imagined.

Lives organised in this way can appear narrower from the outside. There is often less movement, less accumulation, fewer visible signs of expansion. What becomes possible instead is a kind of closeness — to days that repeat without eroding, to relationships that hold without effort, to forms of attention that do not need to travel far to be sustained.

Less is reached for. More is stayed with.

What begins to take shape here was not waiting in the background. It could not have existed under earlier conditions. It emerges gradually, as effort loosens its hold and life is allowed to organise itself again — into a life more beautiful than we once knew was possible.

Related Resources

Important Information

This reflection is offered as a conceptual exploration rather than a therapeutic framework or directive. Experiences of capacity, grief, and adaptation are shaped by relational, social, and material conditions and will differ across contexts. This piece is not intended to replace individual support or to suggest that all distress can be resolved through accommodation alone.

RI Ali https://www.theflowerdoula.com