02/17/2026
When someone says “just get over it,” it often reveals more about their history than yours.
Minimizing another person’s pain is rarely a sign of strength. More often, it is a well-practiced survival strategy. Many people were never given the space, language, or safety to feel what hurt. They learned to override, suppress, intellectualize, or power through. So when they see someone pausing to acknowledge grief, trauma, or disappointment, it can feel threatening. It confronts the very defenses that once kept them intact.
Psychologically, this is understandable. Unprocessed pain does not disappear; it reorganizes itself into avoidance, rigidity, irritation, or contempt. Being in the presence of someone who is consciously tending to their wounds can activate what was never permitted in one’s own story.
But healing is not indulgence, and it is not stagnation.
Those doing the work of therapy, somatic processing, or reflective practice are often metabolizing pain that was never metabolized by prior generations. They are interrupting patterns of silence, emotional cutoff, and inherited survival responses. This is not about staying stuck in suffering. It is about completing what was interrupted — feeling what could not be felt, naming what could not be named, and moving through what was once frozen.
Acknowledgment is not the opposite of resilience. It is the foundation of it.
The goal is not to live in the wound. The goal is to integrate it, so it no longer runs the nervous system from the shadows. And that requires something many of us were never taught: turning toward pain with enough safety and support to let it move.
If “getting over it” were that simple, we would have generations of fully healed families. Instead, we have generations learning — sometimes for the first time — how to feel, process, and repair.
Healing is not weakness. It is the courageous refusal to pass unprocessed pain forward.
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