Emotional Recovery and the Moment I Stopped Letting the Darkness Grow
- Dr. Scott Eilers, PsyD, LP
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
If you’ve been moving through life with a heaviness that feels years deep, it can be hard to believe there’s anything inside you worth saving. I know that feeling.
There were long stretches where it felt like every good piece of me had been stripped away, like a forest logged down to nothing. What looked solid on the outside was hiding damage underneath.
This is how emotional erosion happens: slowly, quietly, until you wake up one day unsure whether the person you used to be still exists at all.
How Losing Yourself Happens Slowly
There was a time when I didn’t protect myself from anything that hurt me. I let anyone into my life. I reshaped myself into whatever version people valued. I tried to erase my interests, my boundaries, even parts of my identity. Being different felt dangerous. Being myself felt impossible.
And that’s the danger of slow self-removal:
You stop pushing back.
You accept things you would never accept now.
You absorb beliefs that never belonged to you.
Over the years, you shrink yourself to survive. Eventually you look in the mirror and barely recognize who’s left.
The Turn Toward Emotional Recovery
When reshaping myself didn’t work, I went to the opposite extreme. If I couldn’t be accepted, I’d be unrecognizable. I fed the darker parts of myself because it felt like the only thing I could control. I disconnected from empathy. I treated emotion as weakness. I surrounded myself with people who weren’t interested in healing, only escaping.
But emotional recovery doesn’t always begin in a therapist’s office or during some big revelation. Sometimes it starts in a place you didn’t expect, somewhere that reminds you of a version of yourself you thought had died.
For me, that moment happened in the forest I grew up in. I hadn’t returned in years. But something about those trees, the ones that had been destroyed long before I knew them, showed me that regrowth was possible. They had come back stronger. And in seeing that, I realized I wanted to grow back too.
Creating Rules That Protect Your Growth
Healing didn’t happen overnight. It still hasn’t. But that moment reset my direction.
Emotional recovery requires boundaries. It requires intention. You cannot regrow if you keep letting in the things that destroyed you the first time.
So I began choosing differently:
People who treated my mind and body with respect
Ideas that supported recovery instead of sabotaging it
Environments that gave space to grow instead of shrinking me
Healing requires protection. New growth is tender. You cannot rebuild on ground that keeps getting trampled.
A Path You Can Walk Too
You deserve a life built around the parts of you that are real, not the parts you had to create to survive.
Change doesn’t need to be loud. It can start with one honest moment where you finally admit your story doesn’t have to keep unfolding the same way.
There is a way back to yourself.
There is room for new growth.
And the fact that you’re still here means something inside you never gave up.
You are still capable of becoming someone stronger, clearer, and more whole than you’ve ever been allowed to be.
(If this post hit home, you’ll probably connect with my new book, The Light Between the Leaves. It’s a practical guide for the days when “try harder” stops working.
-Scott
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