This Is What Healing Looks Like
I forgot my own 35th anniversary. After narcissistic abuse, that is not a foggy memory. That is freedom.
From my journal, written this morning:
Yesterday used to be a special day. June 20th was our anniversary. It would have been our 35th. But to me it was just another Saturday.
My ex texted me. “I had to say hi today, Love You.” I looked at the text and it still didn’t register why he texted, so several hours later I hearted it and went on with my day. It wasn’t until this morning, a full 24 hours later, that I realized the meaning of his text.
It actually feels good to not be in touch with HIS reality anymore. I actually remembered a friend’s birthday on this day before I remembered it was our anniversary. This is what healing looks like.
Welcome to Passage to Peace. I’m Marcia, a licensed therapist, survivor of narcissistic abuse, and founder of Passage to Peace. I write about the healing journey: the science, the spirituality, and the ordinary moments where freedom shows up unexpectedly.
This is my first post. It comes directly from my journal.
June 20th would have been my 35th wedding anniversary.
My ex texted me that morning: “I had to say hi today, Love You.”
I saw the text and I hearted it. Then I went on with my day.
It wasn’t until Sunday morning, a full 24 hours later, that I realized why he had sent it. Earlier that same day, I had remembered a friend’s birthday before I remembered it was our anniversary.
I went to dinner with my best friend that night. We spent an hour talking about the abuse I endured in my marriage. And it STILL never dawned on me that it was our anniversary.
WOW.
I wrote four words in my journal that morning: This is what healing looks like.
I want you to see it. This is my story. It is also a map of what is possible for yours.
The Science
What Your Nervous System Knows Before You Do
There is a name for what happened inside me on June 20th. It comes from the work of Dr. Stephen Porges and Polyvagal Theory.
Polyvagal Theory, Dr. Stephen Porges
Why the Body Keeps Score on Dates
Our autonomic nervous system encodes significant dates, relationships, and experiences as either safe or threatening. After prolonged trauma from narcissistic abuse, what was once important, such as anniversaries, names, and certain dates, become threat-activated anchors. The body braces before the mind even registers why. Healing is not the suppression of these responses. It is their metabolization until the nervous system no longer registers the stimulus as danger. When a date that once hijacked your entire system passes neutrally, that is called ventral vagal regulation. It is the biological signature of safety.
June 20th used to live in my body as a wound. This year, it passed through me just like the weather.
That is not a foggy memory. That is integrated healing.
Healing is not the absence of memory. It is the absence of the charge.
Internal Family Systems, Dr. Richard Schwartz
The Protector Who Finally Got to Rest
In my work with survivors, I teach about the four survivor parts. Each one develops during the trauma to protect us from pain. One of the most powerful is called the Protector.
The Protector is the part that stays hypervigilant. It monitors. It scans. It braces.
When I was in my marriage, and for years after I left, my Protector was on duty every June 20th.
Here is the truth about those anniversaries. Every one of them was special, but special was a performance. It did not reflect what I lived most other days of the year. Anniversaries were the days we celebrated the mask, the healthy, happy, adoring couple. Some years it was a trip. Other years it was a special dinner. Either way, it was a day to escape reality and act as if everything was great.
But a cloud usually loomed over the day. And some clouds turned into storms.
So my Protector watched. It monitored whether he would respect the day or expose it for what it really was: a delusion. It braced for disappointment. It stayed alert so I would not be caught off guard by the grief, or the storm, that so often came before, during or after that date.
That part was not broken. It was doing exactly what it was built to do. It was keeping me safe the only way it knew how.
This year, my Protector rested.
It had finally received the message, through years of inner work, therapy, building this program, doing the hard things, that I am safe now. June 20th is not a threat. And it no longer needed to stand guard over a date that no longer belongs to the wound.
When you heal, the things that used to hook you just slide right off.
Iyanla Vanzant
The Spiritual Perspective
I Am No Longer Living in His Story
I wrote something in my journal that morning that I keep coming back to.
It actually feels good to not be in touch with HIS reality anymore.
Michael A. Singer writes in The Untethered Soul that we suffer from the story we keep living inside, long after the chapter ends. My ex texted on our anniversary because that date still lives in his story. It has weight there. It carries meaning and memory.
But in my world, his text arrived in a life where June 20th was just a Saturday. Dinner with my best friend. Genuine conversation. True joy.
God doesn’t just heal you from the wound. He heals you from needing the wound to define you.
T.D. Jakes
Eckhart Tolle calls this presence. Not the absence of memory. The ability to live fully in the now without the echo of the past pulling you backward. I was present for my friend's birthday. I was present at dinner. I was not present in 1992, in a marriage, in a pain that no longer belongs to me.
The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but your thoughts about it.
Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth
A Word For You
If Your Date Still Has a Charge
Maybe June 20th isn’t your date. But you have one.
Maybe you still check your phone on that day. Maybe the grief rises in your body before your mind even knows why. Maybe you told yourself you were over it and then that date rolled around and proved you wrong.
I need you to know: I was exactly where you are.
I know what it is to build your entire nervous system around another person’s moods. To scan for danger in the silence between texts. To interpret a look across the room as a verdict on your worth. To lose yourself so completely inside someone else’s reality that you don’t even know what you feel without their permission.
I know that freedom sounds like something that happens to other people.
And I know, because I have now lived it, and because I have watched hundreds of survivors live it too, that freedom is real. It is not a concept. It is a real place. And it is closer than you think.
You can’t get to courage without walking through vulnerability.
Oprah Winfrey
The work is hard. The healing is not linear. There will be dates that still catch you. There will be moments you think you have gone backward when really you are going deeper.
But a day will come when that date is just a date. When their name is just a name. When their text is something you ‘heart’ and move on from without drama, without grief, without even remembering why it should have mattered.
That day came for me on June 20th, 2026.
It is coming for you too.
If the one who could not forget that date is behind you, who are you as you move forward? What do you get to claim now that you couldn’t before?
Write your answer. That is your next page.
I am on page 257 of my journal. My story is still unfolding. So is yours, and you are holding the pen.
You were never meant to stay in the wound.
Passage to Peace is a healing and transformation program for survivors of narcissistic abuse. Your journey starts here.
Absolutely! Profound. My day is coming ❤️