The Wound Is the Way: Crossing the Threshold

The Wound Is the Way

We often think of healing as escape—an exit strategy. Get past the pain. Shut the door. Move on.

But healing isn’t about leaving behind. It’s about return.

In therapy, the deepest work doesn’t begin with new insight. It begins by circling back to what we abandoned: the wound that broke us open, the shame we buried, and the parts of ourselves we exiled.

What We Repress

What we repress doesn’t die. It waits—like mold under wallpaper, spreading until the wall itself buckles.

This is the way hurt arrives—with intent.

When Hurt Shows Up

Hurt doesn’t knock politely. It kicks in the door at 3 a.m., rummages through your fridge, and leaves the milk to sour.

It forces you to face the lies you told to survive, the parts of yourself you hid to be loved, and the bargains you made to belong.

It reveals the distance between the life you live and the larger, truer life you long for—shouting with a clarity comfort cannot bear, drowning out the tidy stories that kept reality at bay.

And that revelation wounds more than the wound itself.

To numb it is to erase the lesson. To bargain with it is to hollow it out. To ignore it is to guarantee its return—louder, more feral.

When Truth Betrays

Truth makes you the villain—when you admit you hated the job everyone praised, when you tell your mother you won’t carry her secrets anymore, when you leave the relationship that kept you safe but small.

Truth wounds before it frees you.

Hurt keeps circling back, whispering, “Stop clinging. Stop polishing what was already shattered. Learn the difference between silence that protects and silence that betrays.”

If maturity teaches anything, it’s this: Hurt is the door no one chooses, yet none of us can leave unopened. It doesn’t ease us through—it smashes us against the shell of who we thought we had to be.

And sometimes falling to our knees is the only way to discover the faith that never let us go.

The Road Walked Twice

There is only one path, and we are condemned to walk it twice.

The first as descent—into survival, into repetition, into the masks that kept us alive.

The second as return—into remembrance, into the fracture, into freedom.

The road doesn’t change. We do.

This time we come back stripped, emptied, finally submitting.

And when we return, the selves we once exiled fall into step beside us—not as burdens or ghosts, but as companions carrying their broken lanterns, casting a frail light across the way home.

No Secret Exits

I’ve tried shortcuts: distraction, reinvention, and overwork. None of them hold.

What we bury comes back until we face it.

Submission isn’t collapsing. It’s the courage to let the scaffolding rot and see the house still stands.

Winnicott called it creation: the willingness to be undone, to let life grow in the ruins.

Jessica Benjamin called it recognition: meeting another—and ourselves—as real.

Submission is not defeat. It is the threshold. The first breath after nearly drowning.

Closing Reflection

In the therapy room, this return is not theory. It is lived. Raw. Slow. Terrifying.

To retrace our steps is to sit again in the places where pain first entered and let ourselves feel what we once fled.

Collapse doesn’t vanish—it strips. Exile doesn’t dissolve—it lingers.

The wound never disappears. It waits—threshold, portal, reminder. Not an enemy. Not a friend.

A door that refuses to close.

Author’s Note

This reflection is part of a series on the poetry of healing—where lived experience and the depths of the psyche meet, shaped by the inner life we all carry.

Yoon Im Kane is a psychotherapist, educator, consultant, and speaker whose work explores mindful leadership, the poetry of healing, and the power of lived experience. Trained at Yale and practicing for over two decades, she founded Mindful Psychotherapy Services in Manhattan and MNDlink in Maui.

Her publications include The Mindfulness Workbook for Depressionand Women, Intersectionality, and Power in Group Psychotherapy

Join us in ongoing conversations of healing. Connect on social media @mindful.nyc.

References

Benjamin, J. (1988). The bonds of love: Psychoanalysis, feminism, and the problem of domination. New York: Pantheon Books.

Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and reality. London: Tavistock.

Freud, S. (1920/1955). Beyond the pleasure principle. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 18, pp. 1–64). London: Hogarth Press.

Ogden, T. H. (1994). The analytic third: Working with intersubjective clinical facts. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 75(1), 3–19.