You're not healing to be able to handle the trauma. You're healing to be able to handle the joy.

Most people frame healing as building a tolerance for pain. They want to become harder to hurt, less reactive, more armored. But the deeper cost of unresolved grief is not its effect on your capacity to suffer. It is its effect on your capacity to receive. The same walls that keep pain out keep everything out. The goal of healing is not to withstand more. It is to feel more freely: the joy, the connection, the life that is trying to get in on the other side of the loss.