When Moving Away Helps Us Heal (2025)

I kicked off my mini "book tour" last week with a stop in DC, followed by a flight down to New Orleans — my old stomping grounds.

While I am originally from Maine, New Orleans is where I truly grew up. I moved here when I was barely old enough to enjoy one of the city's famous drinks on Bourbon Street.

I always say that I grew up here — but that growth was fueled by the necessity to escape (and heal from) my childhood. I grew in the way that matters most: I learned how to heal.

You can't heal while still in the hurt

For so long, I believed healing meant fixing myself within the context of my family — that if I just loved them more, understood them better, or tried harder, we could be okay. But some wounds don’t heal in the environment where they were inflicted.

New Orleans, with its tangled streets, merciless humidity, and vibrant eccentricity, became my sanctuary. Here, I wasn’t the scapegoat, the family savior, or the black sheep. I was just me—and I was free to just be.

I didn't know this at the time, but I left home not just for adventure but to distance myself from the toxic dynamics of my family. To create distance from the roles I’d been forced into, and distance from the version of myself that had learned to survive rather than live.

Distance can fuel healing

Physical space allows for emotional space. No longer drowning in the urgency of my family's crises, I slowly realized how much energy I’d spent trying to solve problems that were never mine to begin with. I could finally hear my own thoughts, and learn who I was — outside of my family roles.

For me, and many other survivors trying to heal from their history, proximity means perpetual reactivation: every interaction, even a text message, could send me spiraling into old survival modes — people-pleasing, hypervigilance, and anxiety. I can quickly find myself slipping back into that parentified child, trying to solve problems, and panicking when I am inevitably unable to do so.

But distance changed all that for me. Over time, I began to notice that my nervous system wasn’t on high alert. And when it was, I was finally able to find ways to soothe. Without the daily manipulation, I noticed the weight I’d been carrying: the guilt, the grief, the phantom sense of responsibility for adults who’d failed me.

Studies on trauma recovery emphasize the importance of safety as a prerequisite for healing — but this is something many of us can’t access when we’re still trapped in the environments (or relationships) where harm occurred. Some of us need to leave to create that safety, and this is okay. Physical separation often allows us to process pain without retraumatization that comes from still being "stuck" in the trauma and chaos.

Distance didn’t absolve the pain, but it gave me the one thing I’d never had: agency. For the first time, healing wasn’t something I had to negotiate with anyone but myself.

Distance gave me the breathing room to face my trauma without being suffocated by it.

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