Not all wounds bleed. Some harden quietly beneath our skin, covered by time and normalcy, until they are mistaken for healing. Discourses on geopolitical realignments, climate anxiety, and social unrest are underway as we enter a new year. With more integration of artificial intelligence in life, governance, warfare, and medicine, there is a shift towards multipolar influence from unipolar politics. Yet beneath all these structural shifts lies a quieter but decisive factor that will shape a lot of our future events, which are the psychological conditions of individuals and societies. An unhealed future cannot be stable, no matter how advanced it appears.
Dr. Gabor Mate, in his book “The Myth of Normal,” talks about how social life affects health is not a new discovery, but the recognition of it has never been more urgent. He sees it as the most important health concern of our time, driven by the effects of increasing stress, inequality, and climate catastrophe, to name a few salient factors. He talks about how, on a societal level, ‘normal’ often means ‘nothing to see here’, all systems are functioning as they should with no further inquiry needed. Normalization becomes a tool of dismissal rather than understanding. With increasing exhaustion, anxiety, emotional numbness, and disconnection that’s becoming widespread, they are no longer seen as warning signs but as acceptable costs of modern life. By 2026, this idea of normal has grown increasingly dangerous. A world can appear functional while quietly breaking the people within it. Economic productivity may rise, technologies may advance, and institutions may remain operational, yet the internal lives of individuals deteriorate beneath the surface. Labeling this condition as “normal” silences inquiry and delays healing. True progress cannot emerge from such denial. The way forward requires redefining normal not as survival within dysfunction, but as alignment between human needs, emotional well-being, and the systems we inhabit.
Dr. Gabor Mate further adds about how “Our concept of well-being must move from the individual to the global in every sense of that world”.
This brings us to the infamous line from time being, which says “time heals everything”.
Well, does time really heal everything? Even when the physical scar is left untreated, considering that time will heal it, so with time it will get covered by scar. It’s not raw and Open, but the scars are still there. Same as the psychic wound, which we also know as Trauma. If it’s left unhealed, it’ll be like an ongoing source of pain and a place where we can be hurt over and over again by even the slightest stimulus. Over time, time can only do so much by forming a rigid scar over that trauma. That scar will provide protection, but it will be like a zone of numbness. Like a scar has no nerve endings, so no sensation, similarly, it will cause us emotional numbness.
Dormant wounds remain active internally, and triggers reactivate trauma fully again. So did time really heal it at all? Moreover, many times, people confuse traumatic experiences with difficult experiences or minor inconveniences. There is a very distinct differentiation between these two, and also how they affect the individuals. It can be stressful to experience a difficult event in a particular period in life, but it will not necessarily bring about a longer-term effect in life to come. However, trauma affects a person both mentally and physically in life. To make it clearer, the traumatic event may have occurred to you in life, but the process resulting from the effect is called trauma.
As I used “psychi wound” in the previous example, it is just a wound because it is an effect of the traumatic incident in life. It is extremely important to note the difference between the two because we could heal the process called “trauma,” but it seems impossible to heal “traumatic events.” It is impossible to go back in life and reverse the negative events that have occurred. Which brings us to the word “heal”, the way we started this topic, which was “can time heal”? The word comes from Anglo-Saxon origin, which means wholeness.
Healing means wholeness, Wholeness within oneself. Since the trauma disconnects us from our true self, from our emotions and from our body, healing is when we become complete again. And healing is an active process. It requires that person’s conscious involvement. Time alone does not heal trauma. Unhealed trauma keeps showing up in the present. Trauma keeps us stuck in the past, robbing us of the present moments, and limiting our growth and our true self. Healing is about focusing on our emotional reaction in the present time. Even if we revisit past events many times it won’t help if we don’t address the effects of our current life. It’s about the present not the past. Healing happens by dealing with emotions arising now. Often we don’t let ourselves express grief fully. Either we suppress it or just try to minimise it, acting tough.
On the other hand, in recent years, humanity has faced a series of traumatic experiences that were unprecedented. The COVID-19 pandemic was not only a health crisis, it was a worldwide psychological shock. The sudden loss of dear ones, the confinement, the fear of infection, the insecurity of livelihood, and the fear of the unknown future created a powerful psychological imprint on all sections of society. Although the health crisis created by the pandemic has ended, the psychological imprint of the event is still visible on a large section of the population. Meanwhile, the series of confictions in the past years, the images of violence, destruction, and human suffering visible on digital media every day, the images of fire, flood, and other natural calamities, have all exposed the world, directly affected or indirectly affected, to a series of traumatic events.
Furthermore, under such situations, if a person is not allowed to grieve, then it’s a hindrance in their healing process. Grief is essential for life because loss is inevitable. From a young age young children should be allowed to show and express every emotions. It’s very important for their development, as validating grief helps children learn they can endure painful emotions. No matter how small the loss seems to adult, they should not downplay it by saying it’s not a big deal. For children it can be a big deal. So suppressing grief blocks healing. Unhealed pain from childhood gets carried into adults life. Based on these childhood traumas, later in life our mind forms a defense when things get overwhelming. We shut down completely, refusing to open up and sharing our emotional turmoil.
This type of defense actually stops growth since growth requires vulnerability. In nature, things really only grow where they’re a bit exposed or vulnerable. Defences were necessary in childhood in a way to protect against painful events but in adulthood they block healing and growth. Healing requires letting go of old defences, allowing vulnerability again. No doubt why we seek certainty, because vulnerability feels unsafe. These vulnerability and defences causes loneliness since if parts of you remains unseen or unexpressed, it often create loneliness. The mind resists change to avoid re-experiencing pain. But growth only happens in uncertainty and vulnerability. Vulnerability is essential for growth like snake does not outgrow it’s skin quietly.
It splits, peels and leaves behind what once kept it safe, for a moment it is vulnerable, but that vulnerability is the price of becoming larger than before. We crave certainty, identity, and belonging. To Identify simply means to make oneself the same as something. It’s like narrowing yourself, and limiting your being. Some people over-identify themselves as victims or wounded. this type of identification freezes growth, keeping people stuck in the past. Which can be worded better by a term given by Peter Levine: “The tyranny of the past” meaning, when past wounds dominate present reactions.
This leads us back to the wound metaphor: An unhealed wound does not heal just because time passes.
In summation, time alone does not heal the wounds. Healing is a process. It requires us to acknowledge our suffering rather than suppress it. It is not about fixing the past, it’s about acknowledging the effect of those sufferings in the present and becoming complete within our true self. It’s about being free in the present from the past. This freedom comes from loosening identification with fear, roles, and pain. A person is much greater than what happened to them, they are much greater than their suffering.
Seeing clearly matters now, as people step into 2026. Built on ignoring hurt, tomorrow just repeats fights, distance, broken feelings. Healing isn’t waiting; it shows up through attention, kindness, owning what we carry. It pulls both persons and groups toward quieter moments, turning ears inside, making room so ache can be seen instead of skipped. Truth about feelings must find its way into how people live, how organizations work, one story at a time or history keeps pulling us sideways. Progress missing this balance spins in place, dressed differently each round. we can work towards a future that’s really good for everyone not just one that has a lot of new technology. Only when inner repair accompanies external progress can societies move forward without repeating the same unresolved patterns in new forms.
By: ANJALI KUMARI
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