How I started Healing with Reactive Attachment Disorder RAD

🌙🦋 “Roots From the Shadows” — A Spoken Word on Healing Reactive Attachment Disorder 🌲✨

I was left before I had a name.
Before I even learned what holding meant.
Before the word love came with warmth instead of warning.

Abandoned at birth. Adopted.
A story that was supposed to be a rescue — but felt more like a rearrangement of the same loneliness.

People say love heals.
But what if you never learned its language?
What if every hug feels like a question you don’t know how to answer?
What if “unconditional” sounds like a fairytale you weren’t invited into?

I grew up learning how to survive,
not how to connect.

I learned how to smile without trusting,
how to care while staying far away.
How to look like I belonged —
even when every cell in me whispered, you don’t.

Reactive Attachment Disorder isn’t a headline or a pity story —
it’s the quiet in the room when people try to get close.
It’s the flinch behind the laughter.
It’s wanting love and running from it at the same time.
Every. single. day.

But somewhere between the cracks of that ache —
I found nature. 🖤🌿

The forest doesn’t demand affection.
It just… exists.

I walk beneath trees older than memory,
and they tell me — softly —
that belonging doesn’t have to be earned.
That maybe love starts with sitting on the ground
and letting roots curl around the parts of me that still don’t trust.

The moss doesn’t judge me.
The wind doesn’t leave when I cry.
Nature taught me the first lesson of healing:
safety without conditions.

Then I found DBT —
the language of feelings I was never taught.
Mindfulness, emotion regulation, distress tolerance —
it’s like I went back to emotional kindergarten,
learning how to name things without apology.

DBT became my spellbook.
It whispers, you’re not broken for needing tools.
You’re brave for building them.

CBT came next —
and I met that voice inside me.
The one that says, you’re too much, you’re not enough, you’ll always be alone.
But CBT helped me sit across from that voice —
and say, hey, maybe you’re wrong this time.

It helped me rewrite the story I thought was tattooed on my bones:

“I am unlovable.”
into
“I am learning to love, even if no one showed me how.”

That’s what healing looks like —
not perfection, but a quiet rewriting of who you believe you are.

And then — ACT.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.
It taught me that pain doesn’t have to disappear
for life to be worth living.

Now, when fear shows up —
I don’t banish it.
I make it tea.
I say, come sit with me. You can stay — but I’m still going forward.

ACT taught me that you can hold hurt in one hand
and hope in the other —
and still move.

And through it all…
I still feel it.
The ache of not belonging anywhere.
The confusion when someone says “I love you” and I freeze —
because I don’t know what that feels like.

Every day, I choose to fight the urge to pull away.
Every day, I reach for connection like it’s something holy.
Sometimes I fail.
Sometimes I just stand in the forest,
talking to trees that never interrupt
and thinking — maybe this is what unconditional love feels like.

Quiet.
Steady.
Here.

I am not fixed —
but I am rooted now.
I am growing from the shadows,
slow and wild and soft.

And maybe,
that’s what healing really means —
learning that love doesn’t always arrive wrapped in people.
Sometimes it finds you
in wind,
in therapy,
in your own heartbeat
finally whispering:

"I’m still here. And I’m still worthy."

🌙🩶🌿