As God continues to grow this space, my heart is to open it to voices beyond my own. Today’s guest post is a thoughtful reflection on healing, time, and the permission to move at your own pace.
Tessie ~
As a child, my mother introduced a stove-top timer as a way togive me freedom within safe boundaries. Her intention was wholesome. She believed that time could be a neural tool for success, a way to structure independence while ensuring security. At first, this seemed empowering. But as I grew older and reflected on those experiences, I realized something deeper: time can be manipulated, and delays can evoke profound feelings of fear and abandonment.
What was meant as a constructive tool became, in my perception, a silent authority. Time began to feel less like a gentle guide and more like a ruler. Rigid, standardized, and used to measure worth, productivity, and success. Deadlines, schedules, and timelines can indeed be helpful, but for many trauma survivors, they also carry hidden weight. They can quietly trigger stress, shame, or even re-traumatization.
Through my journey to wellness, I’ve had to re-examine not just my memories, but my relationship with time itself. I’ve learned that time is not inherently oppressive, but the way we use it, and the meanings we attach to it, can shape our sense of safety and self-worth. Today, I strive to see time not as a measure of my value, but as a flexible companion in my healing process.
A powerful biblical example that speaks to this dynamic is the story of Martha and Mary in Luke 10:38–42.
Martha is consumed by urgency and productivity. She’s busy preparing, hosting, and meeting expectations. In her mind, value is tied to performance and timeliness: “If I don’t get this done, I’m failing.” Meanwhile, Mary sits at Jesus’ feet, choosing presence over pressure. When Martha complains, Jesus gently reminds her that while her efforts are good, they are not the ultimate measure of worth: “You are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is necessary.”
This passage illustrates that:
• Urgency can feel like survival: Martha’s nervous system was activated by the perceived demand to perform.
• Conditional care echoes in productivity: Martha believed her value was in her service, not her being.
• Jesus reframes time: He invites Mary (and Martha) into a posture of rest and presence, showing that worth is not earned by meeting deadlines but received through relationship.
Those of us with trauma histories, especially complex or chronic trauma, the nervous system may not experience time as neutral. Urgency can trigger a survival response. Productivity metrics can echo earlier experiences of conditional care. Beginning to believe that “You are valued when you perform on time”. Think of time like a smoke alarm that’s overly sensitive. It’s designed to keep you safe, but when it goes off every time you make toast, your body never gets a break. Arbitrary time constraints can work the same way, constantly activating the alert system that was shaped by past harm, rather than present reality. Trauma can make our internal alarms hypersensitive, and arbitrary time constraints can keep us in that loop.
Our culture often promotes linear progress when it comes to wellness: healing should look a certain way by a certain age, stage, or season. But trauma recovery rarely moves in straight lines. It spirals, pauses, revisits, and sometimes rests. This is not failure, it’s the nature of healing.
When communities, markets, or even families enforce a single pace, they unintentionally create harm. Consider a 24/7 grocery store: it’s always open, inviting people to shop at any hour without boundaries. While convenient, this lack of structure can be just as harmful as rigid deadlines because it disregards the nervous system’s need for predictable rhythms. Both extremes, hyper-structured timelines and open-ended time; can activate old survival patterns.
Similarly, applications that close on Friday, programs that expect healing in X weeks, or success defined by rapid growth; all risk excluding survivors whose bodies and lives require flexibility. For those of us with trauma histories, arbitrary time constraints can feel like a hypersensitive smoke alarm. That is constantly going off, even when there’s no real danger. These constraints echo earlier experiences of conditional care: “You are valued when you perform on time.”
Healing is not a race. Healing will allow for pauses, spirals, and individualized pacing, because safety and restoration happen in relationship, not on a stopwatch.
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