There is a phrase often whispered through grief’s corridors, handed down like a balm for broken souls: “Time heals all wounds.” At first glance, it sounds reassuring—a promise that the ache in our chest will ease, the tears will eventually stop, and the silence left behind by loss will soften into peace. But when grief takes up residence in the deepest chambers of your being, you soon realize this popular phrase is not only incomplete—it can be profoundly misleading.
Time does not heal all wounds. Time passes. That’s all it does. Healing, however, requires much more than the tick of a clock or the flipping of calendar pages. Healing is not passive. It is a deliberate and painful process of remembering, releasing, rebuilding, and sometimes simply surviving.
What Time Does Do
Time may create distance from the raw moment of loss, yes. It may mute the sharp sting of memory and slow the flood of uncontrollable tears. But it does not—on its own—mend the torn places in your soul. What heals the wound is not time, but what you do with the time.
Time with intentional reflection.
Time with space for honest emotion.
Time with safe community.
Time with truth, transparency, and transformation.
Time alone cannot hold your hand at 2 AM when your heart breaks all over again. Time will not talk back when you cry out, “Why?” Time will not explain the unfairness of it all, or stitch the hole left in your future where your loved one used to be.
The Lie of Silence
Sometimes, people use the phrase “time heals” as a way to silence pain they don’t know how to fix. It’s not always malicious. But it can be dismissive. It implies that your sorrow has an expiration date—that if you’re still grieving after a certain amount of time, something must be wrong with you.
Grief doesn’t follow a schedule. It doesn’t have a timeline. It loops, dips, surprises, and resurfaces when you least expect it—years later, in a scent, a song, or a simple Tuesday afternoon.
What Really Heals
What heals is grace. What heals is permission to feel, to speak, to cry, to question. What heals is the presence of someone willing to sit beside you in the ashes and not rush you to resurrection. What heals is honoring the grief and the love it came from.
The truth is, not all wounds heal in the way we hope. Some leave scars. Some alter us permanently. Some change our path forever. But even in the ache, there is beauty—because it means we loved deeply enough to be wounded this profoundly.
So no, time does not heal all wounds. But in the time you are given, you can choose to find meaning, to build new memories, to carry the legacy, and to live forward—even with the pain.
Grief doesn’t end. But neither does love.
Selah Moment with Dr. Althea Winifred
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