86: Why Perseverance is Important for the Healing Journey
Perseverance is important on the healing journey because it reminds us of our strength when life feels challenging. In this episode, I explain perseverance and how resilience and delayed gratification can help you to continue to move forward. I also discuss my own healing journey and how I have learned to persevere over time, and that perseverance and hard work were not qualities that came naturally to me, but skills I developed throughout healing.
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Timestamps ⏱️
Introduction: 00:15
Why Perseverance is Important for the Healing Journey: 2:49
Outro: 23:16
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This podcast was transcribed by an AI tool called Castmagic. Please forgive any typos or errors.
Amanda Durocher [00:00:01]:
Welcome to New View Advice. I'm your host, Amanda Durocher, and I invite you to join me here each week as I offer advice on how to move through whatever problem or trauma is holding you back from living life to the fullest. Let's get started. Hey, beautiful souls. My name is Amanda Durocher, and this is New View Advice. If you're new here, this is a healing centered advice podcast where I offer guidance for the healing journey. It's not my intention to give you all the answers. I believe you have all the answers you seek.
Amanda Durocher [00:00:27]:
You just may need a new view and a little help along the way. Welcome to season 4 of new view advice. Thank you for being here. Today, we will be discussing why is perseverance important for the healing journey. I don't know about you, but my 2023 was incredibly challenging. And one thing I learned over and over again was the importance of perseverance and how it's not a bad thing for life to feel difficult at times even though it can feel really challenging. It's not a bad thing. And so much of life and especially the healing journey is learning how to handle life's Difficulties? Enroll with the punches.
Amanda Durocher [00:00:57]:
How do we persevere? How do we get up after we've been knocked down? How do we continue to move forward and take that next Step. Our heart is asking after being knocked down, after experiencing difficulties. How do we continue to heal as we think we've finished healing something, but then the next layer arises? Or when we replay a pattern in a relationship, how do we continue to persevere? Today, we will be discussing what is perseverance, why it's important when navigating life's challenges, and how to build perseverance in our own lives. My intention for this episode is to help you to lean into perseverance and resilience in your own life and to understand that it's not a bad thing if your life feels challenging at times and that it's very, very human and especially when healing. So I know my audience here is healing from many different things, including infidelity, relationships, trauma, sexual assault, rape, and all those things require perseverance and learning how to continue moving forward and following our heart. Because our heart doesn't lead us down the easy path. Our heart leads us down the path to our intention. And so I know from my life, my intention is freedom.
Amanda Durocher [00:02:02]:
I want to feel free in this lifetime, and I've experienced so much trauma throughout my life that has left me feeling not free, that has left me feeling caged, that has left me feeling limited and scared in the world I live in. And my intention for healing is Always, how do I feel more free? And I have found time and time again that in order for me to continue to follow my heart towards that intention, it requires perseverance. Before we jump into the episode, I wanted to mention that if you haven't checked out my website yet, I invite you to check it out after this episode for more free resources, including journal prompts, meditations, in podcast episodes. You can check that out at newviewadvice.com, and today's episode show notes will be at newviewadvice.com/86. So with that, let's jump on into talking about perseverance. So today's question is why is perseverance important for the healing journey? And in full transparency, this is a question I've been asking myself, So I decided to do an episode on it. So this is really me asking myself a question and hoping that this episode will help somebody else out there as well. Because As usual, the beginning of my new year, so the beginning of 2024, I'm not sure when you're listening to this episode, but I'm releasing it January 2024.
Amanda Durocher [00:03:13]:
And the beginning of my 2024 was not what I expected. I took an unexpected hiatus from the podcast, so that's why we have a new season. I'm feeling inspired to just start new. And so I wanted to start a new season because I had a tough end of the year. I had a lot of trauma come up. And what I mean by that is that I Had a lot of memories from my past come up that needed to be processed. There were things that I had been avoiding for a very long time. And for me, it was healing the layer of my sexual assault.
Amanda Durocher [00:03:43]:
So for anybody new here, I was sexually assaulted and raped in my teen years. I was also sexually assaulted in my youth. But over the past year and a half, I've really been healing from the teen experience I had, and I've done episodes where I've talked about that. A lot of the sexual trauma episodes, I talk more about that. I don't wanna go into the details, but I wanted to share a bit about this because I think it's always important to talk about how the healing journey is like an onion, and it's healing and peeling back the layers in order to get to the core of who we are, in order to come home to ourselves. I believe our heart. I believe our soul is inviting us home to who we really are, and that when we come to planet Earth, we forget who we are. And we all experience really painful things, and we create beliefs about the world based off of those experiences.
Amanda Durocher [00:04:26]:
So for me, being raped in my teens by a group of my peers, I created a lot of beliefs about myself in the world because of that experience. And one Aspect of that assault was that it was a near death experience, so I almost died. I was brutally beaten as well as raped. And this was a layer I had a really hard time accepting. I had a hard time accepting this for a lot of different reasons, and I'm sure throughout the episodes Of this season, I'll talk about a bunch of those different reasons. But today, I wanna focus on the fact that I was running from healing this layer because I didn't want to fall apart again. I feel like my healing journey has been defined in the last 7 years by 3 big traumas. So one was being sexually assaulted in my childhood, moving through the layers of that.
Amanda Durocher [00:05:15]:
Then I had to process being raped in my teens, and then this layer that has been following me for the past year of it being a near death experience was like this 3rd big piece for me. It felt separate even though it was part of my teen sexual assault. It felt like this 3rd piece that I really needed to accept about my life, and I didn't want to. I didn't want to. I didn't want to go through all the motions Yeah. And I share this because it involved perseverance. 2023 for me was all about perseverance. It was all about taking those actions forward even when I didn't want to.
Amanda Durocher [00:05:50]:
Healing is not easy, but perseverance is important for the healing journey. Because as I mentioned in the intro, for my life, I want freedom. I intend to feel free in this lifetime. I will take the actions I need to take in order to feel what freedom feels like because I have felt like a slave to my own mind, I have felt like I am caged by myself in my fears of the world. For a long time, I blame the world for how I felt, But the more I heal, I realize it's the stories I tell myself that have kept me caged, that have kept me small, and it is my intention for my lifetime to feel free. That is why I came here. That is what I am passionate about. I wanna feel free.
Amanda Durocher [00:06:31]:
In order to do that, I have to persevere. I have to keep pushing forward. The definition of perseverance is continued effort to do or achieve something despite difficulties, failure, or opposition. So I think perseverance is so important for the healing journey because I think that sums up healing for so many of us. Throughout healing, we are humbled time and time again by our own limitations of ourselves. And I have found, at least through my healing journey, that I fall time and time again. I repeat patterns. I enter relationships that are there to teach me something, not that are there to be forever.
Amanda Durocher [00:07:06]:
I play out my small minded thinking. I live in fear. I have fears arise all the time. But in order for me to continue moving forward towards my intention of feeling free in this lifetime, I have to continue to persevere. I really wanted to open season 4, which is honoring that doing the inner work isn't easy. It requires perseverance, and it requires resilience. I wanted to mention resilience as well because resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties, and I think resilience is something we all have. Anybody listening to this podcast, anybody healing is very, very resilient, so I want to honor you.
Amanda Durocher [00:07:43]:
But we also learn to be more resilient through healing. Because healing teaches us time and time again that there's more for us So look at, there's more for us to see, and we can be knocked down by ourselves. We can enter relationships that teach us hard lessons. We can make mistakes we regret. We can Experience things that we feel are unhealable, but it's that resiliency and that perseverance that remind us of our strength and remind us how to get back up on the path. There were so many times I felt like giving up in 2023, but then I would think about what is giving up. So do I give up the podcast? Do I get a 9 to 5 job? Do I stop healing? Those were questions I pondered time and time again because, Like I said, 2023 was really, really difficult, and the inner work is hard. There were certain moments where I didn't have anybody to look to for guidance on healing certain things.
Amanda Durocher [00:08:36]:
And what I found time and time again when I sat in meditation, when I journaled, When I went in nature and I sat with my heart, my heart was telling me to keep moving forward, that there was nothing wrong with where I was. And that is something I wanna take a moment to talk about with perseverance is that I think when difficult things happen, we can label it as if the situation is wrong or that we're doing something wrong. And that is not true. Okay? Life is filled with difficulties. It's filled with challenges. Some are easier than others. Some are harder to navigate than others, but it is not a bad thing if you are going through something difficult. You know, I think so many of us compare ourselves to where other people are at.
Amanda Durocher [00:09:18]:
Why does their life seem easier than mine? I know I did that over the past year, And the truth is life isn't fair. We don't have the same lives as everyone else. Everyone is born into different circumstances. Everybody is born into different families with different beliefs, with different structures. Everybody has different life experiences. Everybody's soul came here to learn something different, so stop comparing your path to someone else's because you are here to do you. You are here to learn what you came here to learn. You are here to honor your life's path, and no one knows how difficult your life has been except for you.
Amanda Durocher [00:09:58]:
That's the truth. We want everybody to get it. Don't you see how hard it is for me? I can't tell you how many times this year I was like, why don't people get it? Why don't they get how Hard this is. How hard my life is. And the truth is I had to honor how hard my life is. No one was going to understand what it has been like to be Amanda Durocher except for Amanda Durocher. And every time I wanted somebody to see how hard it was for me, I really wanted them to see me in victim mode. I wanted them to see that I had all these things, so that's why I was struggling.
Amanda Durocher [00:10:35]:
And when I think about it, when I step back from it, the truth is no. I want people to see my strength. I want people to see how amazing I am despite what I've survived. I did not fully honor how hard my path has been. I've been moving so fast, healing so much, pushing forward, moving forward, not looking back that the last 3 months, I I had to look back. I had to see everything I've overcome because that was the only way I was able to see how strong I am, how resilient I am, My ability to persevere. Perseverance is so important for the healing journey because it teaches us How to move forward despite difficulties. It teaches us that we have the power to move forward despite difficulties.
Amanda Durocher [00:11:23]:
It teaches us how to create the life we want. I think a lot of people get stuck at difficulties, and they think that it's The universe's way of saying don't go that way or they get scared and they stop there. Perseverance is the act of doing it anyway. I'm terrified, but I'm doing it anyway. That is how I live my life, and it's not easy. But through perseverance, I have created a life that I only dreamed was possible. The things that don't haunt me anymore, the beliefs I have looked at and healed, The trauma that no longer cripples me anymore, it's incredibly humbling and liberating for me to see that. I think One way to build perseverance is to honor yourself.
Amanda Durocher [00:12:08]:
I heard recently the expression, you can only see how far you've come by looking back, And I invite you to reflect on how far you've come, the things that you've overcome throughout your life, the things in your life that you used To be afraid of that you're no longer afraid of. The things that used to make you anxious that no longer make you anxious. The things that used to leave you in shame that now you can look at and maybe you are currently looking at. I invite you to honor yourself. If you are here, you have perseverance. You have persevered. And so one way to build perseverance is to honor yourself, to see your perseverance, to bring awareness to it. The more you honor your perseverance, the more confident you'll be in your ability to persevere and to be resilient.
Amanda Durocher [00:12:53]:
Another quote I found when researching Jing perseverance was by Gevirtili. I don't actually know who this is, but he's an author and speaker. But I loved the quote where he said persistence and resilience only come from having been given the chance to work through difficult problems. Oh, that's a good one. So how do we develop perseverance? It's through is through continually aligning with the intention we have for our life and moving forward despite the difficulties. You know, I know in my life, I was not taught Hard work. I know this isn't true for everybody, but when I was younger, I was not taught hard work. School came really easy to me.
Amanda Durocher [00:13:29]:
I had an easy time with a lot of things. I didn't have to work hard for much. I went to college, and I coasted pretty much. And then I got a job out of college that was easy for me. I didn't work hard at it. And it wasn't until I began my healing journey that I learned the importance of hard work. And I mentioned that because I didn't know how to be persistent and resilient because I hadn't Really been given opportunities to overcome difficult problems, and I share that because hard work is so important. Hard work teaches us so much about ourselves.
Amanda Durocher [00:14:04]:
How do we build confidence in ourselves? We see we can overcome challenges. I think so many people are running from being challenged because they're so afraid of failure. I know that I've been afraid of failure throughout my life because I've been afraid of criticism because because that is one of my childhood wounds being criticized. And throughout my childhood, I was also taught not to trust myself. I was taught every instinct I had was wrong, And so I didn't know how to persevere. I didn't know how to function for a really long time, if I'm honest. And it's through the healing journey that I've learned the importance of perseverance and resilience because then I know I can overcome any challenge. You know? I'm at a point in my life where I'm not praying for more trauma, and I'm not praying for big challenges, but I know I could overcome it if it comes my way.
Amanda Durocher [00:14:49]:
It gives me the confidence and the ability to step outside my comfort zone. I used to live in a constant freeze response. I used to be so traumatized. I had so much trauma in my body. I would just freeze all the time in different situations, and I couldn't put myself out there in a new way. And I knew I wanted to do a lot of things in this world, and I was like, Universe, show me the way forward. And I thought the universe was going to give me some acting job or a writing job or some big outward opportunity that would show me the way forward and would help me through the freeze response. No.
Amanda Durocher [00:15:23]:
No. No. No. No. The universe showed me my triggers. The universe showed me what I needed to heal. And then through the healing journey, my life has changed because I've changed my life, because I've become an active participant in my life, And that's what perseverance is. Being able to persevere is being able to take an active role in your life despite whatever challenge you may be facing.
Amanda Durocher [00:15:46]:
And the last thing I wanna mention when it comes to perseverance and how we build perseverance within ourselves is to remember the importance of delayed gratification. Learning to continue to show up through hard times is, to me, a built skill. At least it was in my life. Some people, it may come naturally to show up even when things are hard. As I mentioned, I didn't learn hard work until my twenties, so it was a skill that I had to learn how to persevere. It's why I know anybody can heal from anything because if I can heal from the things I've healed from and change my life the way I have, anybody can. You know, I've had people say to me recently, how did you become you? How did you become so good at all this? I don't think I'm good at all this. I really don't.
Amanda Durocher [00:16:28]:
I just show up anyway. I show up when it's hard, and that didn't always come easy to me. Things that used to take me months and then weeks and then days now may take me hours, or they still take me days. As I mentioned, I took a hiatus from the podcast for a while because I had a really hard month. I've learned just not to beat myself up about it because the less critical I am of myself, the easier it is for me to persevere and to move forward. What used to keep me frozen in that freeze response was negative self talk. It was debilitating. The negative self talk I used to say to myself was cruel and would keep me frozen.
Amanda Durocher [00:17:05]:
I couldn't move. I used to be so mean to myself. Am I perfect? No. Just last week, I was like, I can't believe you're here again. But I caught that thought quicker, and I thought, what is here again? Where am I? I did a meditation. I found a younger part of myself that needed to be witnessed. We felt some feelings, and I moved forward. Why does it come easier for me now? Because I've been doing this for a long time, because I've persevered through really hard times, because I've learned to keep moving forward despite how hard my life is.
Amanda Durocher [00:17:38]:
And if you're here, I know you do that too. I know you continue to move forward even when life is challenging. I know for many of you out there, you have had a very challenging life altogether, and I am so sorry for that. I am so sorry for the challenges you have experienced, And I am honored to be on this path with you and to persevere with you. And so I feel like that was a tangent away from delayed gratification, but I wanna loop back to delayed gratification because I think that it's a big part of perseverance. So learning that we're not always gonna get what we want in the moment is part of perseverance. So many times, I was disappointed over the last year because I didn't get what I expected. Right? I didn't get instant gratification.
Amanda Durocher [00:18:18]:
Nobody was patting me on the back right away. Nobody was giving me $1,000,000. And I was like, oh my gosh. This is all so hard. What's the point? And what I continue to learn is life is about delayed gratification. So I didn't have 1 instant moment where all of a sudden my life was amazing. It was slowly over time, slowly over the last decade as I peeled back the layers that I am now where I am on my healing journey, that I now feel more free than ever before. Could I be freer? I think so.
Amanda Durocher [00:18:45]:
And I'm excited to continue this journey with you, but I'm more free. I'm more liberated. I'm less critical of myself. I'm kinder. I'm more compassionate than I've ever been in my whole life. I'm more forgiving. I'm more understanding. But those qualities didn't come overnight.
Amanda Durocher [00:19:00]:
There wasn't some big moment. And, also, when we're healing, at the beginning, I find we kinda get that instant gratification, actually. Like, we tend to be really low and then really high. That's how it was for me at the beginning. And then over time, we don't get those same highs, But it's because we're peeling back deeper layers, and so then we learn that stage of the healing journey that requires patience, persistence, Resilience. And we learn those really juicy life skills. Because as I mentioned, when you realize how persistent you are and when you build your resilience, You're able to go out in the world in a new way, a more aligned way, a less fearful way. And isn't that what life's about? Going out in the world and being confident in ourselves, I think that's part of life.
Amanda Durocher [00:19:46]:
I haven't experienced that yet. I'm just learning how to do that. I'm just learning not to question everything that comes out of my mouth. I'm just learning not to double think what I say. I'm just learning that I am safe no matter where I am, And it's different for me, and it's cool, and it's groovy, but it's different, and it's new. And I like this chapter, But it took me a while to get here. I had to persevere through a lot. I had to get knocked down a lot of times to be able to find even footing in a world that's filled with rocky footing, if you ask me.
Amanda Durocher [00:20:18]:
And the last thing I wanna mention before we wrap up this episode is that maybe this will help somebody because This is something I noticed in my own life is that when I feel stuck and I feel like I don't know the way forward, It's often that I need to persevere through something challenging. And what I mean by that is what I noticed in my own life is I get in a cycle of I feel stuck, And then I get worried about feeling stuck, and then I get frustrated, and then I go back to feeling stuck, and then I feel worried, and I feel frustrated. And what that stuckness is actually telling me is that there's a challenge, an obstacle, or a fork in the road and that I don't wanna make a decision because it's hard. And many times when we feel stuck, we have to remember that we are resilient, and we have the ability to persevere. Because I find when I'm stuck often, there's 2 hard choices, and I don't know which Hard choice. And sometimes it's easier to stay still, but then I get frustrated about staying still, and then I get worried about staying still. So it's actually not easier because Then I have all these negative thoughts. And so it's a reminder because I had to remind myself this over the past couple years that perseverance is a good thing, that I am perseverant.
Amanda Durocher [00:21:32]:
I am persistent. So are you. And that there is no bad choice. So back to how we labeled difficult situations as bad or wrong, That's not true. Life is oftentimes about choosing your hard, h a r d, and there's nothing wrong with because hard situations teach us so much about ourselves. And the more we face hard challenges, The easier they become, and then the more we can bring peace to those situations, compassion to those situations, forgiveness to those situations. But these are qualities that are built over time, delayed gratification. We don't know how to do all these things right away, right off the bat, and so we continue to persevere and continue to move forward.
Amanda Durocher [00:22:16]:
And that is why perseverance is important for the healing journey. I hope something in here was helpful. This was more a conversation about perseverance than a breakdown of what perseverance is, so I hope you found something helpful. Thank you much for being here with me. Thank you so much for joining me for season 4. I'm excited to be back here with you. I am feeling really Excited about where I am in my life, and I'm excited to share that with you because for a long time, I've felt pretty insecure about myself, if I'm honest. And I'm finally coming into my own.
Amanda Durocher [00:22:46]:
I'm finally feeling confident, and that lack of confidence was so tied to so much of the trauma I survived and disassociating from it. And so many beliefs were created, and I had so much insecurity around that. I'll continue to share more about that, but I just wanna Thank you for being here. Thank you for seeing me, and thank you for being you. Thank you for being on the healing journey with me. It's such an honor to be here with you. Really. It truly is.
Amanda Durocher [00:23:09]:
So thank you. Thanks again for joining me for another episode of newbie advice. As always, I am so grateful to be here with you and to continue talking about the healing journey. And today, we discussed perseverance and why it's important for the healing journey. If you enjoyed this episode, I invite you to follow the podcast on your podcasting app and to leave a 5 star review. Followers and ratings really help to bring more people to the podcast. So thank you so much in advance for leaving a 5 star review. And if you have any questions, please reach out at newviewadvice@gmail.com.
Amanda Durocher [00:23:43]:
Thank you again for joining me for another episode of New View Ice, as always, I am so grateful to be here with you and to offer you a new view on whatever you may be going through. Sending you all my love. See you next time.
