This is my resilence... steps to healing

I am a work in progress so I don't claim to have all the answers. Healing from the trauma experienced from estrangement is a choice. It's a difficult path but it's better than staying in a holding pattern continually re-experiencing the torture of grief and pain. Here is a roadmap, but remember everyone's journey is different and that it isn't necessarily linear. This is my rough guideline for healing from the experience and it applies to not just estrangement.

1. Give up hope that things could have been any different than they were and understand that there is no way to go back in the past and change things. LET GO.
   
2. Make a choice to move forward. This is a choice that has to be made EVERY day, even when you don't feel like it. This sounds simplistic, but make that choice out loud at the start of the day. "I make the choice to heal myself and move forward with my life." Until you do that you will keep looking back and will be in misery. Back is NOT where you will find your healing.
3. You must start to believe that you deserve to heal and that you deserve peace. It's important to protect your peace even from yourself.
4. You must commit to doing the work to heal yourself. For most people this involves therapy and support groups to process the grief and the pain. You can't let it go until you acknowledge it, sit with it, and process it.
5. Find something that centers you be it God, a higher power, meditation, the universe, etc. On a good healing path we must yield to something bigger than ourselves to pull us up from our despair. If we could really do this alone, we wouldn't be stuck years and decades later leaning on our own abilities stuck in the raw trauma. We don't know everything and we can't always do everything. Sometimes we just have to come to terms with that limitation, ask for help from someone wiser.
   

The caveat here is that I'm just an ordinary person that's had to deal with trauma. The only expertise I have is that I have experienced trauma first-hand. So what's working for me may not work for anyone else. We are all different. What works for me may not work for you but I do hope it helps.