"Time Heals All Wounds."

This week on WORDS MATTER, Deanna Ley, The Catalytic Coach, shares a deeply personal message about grief, loss, and healing. Seven years after losing her beloved dog Lilly, Deanna revisits the well-intended phrase we all know: 

“Time heals all wounds.” 

Through her story, she offers a more accurate and compassionate way to understand what healing actually asks of us.

What Listeners Will Learn:
• Why “time heals all wounds” leaves out the lived experience of grief
• How healing asks you to live with what happened rather than erase it
• What open wounds, healing wounds, and scars reveal about your journey
• Ways to care for yourself when grief feels close
• Why love and loss can live side by side

Memorable Quotes:
• “Time doesn’t heal every wound. Time gives the wound room to change shape, and it gives us room to change shape around it.”
 • “Healing doesn’t wipe the slate clean. Healing doesn’t erase the story.”
 • “Our brains hold on to moments like this because they’re trying to protect us.”
 • “The goal isn’t to erase it. The goal is to learn how to live with it without letting it take over every part of your being.”
 • “Time doesn’t heal all wounds. It just changes them. The wound closes. The scar fades. But it does stay.”
 • "Somehow, love finds its way through the ache anyway."

This episode walks beside anyone carrying a wound — fresh or longstanding — and reminds you that grief has no timeline, love leaves a lasting imprint, and healing grows in the space between what hurt and what remains.

Your WORDS MATTER, because YOU MATTER.

❤️❤️❤️

Transcript

Well, hey there, friends. Welcome back to another episode of WORDS MATTER. What we're going to be talking about today isn't light, and I won't pretend that it is, but it is honest. And sometimes the honest conversations are the ones that make the biggest difference.

Now I have Kleenex at the ready, and you may want to grab some, too. Just in case. Because this wasn't the podcast that I intended to record this week. I had a different topic lined up altogether, but when the busyness of this week made it clear that today was my only day to record, I mean, I was ready to share it.

But then I woke up at 3 a.m. this morning and saw the date and realized what day it was. Knowing that I still needed to record a podcast, I chose to move the topic I had to next week and talk about this instead.

And it's all because a quote came to my mind as I was sitting in the quiet reflecting this morning. Now it's a saying we've all heard so many times that people barely think about it before they say it. And when someone says it to you, it usually comes from a place of kindness - or at least an attempt at kindness. Someone is hurting because of a significant loss. And the person standing beside them doesn't know what to say or do, so they reach for the closest, easiest line.

"Time heals all wounds."

Ugh. I mean, I know people mean well. I don't question that. But that sentence has never matched the truth of my life. For sure not my experience. Time can create distance. Time can soften edges. It can shift how the wound feels. But it doesn't erase what happened. It doesn't return your life to what it was. It doesn't have that power.

Time doesn't heal every wound. Time gives the wound room to change shape, and it gives us room to change shape around it.

I'm guessing every one of us in the past has cut ourselves at some point. Never on purpose. Just life happening. Hands moving. Something slipping.

Now in my house, the running joke for years has been, "Don't let Deanna cut that!", because I can injure myself with just about anything - including a butter knife. It's happened. Why just last week, I managed to cut myself twice on the same hand, in the same exact way, within minutes of each other.

These weren't big cuts, but they did land in spots that I use constantly - and they hurt like the dickens for a long time. I've had cuts over the years that needed far more than just a bandage. At one point, I tried to break up a fight between two of our cats - and my left hand paid the price. Now the cats were fine. Me? Not so much.

The cuts their claws left behind got infected and I had to go to the doctor. Turns out those wounds had progressed into cat scratch fever. No, not the Ted Nugent song. The actual infection. It's a real thing. Now I don't know many people who can say that they've had that type of cut, but I do know that most of us have had injuries that forced us to take a step back and take care of ourselves. So I'm sure you can relate to what comes next.

When you cut yourself, you feel it everywhere. The body reacts right away, pulling all of its resources together to close that wound. That process takes effort. It isn't fast, and it for sure isn't pleasant. Sometimes the wound struggles to close and needs more care, but eventually - hopefully - a scab forms. It's rough. Uncomfortable. Super itchy. But it does show that your body is still working for you.

And once the scab falls away, the skin underneath, it's never the same. A scar forms. It may fade over time and it may soften, but it stays. You see it. You feel it. You remember exactly how it came to be. And while the scar doesn't bring the same pain as the open wound, it never disappears either. It becomes a part of you.

And that's where the word heal from our quote today gets misunderstood. Somewhere along the line, people started using "heal" as if it meant to "go back to the way things were". And that's never been true. Healing doesn't wipe the slate clean. Healing doesn't erase the story. Healing means that life grows around what happened. And it means that you learn how to live without letting the wound take over every part of who you are.

And there's a reason for this whole conversation today. It goes back to our dog, Lilly. She wasn't just a pet, friends. She moved through our home and our lives with a presence that was undeniable.

She was quite the dog. She would come with us on pretty much every trip we could take her on. Ooh, she loved the beach. And she climbed Colorado mountains with more determination than dogs twice her size. People - all the time - would stop to admire her dapple coat. But it's her spirit that stayed with everyone that she met.

She was feisty and fun. She would curl up on a pillow on my desk during long work days and keep me company. She would tear through every cardboard box available like she was on a mission. She would wait behind trees for us to throw her ball. She would search out her favorite pine cone without fail. And she had IKEA rats that she would take with her everywhere. They were as much her best friends as we were.

Now we called her the BDE - the Best Dog Ever - because she was. She loved our kids and they loved her right back, but everyone loved her, honestly. She adored our cat Kiki and put up with Sandy, mostly because Sandy had the energy of a windstorm - and Lilly believed that naps should be taken very seriously. I used to call her my shadow because she was. Wherever I went, she was right there with me.

Seven years ago today, we lost her. It was sudden and devastating and tragic and traumatic. And it happened all because of a decision that I made. I left her outside for just a minute and in that minute, everything changed.

The sound of the bus that took her from us is still a sound I remember.

Chris and my amazing son Zachary stepped in right away and protected me from things that no one should ever have to see. And I'll always be grateful for that. But even then, the weight of that day settled inside me in a way that I didn't know how to process.

In those early weeks, I felt like I was living inside of an open wound. I woke up with the same ache every morning - the memory replayed before I even had time to catch my breath. And that school bus coming down our street each weekday at 7.35 a.m. pulled me right back to that moment, until thankfully, we moved.

As time passed, the wound didn't vanish, but it shifted. My relationship with that day - today - it's changed. The sharpness has eased a bit, and the guilt has lost its death grip. I still feel the ache, yet it doesn't swallow my whole mind anymore.

Little by little, the moments that defined her life began rising louder than the moment we lost her. I found myself remembering who she was, not just how she died. Her joy. Her stubbornness. Her softness. Her craziness. The life she lived with us. Those memories didn't erase the pain, but they gave it somewhere gentler to land. And they helped me breathe again.

What I know now that I didn't know then was that our brains hold on to moments like this because they're trying to protect us. See, the brain grabs details - not to punish, but to stay alert for anything that might resemble a similar danger. It doesn't understand that some moments aren't patterns to avoid, but they're heartbreak that we never wanted in the first place. Learning this hasn't erased the pain, but it has helped me stop treating my reactions to it like flaws.

It helps me see them as a human response to something that cut deep. Something that still shapes me in ways I'm continuing to learn how to go through.

Friends, if you're dealing with an open wound right now - something fresh, something that has shook your world - please give yourself far more room than you think it needs.

Open wounds hurt because they tear through the life that you knew. Don't push yourself to make sense of anything just yet. Try to eat, even if it's just a few bites. Choose to drink water, as much as you can. Try to rest when your body refuses to do anything else. And reach for something that steadies your mind, even if it's for just a moment.

I don't know if I've ever said this out loud, even to Chris, but in the immediate days after the tragedy, every time my mind went to the specifics of the aftermath, I decided to recite the Our Father Prayer. I didn't just say the words though, friends. I pictured each word in my mind. Letter by letter. Line by line. I focused on the shape of them in my mind's eye. And the beautiful thing about the brain is that it can't give full attention to two intense things at once. And those words - that prayer - and the people who stayed close to me kept me from losing myself completely.

Now if you have a wound and it isn't new, but still feels close, please hear this. You're not doing anything wrong. A moment that changed your life doesn't disappear just because time moved forward. The scar stays because the moment left a mark that mattered. And the goal isn't to erase it. The goal is to learn how to live with it without letting it take over every part of your being.

And when the memory comes back, meet it with honesty instead of frustration. You've lived a lot of life since then. Let the moments that remind you of love and comfort and connection come forward, too, in the most painful of times. They belong to your story - just as much as the pain does.

And to those of you who knows someone who is hurting from the loss of a pet, let me say this to you clearly. Thank goodness no one ever said to me, "It was just a dog" or "Aren't you over this by now?"

I've heard that those words have been said to others who've lost a pet that feels like a part of them. And if anyone would have said either of those things to me, y'all would have had to bail me out. See, grief in any form deserves respect for anyone or anything gone, lost, or passed. And love deserves respect, too.

And anyone who rushes you or minimizes what you've lost isn't someone you owe any emotional room to. There's no timeline for grief. None. And there never should be. So if you're grieving...

Some days your only choice might be to do something small like stepping outside and letting the sun hit your face or curling up in bed with a warm cup of tea and a book or a movie that gives your mind just a little bit of room to breathe. Those choices matter. They help you stay connected to yourself when everything else inside feels heavy.

Seven years later, I still have moments where the memory of that day with Lilly becomes more noticeable again. Sometimes it's a picture. Sometimes it's a sound. Sometimes it's nothing obvious at all. And I don't apologize for that anymore.

She was part of our lives, part of our hearts, part of our story - and losing her changed me, changed us. But guess what? Loving her changed us, too. And that's really the heart of this episode.

Time doesn't heal all wounds.
 It just changes them.

The wound closes.
 The scar fades.
 But it does stay.

Yet somehow, love finds its way through the ache anyway. And personally speaking, I wouldn't trade that love for anything.

So if today is a day where your own scar feels more noticeable, I hope you give yourself the space and the grace you deserve. And know this... I am right here beside you. You are not alone.

Friends, the words we see and read, the words we hear and the words we say to ourselves and about ourselves - about what we're doing and how we're doing it - they all matter. 

Your WORDS MATTER, because YOU MATTER.

Have a great day.