The Tools That Helped Me Mend

(Not Fix, Not Cure — Mend)

For a long time, I believed healing was supposed to arrive all at once. A realization. A turning point. A clean break between who I had been and who I was meant to become.

What actually happened looked nothing like that.

What happened was mending — slow, uneven, often invisible. What helped weren’t revelations so much as tools. Tools that didn’t demand I reinvent myself, only that I stay present long enough to stitch what had frayed.

Over time, four influences began to shape how I live inside my own mind and body: SMART Recovery, cognitive behavioral tools, Carol Dweck’s growth mindset, and Jon Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness. I didn’t adopt them as an identity. I absorbed them gradually, through use, resistance, forgetting, and return.

They didn’t change who I was.

They helped me work with what was already there.

SMART Recovery: Learning I Had Choices, Even When It Didn’t Feel Like It

SMART Recovery — Self-Management and Recovery Training — is grounded in science and psychology rather than labels or lifelong declarations. At its core is a quiet but radical idea: you have agency, even when things feel out of control.

The tools are practical — cost–benefit analysis, urge surfing, the ABC model — but what mattered to me was the tone. No one told me what I was. No one insisted I define myself by a single struggle. The focus was on how thoughts influence feelings, and how feelings influence behavior.

At first, using these tools felt awkward and overly structured. Writing things down didn’t magically stop impulses or emotional waves. But over time, something shifted. I stopped reacting automatically. I learned how to pause — just long enough to notice what was happening before I acted.

That pause didn’t solve everything.

But it gave me room to choose.

Cognitive Behavioral Tools: Separating What I Thought From What Was True

Cognitive behavioral tools taught me to examine my inner dialogue instead of obeying it.

The basic premise is simple: thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are connected — and changing one affects the others. What wasn’t simple was realizing how often my thoughts sounded authoritative when they were actually distorted.

I began noticing patterns: all-or-nothing thinking, catastrophizing, assuming intent where there was none. For years, these thoughts had passed as facts. CBT tools helped me slow them down and look at them directly.

Over time, my thoughts stopped feeling like commands and started feeling like information — sometimes useful, sometimes not. That distinction mattered. It softened my responses. It lowered the volume of shame.

I didn’t stop having hard thoughts.

I stopped letting them run the room.

Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset: Releasing the Idea That Struggle Meant Failure

Carol Dweck’s work on fixed versus growth mindset reframed something I hadn’t questioned before: the belief that difficulty meant deficiency.

A fixed mindset says, “This is just how I am.”

A growth mindset says, “This is something I’m still learning.”

That shift didn’t make life easier — it made it more honest.

Through this lens, setbacks became information instead of indictments. I stopped treating mistakes as proof that I was broken and started seeing them as part of the process of learning how to live differently.

Growth mindset didn’t push me to be optimistic or relentless. It allowed me to be unfinished without being defeated.

Jon Kabat-Zinn and Mindfulness: Staying With What Is

Jon Kabat-Zinn’s teachings on mindfulness introduced me to a different kind of repair — one that didn’t involve changing anything at all.

Mindfulness, as he teaches it, is about paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, without judgment. Not fixing. Not suppressing. Not escaping.

At first, this felt counterintuitive and uncomfortable. Sitting with discomfort went against everything I’d learned about coping. But slowly, mindfulness showed me that I didn’t have to outrun my thoughts or emotions. I could observe them. Breathe with them. Let them pass without attaching a story or a verdict.

Mindfulness didn’t remove pain.

It removed the urgency to make pain disappear.

How These Became Part of Me

None of these approaches arrived fully formed or stayed consistently practiced. I forgot them. Resisted them. Returned to them. Over and over.

SMART gave me choice.

CBT gave me clarity.

Growth mindset gave me patience.

Mindfulness gave me presence.

Together, they didn’t create a new version of me. They helped me mend the relationship I had with myself — stitch by stitch, with long pauses in between.

Hope didn’t arrive as a feeling.

It arrived as a practice.

And over time, that practice began to hold.

A Gentle Invitation

If you’re reading this and feeling behind, overwhelmed, or unsure where to begin — you’re not doing it wrong.

You don’t need every tool.

You don’t need to be consistent yet.

You don’t need to be ready.

Sometimes mending starts by holding one loose thread and deciding not to pull away.

That’s enough for today.