The Courage to Fight

Why healing requires more than Understanding our Wounds

I know this kid. I don’t know him particularly well, and I don’t know much about his life, but I know enough to respect him.

He’s a young adult trying to create a different future for himself. The kind of future that requires a person to wrestle honestly with their story, to confront difficult realities, and to make choices today that may not pay off for years. There is something deeply admirable about that.

A few nights ago, I found myself awake in the middle of the night thinking about him. My mind wandered to the challenges he might be facing, the hopes he carries, and the future he is trying to build. And even though I don’t know the answers to these questions for this kid, as I lay there, I began thinking about all of us.

Because in one way or another, every person is building a life. Some of us are doing it intentionally. Others are doing it by default.

And that led me to a question I couldn’t shake. What does it actually take to build a life worth living?

Not a perfect life, because perfection has never been available to human beings. Not a life free from struggle, because every meaningful life will eventually encounter loss, disappointment, uncertainty, and pain.

A life where we know what matters most and are willing to protect it, nurture it, and fight for it.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that many of the people I admire most have one thing in common. They are fighters!

Not in the loud or aggressive sense of the word. They are people who continue showing up for what matters. They fight for their healing. They fight for their values. They fight for their marriages. They fight for their children. They fight for their faith.

They fight to become the kind of people they hope to be.

And as I thought about this young man—and about the people I have had the privilege of walking alongside over the years—I found myself wishing they knew something important:

A meaningful life is rarely found. More often, it is build. And the things that matter most require us to fight for them.

Over the last several years, conversations about mental health have changed dramatically. We have learned to ask not only, “What’s wrong with you?” but also, “What happened to you?” This shift has been important. Understanding our stories matters.

But somewhere along the way, I wonder if many of us have unintentionally begun to believe that understanding our pain is the same thing as healing it.

It isn't.

Healing requires something more. It requires courage. It requires participation. It requires a willingness to fight.

Understanding Is Not Healing

One of the greatest gifts of trauma-informed care is that it helps us understand why we struggle. It reminds us that our fears, reactions, and ways of protecting ourselves often make sense in light of our experiences. For many people, that understanding brings relief, self-compassion, and hope.

But understanding is only the beginning. Most of us have experienced the reality that knowing why we struggle does not automatically create change.

We may understand our anxiety and still need to face our fears.

We may understand our wounds and still need to take steps toward healing.

Insight helps us make sense of our story, but growth happens when we begin to live differently. Healing happens when we understand and move.

The Trap of Avoidance

When something hurts, avoiding it feels natural. We avoid painful emotions, uncomfortable memories, uncertainty, rejection, difficult conversations, and situations that make us anxious. In the short term, avoidance often brings relief. The problem is that the relief is temporary, and over time the brain learns that avoidance is necessary for safety.

A life worth living is rarely built by avoiding what is difficult. More often, it is built by repeatedly choosing what matters, even when it requires courage.

The path toward freedom is often found on the other side of courage. Freedom is found in facing the hard work of moving through our wounds of childhood, relational hurts, and the fears that have shaped us for years. Freedom is found in having the conversations, setting the boundaries, attending the events, grieving the losses, trying again after failures, or allowing ourselves to hope after disappointments.

Healing frequently requires us to move toward the very places we would rather avoid. It is found in taking small steps toward the life we want to build.

Compassion and Responsibility

Many people have experienced things that were never their fault. A painful childhood, a betrayal, a loss, a diagnosis, or circumstances outside of their control may have shaped their lives in profound ways. At the same time, healing often begins when people recognize that while they are not responsible for what happened to them, they are responsible for what comes next.

Taking responsibility for our healing is not the same as blaming ourselves for our wounds. It is simply believing that our story is still being written and that we have a role to play in what happens next.

Part of becoming a mature adult is accepting a difficult truth: no one else can do our healing for us. Not our parents. Not our spouse. Not our friends. Not even our therapist. They can support us, encourage us, and walk alongside us, but they cannot tend to the parts of our story that require our own attention and courage. In many cases, those wounds are hidden not only from others, but even from ourselves.

Healing begins when we stop waiting for someone else to rescue us and begin gently taking responsibility and start fighting for our own growth. And to do that we need courage.

Purpose

If healing requires courage, where does that courage come from? Why keep showing up when progress feels slow? Why risk vulnerability, change, and disappointment?

I believe the answer is purpose.

Healing is not the destination. Healing serves something larger. That “something larger” looks different for each person. It may be a marriage, a family, a friendship, a dream, a calling, a creative pursuit, a faith, or simply the desire to become the kind of person you hope to be.

Whatever form it takes, purpose gives us a reason to keep fighting when life gets hard.

Perhaps purpose begins with a simpler question than “What is the meaning of my life?” Maybe it begins with:

What matters to me? and What kind of life am I trying to build?

From there, we take the next step, and then the next. Like courage, purpose often grows through action. We don’t always discover it by thinking about it. We discover it by living and fighting for that life.

Fight for it

Perhaps one of the most hopeful truths about being human is that healing is not something that simply happens to us. We fight for it.

Yes, we need compassion for our wounds. Yes, we need understanding for our struggles. Yes, we need support from others—decades of research point to relationships as one of the strongest predictors of who heals and who thrives. We were never meant to fight alone.

But alongside all of that, we also need courage. The courage to take the next step, to ask for help, to have the hard conversation, and to remain engaged when life invites us to withdraw.

The courage to believe that our story is not over.

In a world that often encourages us to focus on what has happened to us, perhaps we also need reminders of what is possible within us. Human beings have always possessed an extraordinary capacity to heal, rebuild, and grow simply because life is meaningful.

The courage to fight is not about denying pain. It is about refusing to let pain have the final word. And when we discover something worth fighting for, we often discover strengths within ourselves that we never knew existed.

For Those Who Hold Faith

I believe the courage to fight is not something we have to manufacture on our own—it is something we are invited into.

Scripture never asks us to pretend our pain isn’t real. It is remarkably honest about suffering: the Psalms are full of lament, Job sat in the ashes of his grief, and Jesus himself wept. But the biblical story does not leave us there. It insists that our suffering has somewhere to go.

Paul writes that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance produces character, and character produces a hope that does not put us to shame (Romans 5). James says much the same—that trials, endured rather than avoided, are what make us mature and whole.

This is why the language of Scripture is so often the language of the fight: we are told to fight the good fight, to run the race set before us, to press on. We are described not as victims of our circumstances, but as more than conquerors.

And yet—this is the heart of it—we are never asked to fight in our own strength. The courage we are called to is not gritted-teeth willpower; it is grace-empowered participation. It is God who works in us, even as we work. His strength is made perfect in our weakness.

We are made in God’s image, created with dignity and purpose. And the God who made us is still at work, redeeming what is broken and bringing life to places that once felt lost. That means our story is not over.

The courage to keep fighting—to keep hoping, healing, and showing up—comes from trusting that God is still writing the story. And because He is the Author, our pain will not have the final word.

Keep Showing Up

As I think back to that young man who kept me awake that night, I find myself hoping he discovers something that took me years to understand.

The goal is not to build a perfect life. The goal is to build a meaningful one.

A life where he knows what matters and is willing to keep showing up for it. A life where healing is not the absence of struggle, but the courage to engage with it.

And I am not just writing about him. I am writing about all of us. Every day, we are deciding what deserves our attention, our energy, and our fight. We will not do it perfectly. We will get discouraged and sometimes lose our way. But perhaps the invitation is simply to keep showing up—to take the next step and move toward what matters.

A meaningful life is rarely found. More often, it is built. And the things that matter most are always worth fighting for.

Until next time, keep showing up with care and courage.

 GO brave. GO strong.

About the Author:

Written by Gaby Ortiz, MA, LPC, NCC.

Gaby is a Licensed Professional Counselor in Colorado who helps children, teens, women, and families grow with resilience, warmth, and hope. She believes that healing begins in safe connection and that every story holds the possibility of renewal.

Some of the ideas in this article were influenced by the work of:

• Viktor Frankl – Psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor, and author of Man's Search for Meaning, whose work explored the role of purpose and meaning in human resilience.

• Albert Bandura – Psychologist known for his research on self-efficacy, or the belief that we can influence our lives and overcome challenges.

• Kristin Neff – Researcher and pioneer in the study of self-compassion, whose work highlights the role of kindness toward ourselves in growth and healing.

• Martin Seligman – Founder of Positive Psychology and researcher on learned helplessness, resilience, and human flourishing.

• Steven C. Hayes – Creator of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), whose work emphasizes psychological flexibility and moving toward a meaningful life even in the presence of pain.

• The Bible – Particularly the themes of redemption, perseverance, hope, and God's ongoing work in the lives of His people.