Reject the Sense of Injury
and the injury itself disappears.
“Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.” — Marcus Aurelius
I know, I know, but let it sit for a second.
Your first instinct is to push back. That’s not how trauma works. You can’t just decide not to be hurt. That sounds like something people say when they’ve never been the target, when they’ve had the luxury of never having something taken from them. It reads like denial dressed up in a toga.
I thought the same thing. For years.
Then I did the work. Not the performative kind. Not the “I’ve moved on” kind where you white-knuckle your way through every trigger and call it growth. The real kind. EMDR. Therapy that doesn’t just ask you what happened but rewires what your body does with the memory. The kind of healing that doesn’t erase the event but changes your relationship to it so fundamentally that one day you realize the thing that used to level you just doesn’t anymore.
And that’s when Marcus Aurelius started making sense.
Here’s what the true meaning of that quote that really settles to the bottom is: He’s not saying “pretend it didn’t happen.” He’s not saying “be tougher.” He’s describing what it feels like on the other side of actual healing. He’s describing a result, not a strategy.
Think about it this way. Someone tells a joke designed to hurt you. But you don’t get it. You don’t speak the language it was told in, or you don’t have the context, or you simply weren’t paying attention. The words hit the air and dissolve. Nothing lands. Not because the joke wasn’t cruel, but because you weren’t the audience for it anymore.
That’s not denial but rather more along the lines of physics.
Now think about the version where you do understand the joke, but you just don’t care. Someone throws a barb about something that used to gut you, and you feel... nothing. Not numbness. Not suppression. Actual nothing. The words arrive and there’s simply no hook for them to catch on. That is the same mechanism. Whether you never understood the insult or you outgrew it, the result is identical. The injury requires your participation to exist.
So what does healing actually do? It moves you from one state to the other. Not from wounded to pretending. From wounded to genuinely unreachable.
EMDR doesn’t make you forget what happened. It makes your nervous system stop treating the memory like a current threat. And when your body stops sounding the alarm, something remarkable happens. The meaning loosens. The weight shifts. The thing someone did to hurt you becomes just a thing someone did. No charge. No flinch. No loop.
You rejected the injury, and the injury disappeared.
Now. I’m not talking about the injuries that cost you money, or broke your body, or took something material that needs a material solution. Those are real, and they require real answers. I’m talking about the ones that lived in meaning. The ones that hurt because of what they said about you, or what they confirmed about someone else, or what they revealed about a system you trusted. The injury wasn’t the event. The injury was the story you carried about the event. The weight you assigned. The loop you rehearsed.
Healing rewrites the story. Not the event. Just your place in it.
And here’s what makes this a superpower. The people who wounded you designed that wound for a specific person. They studied your patterns. They knew where to press. They built something custom. And healing made you someone they don’t have a blueprint for anymore. Someone whose pressure points moved, or closed, or simply stopped responding to the old codes. They’re still pressing the same buttons. But the wiring changed. Nothing fires.
That is what Aurelius meant. Not that you should deny what happened. That you can become someone it no longer reaches. And that the moment you do, the power behind it doesn’t just diminish. It evaporates. It was never its own thing. It was only ever as strong as your willingness to carry it.
That’s the real superpower. Not becoming untouchable. Becoming unreachable by the things that were designed to keep you isolated. And discovering that on the other side of that work, the rest of us are ready to heal —
Together.
Resources
If anything in this piece resonated with you, these are places to start.
Find a Therapist Psychology Today Therapist Directory — Search by location, specialty, and insurance. This is where I found the therapist who changed my life.
EMDR Therapy EMDR International Association — Find a therapist trained specifically in EMDR. Over 20,000 members across 130 countries.
Crisis Support 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988 (available 24/7) Crisis Text Line: Text HELLO to 741741
Books The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk — The foundational text on how trauma lives in the body and how to release it. Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff — The research behind treating yourself with the same kindness you’d offer someone you love.
Related Reading
The Self-Worth Epidemic — How cruelty is rooted in low self-worth, not superiority. And how a little dog cracked my armor.
For the Love of... Self — Self-love was never missing. It was buried. The work of attachment, grace, and becoming.