This Is Healing cover art

This Is Healing

This Is Healing

By: Joe Strecker Productions
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https://sarahlheringer.substack.com/

Wife.
Witness.
Writer.
Survivor.
Reluctant activist.
Relentless truth-teller
.I did not ask for this.
But I will not look away.

On June 4, 2025, my husband Patrick was murdered in our home while protecting me from a man who should never have been free. A man with a violent record, with open warrants, with a past the city ignored—and a blade in his hand. Patrick died in my arms.There are no metaphors for that. Only blood, memory, and silence.What followed was the unraveling of everything I thought was safe.What I write here is not for spectacle. It is not curated grief. It is not a campaign. It is a reckoning.
With systems. With silence. With myself.
I write because I need somewhere to put it.The grief. The fury. The facts. The failures.I write about public safety because no one else will say the quiet part out loud: that our leaders are protecting power, not people. That our systems are engineered to delay, distract, and discard the victims. That negligence is not a policy—it’s a pattern.I write about trauma in real time. I record podcasts from the dead center of it. Not once I’ve healed, but while I’m trying to.You’ll hear my voice shake. You’ll hear me try to laugh. You’ll hear a woman unlearning how to be agreeable and learning instead how to be impossible.Because being impossible might be the only way anything changes.
This publication is a record.A record of a woman fighting for her own life after the one she loved was taken.
A record of a broken city pretending it’s functioning.
A record of truth-telling in a landscape built on press releases and public amnesia.There is poetry here.
Not the pretty kind. The kind found at the bottom of grief, where language turns feral and light only filters in when you stop pretending you’re okay.There is politics here. But not in the way you’ve seen it.
This is not partisan. It’s personal.
This is about justice that was promised and never delivered.This is about what needs to be said, what needs to be burned down, and what must be rebuilt in its place.
If you're here, I hope it’s because you’re willing to look.Not just at the facts, but at the fractures.
Not just at the grief, but at what it demands of us.Because I am not a victim.
I am what comes after.
And I’m not writing this to be understood.
I’m writing it so no one can say they didn’t know.Welcome to the fight.
Welcome to the fire.Copyright Joe Strecker Productions Spirituality
Episodes
  • This is Healing — Keep Your Heart Open

    This is Healing — Keep Your Heart Open
    May 27 2026
    What does it actually mean to keep your heart open after the worst thing? Not as a platitude. As a survival strategy. This episode goes there.



    I just got back from a writer's retreat in the mountains of Colorado. I went to write. I came back with something I didn't expect — a realization I could no longer avoid. This episode covers what I learned about grief, wavelengths, the nervous system, why you don't need more discipline, why you need connection, and what it actually means to keep your heart open when every instinct you have is telling you to close it. We also get into talking to dead people, widow's fire, Patrick, the book I'm writing, and the avoidance that showed up the minute I claimed I was going to write it. An hour of the real thing.
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    1 hr and 45 mins
  • This is Healing — The Backlash of Feeling Alive Again

    This is Healing — The Backlash of Feeling Alive Again
    May 8 2026
    I finally felt something good again—and then it hit me.

    In this episode, I talk about the emotional backlash that follows moments of feeling alive, how my relationships are changing, and what Patrick’s birthday actually felt like.

    This is an honest look at grief, the body, and continuing to live after everything changes.
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    1 hr and 6 mins
  • This is Healing — How Do You Cope?

    This is Healing — How Do You Cope?
    Apr 8 2026
    How do you cope with a timeline you want no part of? It's the question everyone asks and nobody answers with any honesty. In this episode of This Is Healing, I go deep into what grief actually is — not a problem to be solved, not a stage to move through, but an ocean you learn to live beside. I talk about the difference between coping and building capacity, why the five stages of grief fail the moments that matter most, what the nervous system is still reaching for when the person is gone, and what it means to continue moving through life when the person you loved is not. This is not a recovery story. There is no resolution here. There is only the truth of where I am — in time and space — and an invitation to anyone carrying something to recognize themselves in it. If this episode finds you at the right moment, send it to one person who needs to hear it.
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    1 hr and 4 mins
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