I think this is true of most real healing, in children and in adults both.

We are changed not by being told a new truth once, but by being shown it, gently, so many times that the old wound finally gives up its grip.

My daughter did not heal because I said the right words to her, though I said them.

She healed because, for month after month, I made the words true, in small ordinary ways, so relentlessly and so reliably that eventually her whole small self came to trust it.

And the day I knew we had made it — the day she forgot, for a whole afternoon, to worry about her brother at all, and simply read her book in the sun like the child she was supposed to be — meant more to me than any court order, or any custody ruling, or any downfall of anyone who had wronged us.