This Is Healing cover art

This Is Healing

This Is Healing

By: Joe Strecker Productions
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About this listen

 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 — Episode: "Operation Hummingbird"

    This is Healing — Episode: "Operation Hummingbird"
    Feb 6 2026
    This episode was recorded from my new family room in Colorado, sitting in front of an enormous stone fireplace, looking out at snow I can’t even quantify. Eight inches. Ten. Maybe three feet. Who’s to say. What matters is that it’s here. And that I am here.

    This is a fireside reflection on why I left Cincinnati when I did, and why it was never just about the cold. It was the gray. Grief already compromises the nervous system. Seasonal depression was already part of my pattern even when Patrick was alive. I was not going to stack suffering on top of suffering this year.

    I talk about the stress of moving inside grief, what it meant to pack one box at a time, and the quiet moment when I realized my memory was starting to come back. Not all at once. Just enough to notice. Enough to feel like progress.

    From there, the episode moves into a complete redefinition of strength. Not endurance. Not white knuckling. Not grit. Strength as slowing down. Listening before the body screams. Paying attention to insomnia, hunger, money, and the ways the nervous system tells the truth long before the mind catches up.

    I share the moment I had to write a thirty-one-thousand-dollar check to the biohazard company, and how money hits the body as safety when everything else has already fallen apart. Grief is not just emotional. It is cellular. It disorients time, memory, purpose, and identity.

    The story of Operation Hummingbird unfolds through the drive west with Matt and Rachel, a ridiculous game of Would You Rather, and the moment lunch turned into tears when my body finally had enough fuel to let the sadness arrive. “Well, I’ve eaten. So now I’m sad.”

    This episode weaves through coping, sobriety, nervous system capacity, and why grief cannot be met with toughness. I talk about softness, pliability, and why you can’t harden around loss without calcifying around what’s missing.

    There is space here for psilocybin, not as escape, but as widening the riverbanks so feeling can move again. For trust without clarity. For the hummingbird as symbol, flying without a map and believing the nectar will appear.

    I talk about hope as location, not optimism. Where it lives for me right now. Where it doesn’t. About not wanting to be with anyone and not wanting to be alone. About changing in order to survive, and the fear of not knowing who I am becoming.

    The episode closes with beauty that isn’t pretty, and the question grief keeps asking underneath everything. Can you love without an object. Can you stay open when there is no repair.

    This episode does not offer resolution.
    It offers honesty.
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    1 hr and 2 mins
  • This Is Healing, Podcast Episode: Glimmers

    This Is Healing, Podcast Episode: Glimmers
    Feb 6 2026
    I’m back for the first time since January 9th. This episode comes from my new home in Colorado and tells the full story of what these past weeks have actually been like. I talk about settling into a new house, building safety, finding unexpected joy, and what grief looks like when it no longer consumes every second but never fully leaves.

    I share what it was like to be pulled back into early grief by a song from The National, how endurance is not the same thing as purpose, and what it means to keep staying when the reason for living hasn’t fully revealed itself yet. This episode moves through glimmers, anger, sovereignty, capacity, disappointment, and the reality of starting over without the person I made decisions with.
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    48 mins
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