Miley Cyrus was among those who lost their homes in the devastating California wildfires. The songstress and her fiancé Liam Hemsworth’s Malibu home burned down in the Woolsey Fire, but she’s taken the devastating loss and turned it into what she’s dubbed “post-traumatic growth.”

“I’m in a really good healing place right now,” Miley told Ryan Seacrest on-air on Tuesday, December 4. “I definitely learned a lot. My dad [Billy Ray Cyrus] has always told me ‘Life is a series of adjustments’ and sometimes we never understand what our parents are telling us until we start to experience life more,” she continued. “… I’m starting to really understand what that means now experiencing something as life-changing and devastating as a natural disaster. It’s a really deep character challenge to see the way you react to loss.”

Miley, who recently dropped politically-charged track “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart” with Mark Ronson, added that her father’s advice has always stuck with her.

“Something else I kind of took in that I heard was for me I had a choice of post-traumatic stress or post-traumatic growth and I think you always feel you don’t have control especially when something happens that’s a natural disaster because there’s no beating nature … so to be able to go into your self and to find that growth and say ‘What am I going to do about this?’ And being an active member of my community, not as a celebrity figure, but just as a neighbor, has been a big growing experience.”

All that was left of their house, as Liam previously shared on social media, were large letters that spelled out the word “love.”

“Liam posted on his social these love letters that were physically left at our house,” Miley added. “We had these big gorgeous letters that said ‘love’ when you drove up to our house and they actually made it through the fire … and that’s literally and physically all that’s left so I felt that was really poetic. You can always rebuild a physical structure, but that love that can’t be destroyed is always there and always stayed strong so that gave me a lot of light during a dark time.”

Her new collab with Mark Ronson, “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart,” also eerily features a lyric that spooked Cyrus. In the song, which also speaks to the current political climate, there’s a lyric which references a burning house.