Healing doesn’t always feel like healing.
Healing doesn’t always feel like emotional catharsis and release.
Many of us have been lead to believe that if something is healing us, it’s going to feel good right away - that it’s going to lead to breakthrough, revelation, awareness, lightness and freedom - and most importantly many of us believe that in order for something to be healing it has to be getting RID of our negative emotions as quickly and effectively as possible.
What this means is that many of us have been circling around ‘healing practices’ for a really long time, ‘doing the work’ to try to recover from our past or to heal our relationships with ourselves and others, doing all the self improvement things to try to get rid of our self sabotage, coping, numbing and other ‘bad behaviors’ - and rather than seeing actual progress in our lives we’re finding that no matter how much work we do we keep ending up back where we started.
We keep winding up feeling the same emotional pain, the same feelings of not having purpose or meaning in our lives, the same emptiness, the same struggles with self esteem, the same ‘bad habits’ - and rather than seeing the healing techniques that we are utilizing as being incomplete or wrong, we’re assuming WE must be doing it wrong.
We continue to reach for tools that tell us they will bring us freedom in 30 days, in a session, after a long fast or through some other method of ‘positive thinking’ or pushing ourselves to see the good/take responsibility for ourselves - and over and over again we find that no matter how hard we try we fall off the wagon or the positive feelings fade out and we wonder what we’re missing.
We look for more and more extremes in our healing path - believing that those first moments of feeling relief that we got from the practices we were doing mean that the technique ‘works’ and that it must just be that we need something MORE - harder, more extreme, longer lasting - in order for it to really ‘stick.’
But again, at the end of the day, we never actually end up FEELING BETTER long term, we never end up being able to actually CHANGE our habits or ways of being in a way where we no longer have to fight/resist/try and we never really move to a place where our emotional state and self perception have been shifted in a way that feels like our new normal.
This is because we aren’t being supported in the ways we ACTUALLY need to be supported.
Not because we aren’t trying hard enough.
Not because we need faster, harder, longer.
But because we need to start delving into the healing work that DOESN’T feel good right away.
The TRUE Healing Path Requires Periods Of Pain
This is the part that a lot of people want to avoid - and this is why we have so many spiritual and self help practitioners offering healing tools and strategies that ultimately end up leaving us feeling stuck and dissatisfied.
This is especially true in the spiritual world - there is so much emphasis placed on getting to that ‘love and light’ phase, so much push to ‘forgive’ and be in only positive emotional states that then drives people to essentially try to ‘act’ like they are at the healed place they WANT to be at, before they’re actually there.
So much of what is offered as the healing JOURNEY is really the ultimate END place - the place we naturally arrive at when we have DONE the journey.
It’s the definition of bypassing - what most people preach as the healing journey is actually again, the end state we naturally arrive at when we are healed. They are offering a bypass - a ‘you can skip that messy, painful, dark, uncomfortable middle phase of healing and jump straight to feeling good and high vibes!’
This idea of bypassing is one that is gaining popularity in the spiritual and self help world - which is a good thing - but at the same time many people still don’t really understand what this means, what it looks like to bypass, don’t recognize that they are preaching bypassing or that they are practicing bypassing and don’t know how to identify a path that ISN’T a bypass.
Healing isn’t something that we can ‘fake’ until we make - and I realize that people don’t present it in this way - but this is essentially what people ARE preaching.
A lot of the time I don’t even think people realize that what they’re teaching and preaching ISN’T the path. They themselves have been convinced that healing is just a matter of taking responsibility for yourself, forcing positive emotions, ‘trying’ to forgive and attempting to rise above what we’ve been through. Many people haven’t been able to go through the journey of healing themselves and haven’t been given a roadmap of what to expect - so they don’t recognize the path when they see it.
In fact, because of what we’ve been taught to believe healing is ‘supposed’ to look like, many people are continually looking for healing modalities and methods that are actually bypassing - they believe that ‘doing the work’ means to BE AT THE END - and thus, again, they seek out the bypassing path without knowing it, and reject the real path when it’s presented to them.
This is what we need to work to combat in order to be able to get onto the true path.
We need to learn that healing IS messy, it IS painful, and it means that we AREN’T going to be at the ‘end state’ today.
It means that we are going to have to go through periods where we deeply feel and embrace our pain - and rather than trying to look for the positive, take responsibility for it or trying to forgive and forget - we need to let ourselves be angry, sad, resentful and whatever it is we ACTUALLY ARE - and we need to be validated, loved and supported in that space and in our expression.
It means that we have to go through those times of facing the ‘dark night of the soul’ - where it IS going to feel like we may never feel better, like we are never going to get there and like there may not be hope for us.
We usually need someone or something to give us assurance that these dark times and dark feelings aren’t a sign that we’re stuck or that something has gone wrong - we need to know that this IS the path, and we need to be comforted that it’s only a PHASE.
This is what I hope to provide for you in this article, and in all of my work.
The Dark Phase Of Healing
The most important thing I wish to express in this article is that the PATH of healing will often look nothing like the END PHASE of BEING healed.
Many of us are better able to understand this when we put it in the context of physical healing.
We can understand that when we fall and break a bone in our leg - the way to heal that bone is not to simply stand up and start walking on the leg acting like it’s not broken. Rather we can all see that to do so would likely lead to more and more damage.
If we were to fall and break our leg, and rather than doing what is required to actually heal that bone, we instead continued to live as though the bone had never been broken we would end up continually stuck in pain and agony. If we were to avoid the healing process and attempt to go for a 10 mile run - we would end up damaging the bone more, damaging the tissue around the bone, we would be setting ourselves up for infection and a whole host of other problems.
In the moment it may feel good to believe the bone isn’t broken or that we can just carry on in life as usual. Of course, no one wants to have to take time out of their lives to nurse a broken bone and no one wants to go through the pain of the healing process - thus there is that temptation to ignore it or to live as though we’re already healed and fine. But again, logically we can all understand that in doing so, we would be causing more and more damage.
What’s likely to happen if we do this, is that we cause more and more damage, AND we would then start to develop different ways of coping with the continual pain and complicating factors that would start to pile up due to not addressing the issue.
We would start to develop a limp which would cause our entire skeleton and muscle structure to have to shift to adapt to our new ways of moving through the world that would likely cause misalignments and pain in other areas of the body.
We might start taking pain killers and other numbing substances in order to keep ourselves going through the pain - leading us to experiencing a rollercoaster of highs and lows as we stimulate and numb ourselves, feeling the relief and high of that, and then the subsequent crash as the substance or whatever technique we’re using wears off and the pain comes back into our awareness. This would likely lead to us feeling shame and guilt about the tools we’re using - thinking that if we could just get ourselves to stop numbing and stimulating ourselves we would be great! When in reality if we stopped the numbing and stimulating we would then be stuck in a state of perpetual and constant pain - which would feel WORSE.
We will notice that our capacity to do normal things is deeply impacted - and rather than being able to recognize that this is because we are in need of healing and rest, we would start to blame ourselves - seeing ourselves as broken, defective, weak, lazy or otherwise just not trying hard enough.
We can recognize that when we’ve been injured, just trying to go on living life as normal means creating MORE issues in the future, more problems in the present and pain that can never actually be resolved. It creates a situation where the BEST we can do is cope, numb and distract ourselves, and where we are GOING to develop habits that are workable within a terrible situation but that don’t allow us to live a full, functioning, healthy life.
It means being stuck in pain and having to cope with that pain vs. actually HEALING so that the pain actually doesn’t exist anymore.
We all understand that in order to HEAL that broken bone, we have to stop living our normal life.
We have to get surgery possibly to reset the bone and make sure that the bone regrowth is going to happen in the proper ways.
We have to get a cast that will decrease our mobility and we are going to have to forego normal activity in order to give the bone the space and time it needs to heal.
We are going to have to take medicines and do other treatments to avoid or clear out any infections or other complicating factors.
We may then have to do rehabilitation exercises and other mobility and strength work once the bone is healed enough in order to get ourselves back to the functional state we were previously in.
We are going to have to rest.
We are also going to have to go through the healing process which is not going to FEEL GOOD.
There are going to be long nights of deep bone pain as the bone stitches itself back together. There will be pain from any injury to the tissues. There will be inflammation. Itching. Aching.
There will be the discomfort of having to sit and rest when we would rather be up and about.
There may be moments of having a fever or not feeling well as the body contends with any virus or bacteria we may have been exposed to.
It’s not going to LOOK like we are healed. We are going to have to go through a period of not being functional like we normally are, not carrying on like we normally do and not FEELING our best - because this is what happens when we get hurt!
The truth is, many of us had our legs broken when we were very young.
Many of us don’t actually remember a time BEFORE the broken leg.
We only know what it’s like to have a broken leg and to HAVE to keep walking on it - because there was literally no other option.
When we weren’t loved, supported or given that secure connection we needed as children, when we were neglected, abandoned, abused in any way, when we were not rescued from our pain or when we perceived that the love of our caregivers was going to go away for any reason - we got hurt. We got injured. There was damage done.
But we didn’t have the capacity to rest. We didn’t have access to the things we needed to heal. We couldn’t change the situation or improve it - other than through coping, finding ways to stimulate and numb ourselves, finding ways to navigate on the broken leg and through other strategies of survival.
All of this impacted our choices and the ways we were going to grow in adulthood.
All of this altered the way we saw ourselves and the world around us.
All of this stopped us from being able to feel our real feelings, how to process what was truly going on for us, how to identify our wants and needs and it stopped us from learning how to effectively advocate for ourselves, recognize healthy and unhealthy environments, how to have healthy relationships, how to communicate and so much more.
It led to us developing coping strategies and self sabotaging behaviors that we now blame on ourselves or see as the problem vs being able to see them as the solution.
It stopped us from being able to own what we are actually feeling, wanting and needing, and has driven us into states of shame, blame and guilt - seeing ourselves as the problem vs. seeing that we are hurting and seeing that we have needs we need to learn how to get met and pain we need to process.
THIS is what is so hard about the healing process.
We have a hard time identifying that we even HAVE a broken leg, because that broken leg is just our normal.
We don’t know how to slow down and do the healing work because it hurts and it doesn’t LOOK like the life we WANT to be living.
We want to skip to being happy, healthy and functional - and we feel like we SHOULD be able to just WILL ourselves there. To forgive our way there. To positive focus our way there. To ACT our way there.
But the truth is, we need to stop and heal the bone.
The Actual Path
The actual path of healing means feeling.
It means slowing down, learning to feel the pain we’ve been running from, and working through EXPRESSING that pain in a safe environment where we aren’t being asked to feel differently than how we feel, and where we aren’t being asked to take responsibility for what ISN’T ours to own.
We need to be given the space and time to grieve. To blame those that hurt us so that we can get out of the cycles of self blame and shame.
We need to be given the space to see WHY we are coping, numbing and self sabotaging - understanding that these are methods of survival and functioning that we adopted in antagonistic environments. They are not the problem, they are the SOLUTION we came up with TO the problem.
We need to be given the love and support we need to then figure out HOW to meet our needs, how to show up for ourselves, how to set boundaries, how to ask for what we need, now to identify our emotions and what they are telling us.
And all of this is going to be uncomfortable.
There will be times when it feels like the pain of what we suffered is so great that we will never ‘get through it all.’
There will be times when we are SO angry or SO sad that it may feel like we can’t ever expect to get to a place of peace of forgiveness.
There will be times when it feels like what we went through was so dark and painful we will never recover.
There will be times where we have to wrestle with the instinct to try to fix ourselves, to shame ourselves and to try to rush to the ‘end state’ - knowing that of COURSE these things desires are going to be there as they have been the tools we’ve been using up to now.
There will be times when learning how to be in the new state of acceptance, love, making space for emotions and not running from ourselves is really, really HARD. Where it feels impossible.
All of this is normal.
All of this is to be expected.
All of this is par for the course.
Because the healing PROCESS doesn’t look like BEING healed.
We can’t positively think our way there. We can’t manifest our way there. We don’t forgive before we figure out what hurt, why it hurt, what kind of repair we need and what kind of boundaries we now need to keep ourselves safe.
The truth is, we will ARRIVE at a state of positivity, feeling better, forgiving to an extent and moving forward with new habits and strategies for life EVENTUALLY.
As we do the real work, we learn these new skills over time and we retrain our nervous systems to operate in a newer, more functional way.
This is not an easy process, and it’s one that the world may look at and judge as being wrong.
We may get messages from those around us that we are just ‘holding onto’ our anger, that we just need to ‘get over it’ and forgive. We may be told that we SHOULD be totally functional and that any amount of struggle we are experiencing is because we just aren’t trying hard enough. We may be told that we’re being negative and that this is doing us more harm than good.
This is all misunderstanding - but it can still be very painful to hear and receive.
You deserve to feel better.
You deserve the real healing.
I want you to know, it’s normal that the healing process doesn’t look like the end goal.
You’re allowed to get upset.
You’re allowed to not take responsibility for the messes that others made in your life for a while.
You’re allowed to be angry and sad.
You’re allowed to process and grieve.
You’re allowed to start loving the parts of you you’ve been trained to hate and deny.
You’re allowed to feel your feelings and to validate them.
You’re allowed to start to make space for the curiosity around your coping, numbing and self sabotaging behaviors so that you can learn why they are there, how they’re helping you and what you need in order to be supported in doing things in a new way.
You’re allowed to rest and not be as functional as you’re used to being for a while.
You’re allowed to do this even if others don’t understand and can’t validate you and your path.
You’re not broken, you’re doing the best you can with what you have been given - and you’re worthy of the time it takes to process through that, to feel the pain, to go through the darkness and come out the other side.
Let this be your permission slip.
<3
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Are you ready for a true spiritual path that connects you to yourself and reality so you can feel good about your life?
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