Do you ever get the feeling that you are ‘trapped’ in your healing work?
Do you ever feel like you are doing everything in your power to heal your inner child, to learn how to regulate your nervous system, to face your past and the traumas that you have experienced, to learn to forgive and move on from what happened to you, to take responsibility for yourself and develop newer, healthier habits that will support you in creating the life you really want to live - only to find that you perpetually ‘fall back’ into doing and being exactly what you’ve always done and been?
Do you ever feel like you have tried EVERYTHING the spirituality/self help/wellness world has to offer - and still you find yourself struggling with the same struggles you’ve always had?
Do you find yourself ‘looping’ - feeling like you can really ‘master’ changing your habits, feeling like you’re really making progress and doing things in a new way for a few days or weeks - but that this progress is always derailed somehow and you end up doing what you’ve always done, exactly how you’ve always done it?
Like no matter how hard you try, you end up being ‘triggered’ by the same things in your relationships and responding how you’ve always responded?
Like you always get pulled back into your self sabotaging behaviors no matter how much you try to set yourself up to do something different?
Like you end up falling back into cycles of self hate, shame and guilt even when you are diligently working on being kinder and more supportive with yourself?
Do you feel like ‘healing’ has become your whole life and almost a new identity? Something that takes up most of your time, energy and brain space?
If so, then you’ve come to the right article.
How The Wellness Industry Tricks Us
The first thing I want to help you see is that this feeling of being ‘stuck’ on your healing path, this feeling that you are constantly striving and never arriving, this feeling that you must be failing or doing something wrong because you are doing all the ‘things’ but not experiencing the promised results - is not your fault.
It’s not a sign that you’re weak, lazy or too broken to be helped.
It’s not because you aren’t trying hard enough or because you’re beyond repair.
Rather, a BIG part of why most people get trapped in their healing work, is because the promises that are made by the wellness/spirituality industry around what ‘should’ happen when you do your healing work aren’t true, and because most of what is offered in terms of the ‘path’ to healing isn’t actually healing.
You see, a BIG part of the actual issue that most of us are facing as we try to heal, is the idea that healing ‘should’ look like absolute transcendence.
If we take a step back and really look at how healing/wellness tools are sold to us - we are going to notice that rarely, if ever, do we see someone saying that if we do our work, we are going to end up in a place of BETTER.
That we are going to gather tools that will help us slowly and incrementally establish newer, healthier habits while we simultaneously hold onto old habits - working our way towards comfort and familiarity with something new.
That we are going to continue to have things that trigger us, that challenge us and that cause us to be in a state of confusion or doubt - and rather than finding a perfect life we will instead gather tools that will help us navigate these challenges.
That we will be learning WHY we are doing what we are from a place of compassion and curiosity, so we can deeply understand how what we are currently doing is working for us, and thus we can slowly work to develop new patterns that meet the same needs with fewer side effects.
That we will never fully transcend pain or challenge - but rather that we will learn how to have a full life even with our struggles and the things that will never be perfect.
Rarely are we taught how to actually SUPPORT ourselves, how to show up for the ‘us’ that actually exists right now, so that we can gently work towards taking slow, steady, incremental steps - rather we are taught that if we do the diet, mindset work, lifestyle changes, meditation practices, perfect morning routines and spiritual work we can fully transcend all of our pain.
We are taught that the way to healing is to figure out what’s ‘wrong’ with us, to shame ourselves, blame ourselves and guilt ourselves all through the guise of ‘taking personal responsibility’, so that we can then ‘fix’ what’s broken about us.
We are taught that the more extreme the practice, the more we shoot for that version of ‘perfection’ and the more we twist ourselves into knots trying to BE that perfect person, the faster we will get results.
We’re taught to literally do exactly the OPPOSITE of what is actually required to heal, change and grow - and we’re taught that this opposite path to healing is what healing is SUPPOSED to look like.
We are literally set up to fail - for reasons we will explore below - and then we are told that when we fail we failed because we didn’t try hard enough, we didn’t do it perfect enough, we did the wrong thing, that we need to buy the next coaching package, the next book, go to the next retreat and so on and so forth - forever and ever.
The problem is, what we are being sold doesn’t work - but we are being convinced that the reason we are failing is because WE are failures - and thus we are primed to continue to consume everything the wellness/spirituality world has to sell us, over and over again - always striving, never arriving and constantly questioning OURSELVES instead of questioning the method.
This is really great for capitalism - in fact if we take a step back we can see how this is the PERFECT marketing scheme for ever increasing profits. Sell the people a product that can never work, convince them that when it fails to deliver on the results it promises to offer that it was the consumer who failed, not the product, convince them that buying MORE of the product is the solution - and then repeat.
Why We Believe The Failed Product Is Our Fault
At first glance, most self help, spirituality and wellness work looks and sounds really empowering.
Again, the way we are sold things is via the lens that we can fully transcend all of our pain, that we can ‘manifest’ and create these PERFECT lives where we have a purpose, have perfectly healthy and beautiful relationships, where we are financially abundant and working a job that feels ‘authentic’ to us, where we are always happy, regulated and without trigger, where our bodies are fully healthy and we never struggle with self doubt ever again.
We are sold that if we are really doing our healing work right, that we can ‘get rid of’ all ‘negative’ thoughts, feelings, behaviors and patterns - that we can fully overcome all of the things that are wrong with us - and that this just requires realizing where we are the ‘cause’ of our pain, so we can heal it and move on.
We are sold that the TRUTH of why we struggle always comes down to us making the wrong choices, us being ‘broken’ in some way - but that this is a GOOD thing, because it means that if we just fix ourselves and make different choices, we can create absolute bliss and transcendence for ourselves.
We are sold that all of our pain, all of our problems and all of our struggles come from US doing/being something wrong - which means that if we just start to do the ‘right’ things - if we eat in the right way, think in the right way, relate in the right way and speak in the right way - that we will finally create the lives we’ve always wanted to live.
The message is usually that we simply arrived in our adulthoods, decided to self sabotage, make bad choices, harbor negative feelings, not take care of ourselves and to create chaos for no reason other than being broken - and that the solution is to simply stop that, create new habits and be better. We are taught that all of our negative experiences as an adult have nothing to do with our surroundings, our history, the systems we live in or any other factor - that it all comes down to us and our choices.
If there is an acknowledgement that we may have been traumatized or wounded in our childhoods, that we may be living in systems that don’t work or feel good for us, if there is any mention of the idea that the outside world may be having an impact on us - even in this we are taught that if we just ‘make the right choices’ we can fix all of THESE issues to.
We are sold that we can go to the healing retreat and fully transcend all of our childhood trauma in a weekend - coming home as a fully new person. That we can control our diet perfectly so as to protect ourselves from all the harm of those evil corporations that are harming us. That we can do a medicine journey and completely transform in an instant. That we can ‘see’ why we have the patterns that we have, and thus can then just create new habits because we have awareness.
Either way, we’re taught that WE are the center point of our reality and that transcending all of our pain is as simple as changing our behavior.
Which means that when the program fails, when we do the retreat and it doesn’t transform our whole lives, when we do the mindset work and still find ourselves triggered and repeating patterns, when we get sucked back into our self sabotage and coping mechanisms - the blame will ALWAYS be pointed back at US.
We didn’t do it enough.
We didn’t try hard enough.
We are broken, making bad choices and doing the wrong things - and THIS is why we are suffering.
Now the reason this message makes so much sense to us, to the point where we believe it?
The reason why we do our self help, spirituality and wellness work so diligently, don’t get results and then blame ourselves instead of questioning the method?
It’s because the ROOT of this message is exactly what our childhood selves learned about reality.
You see, when we were in that temporary codependent relationship with our caregivers at the very beginning of our lives - we had no concept of actual reality.
We didn’t understand that our caregivers weren’t Gods that had access to all things, that could save us from all pain and provide us with all pleasure. We couldn’t see how their behavior, their ability or inability to give us a secure connection where we felt like we could be ourselves, express ourselves, go through our learning process, make mistakes, discover who we were and how the world worked and be loved, provided for and cared for no matter what - had nothing to do with us.
Rather, it appeared to us that they were the source of all things, and that the ONLY reason they would or wouldn't provide us with the things we needed was because of OUR behavior.
From our childhood perspective, our caregivers were the ultimate arbiters of reality - and all we needed to do to find security, protection, safety and provision, was to learn how to behave in whatever ways we needed to to earn their love, attention and approval - because we perceived that this is what would lead to them providing for us.
We learned deep in our nervous systems that if we could just ‘fix’ ourselves to be what they wanted us to be, we could avoid their rejection, their abuse, their lack of capacity to provide for us - and thus could establish that perfect, secure connection where all of our need would be met and we would have perfect safety.
THAT is what we wanted and that is how we perceived we would get it.
Sound familiar?
For most of us now as adults, we still have a deep-seated belief that getting our needs met, being safe, being provided for, having security and being in a state of pleasure comes from behaving correctly.
We are still trying to figure out how to perfect ourselves so that the universe, our partners, our bosses, God, the world in general will respond to us in a different, more pleasing way.
We still have this base, core belief that if we are struggling, in pain, suffering, not feeling how we want to feel - that this is because we are behaving in some way that is ‘wrong’ - and thus that the solution is to fix ourselves to be more pleasing, and that in doing so we will get what we actually want.
Safety And Security - The REAL Reason We’re Trying To ‘Fix’ Ourselves
At the end of the day, what most of us are missing on our healing path is this:
The reason we are jumping through all of these hoops, the reason we are getting stuck on our healing path, the reason we are doing all the ‘healing’ we are trying to do and the reason we feel that if we just ‘get it right’ all of our pain will go away - is because we still believe that if we get our behavior right, life will become perfect.
We aren’t seeing that we have needs that aren’t being met, that we have parts of self that have been cast into the shadows and aren’t being expressed, that we are suffering for reasons that have nothing to do with us or our choices.
We aren’t seeing the REAL reason that we’re in pain - our needs aren’t being met and we aren’t expressing how we want to express - but rather we are perceiving that we are in pain because we are DOING something wrong - because this is what we learned in our childhoods.
You see, many of us never learned how to actually figure out why we were in pain.
We never learned WHY we cope, numb, scapegoat and self sabotage.
We never learned to assess WHY we want to manifest this or create that.
We never learned WHY we are in pain, what hurts and what to do about it.
We only learned that pain = I am doing something wrong = I need to fix myself so that the outside world will respond differently to me, will understand me and my needs, and will meet my needs for me.
THIS is the root of why we get stuck in our healing work.
THIS is the reason we get trapped and never find our way forward.
We are stuck in the childhood perspective that says pain = I am behaving wrong, that I am broken, and I need to fix myself so that the world around me will understand me, love me and then provide for me what I need.
What we want is security, safety, provision and the feeling that we are going to be loved no matter what.
And we think that is going to come through behaving right.
So when the wellness, spirituality and self help experts come in and tell us that this is exactly right - that if we just fix ourselves enough we can eventually transcend all of our pain and manifest these perfect, triggerless, challengeless lives - we believe it.
When we are told that the healing modalities didn’t work not because they are not actually healing us or because they don’t actually work but because we didn’t do it right - we can always find a way to blame ourselves - to see how we didn’t do it enough, didn’t do it perfect, didn’t do it for long enough - and thus we will always blame ourselves - holding onto the hope that we DO have the answer, we DO have the solution, we DO know how we are supposed to behave - we just need to try harder and do more.
We want a secure connection that we think will lead us to always having our needs met - and we think that it is through perfecting our behavior that we are going to establish this connection.
THIS is why we get stuck, because this isn’t how reality works.
So long as we are convinced that if we perfect ourselves enough we can create a perfect life, we will be trapped in the world of always striving, never arriving, because we won’t be in alignment with real reality.
How Real Reality Works
In real reality?
As adults, we need to start to realize that we are not suffering and struggling because we aren’t behaving in a way that pleases the world around us.
Rather, the TRUE healing path is one where we slow down, and start to actually get to KNOW ourselves.
It’s about realizing and recognizing where we didn’t get our needs met in our childhoods, and how we developed methods of coping with that lack that we now call our ‘bad habits.’
It’s about realizing where we were hurt and harmed in the past, learning how to process the rage, sadness, grief and pain of that - without trying to spiritualize it, see the bigger picture, forgive and forget or move on too quickly.
It’s about learning how to investigate into how our current behaviors meet a need for us, how they protect us, how they are the best methods we know right now to keep ourselves safe - so that we can start to understand what we ACTUALLY want and need and how to create new habits that can meet those needs in a way that causes less pain.
It’s about getting compassionate with ourselves and realizing that not everything is because of us - that sometimes we are not getting what we want because we live in systems that make it really hard for us, because the people around us aren’t capable of giving us what we want and need in terms of connection, because our caregivers were literally not capable of providing for us - and learning to deal with the reality of that.
It’s about learning that we are never going to fully ‘transcend’ being human and that we must stop striving for that - so that we can simply focus on finding our STEPS towards BETTER.
It’s about learning to understand where our REAL power is - where it’s our way of being that needs to shift so that we can get new and better results, where we don’t have control and need to learn to support ourselves the best we can within unideal circumstances.
It’s about realizing that all of those ‘bad parts’ of self we have been taught to deny and reject are actually parts of us that need to be loved, understood and brought into the light so that they can grow and express - despite how that may have gotten us rejected in the past.
It’s about learning to ‘cut out the middleman’ in terms of looking for who we need to align with and impress so that we will be loved, understood and provided for - so that WE can start to understand OURSELVES, and then provide for OURSELVES what we actually want and need.
It’s about learning how to come into our adult perspective - to see that not everything is because of the choices we have made, not everything is because of us, and that we aren’t ever going to be perfectly loved, held and supported and thus provided with a perfect life - but rather that we are going to have to slowly figure ourselves out and slowly figure out how to interact with REAL reality, so as to get our needs met to the best of our ability.
It’s about realizing that we want safety and security - and that we don’t lack those things because we are ‘behaving’ wrong - but rather because we aren’t aware of our needs, or because we don’t know how/can’t meet our needs within the reality we’re living in.
It’s about realizing that a revelation isn’t a transformation - and that no matter how ‘aware’ we are of what we want, what we need, why we do what we do and how to move forward - that it’s ALWAYS going to be a two steps forward, one step back process because change is HARD.
Our nervous systems are USED to what we are currently doing - and they need LOTS of proof that any new way is going to work to get our needs met BETTER than any current habit we have - thus we are going to have to be patient with taking steps towards change, knowing that the ‘old way’ is going to stay with us for a while.
It’s about realizing that healing is going to come in layers, that we are going to cycle through the same emotions and revelations over and over again, and that transformation takes place over YEARS - not days, weeks or months most of the time.
So we give ourselves the space to go slow, to ground our understanding into our bodies and to walk about small steps - knowing that our bodies need lots of time to adjust to new ways and don’t respond well to massive changes.
This is how we get off of the always striving never arriving merry-go-round.
We step back, and start getting to KNOW ourselves - what hurts, why does it hurt, what do we need and how do we get those needs met in REAL reality.
It’s about realizing that change is going to be SLOW, because no matter how positive the change is we’re about to make our nervous systems are going to need TIME to adjust to a new way.
It’s about realizing it’s just going to be steps, that there’s no perfect and only tools.
That you are not broken, that you are doing everything you are with the intention of supporting yourself - and then untangling what is real, what is conditioning and how to get your needs met in real reality.
You are not broken - you are doing your best to try to create safety for yourself.
If you were to approach ALL of your healing work from THAT place - how would what you’re doing shift?
THIS is the true healing path.
Slow and steady.
One step at a time.
Getting to know yourself - never fixing yourself.
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Are you sick of the self help roller coaster that leaves you constantly striving and never arriving?
Are you ready for a true spiritual path that connects you to yourself and reality so you can feel good about your life?
Then come check out the Mystery School.
The school is a 4-5 year self paced program that includes written lectures, videos, worksheets, practices and a community all designed to help you develop a clearer view of yourself, your life and reality at large so that you can better design a life that actually works for you.
