I’ve spent a lot of time in the ‘healing’ world. You know the drill: the journals, the podcasts, the carefully curated ‘wellness’ routines. For a while, I actually liked it. I liked the feeling of *progress*. The idea that if I just read one more book or tried one more modality, I’d finally reach that magical place where I was ‘healed’ and everything just… worked.
But lately, I’ve started to feel like I’m just running on a treadmill. I’m putting in all this work, sweating through the ‘inner child’ exercises, but I’m not actually going anywhere. I’m just getting better at the *process* of healing, without actually feeling any different.
“Normalization is the enemy. As soon as we believe something is normal, we accept it. We stop pushing back against the system, demanding what should be rightfully ours – a healed and whole state.”
Bizzie Gold via The Chalkboard Mag
That hit me. We’ve normalized the ‘journey.’ We’ve turned the act of recovering into a lifestyle. When the ‘healing journey’ becomes your entire identity, you subconsciously stop wanting it to end. Because if you’re actually healed, who are you? What do you do with all that energy you’ve spent on ‘fixing’ yourself?
The trap is that we start viewing our lives as a problem to be solved. We treat our trauma like a bug in the software that needs a patch. But the more we focus on the ‘fix,’ the more we reinforce the idea that we are broken.
“The problem… is that in this approach of healing, you’re viewing your experience as a problem to be solved, and by doing so, you only ever reaffirm to your mind that there’s something to fix.”
Michall J. Medina via Brainz Magazine
Then we add the cherry on top: toxic positivity. The ‘good vibes only’ pressure that tells us if we just mindset our way through it, the pain will vanish. It’s not resilience; it’s just gaslighting yourself into silence.
“Toxic positivity is the insistence that a positive mindset should override authentic emotional experience. That suffering should be silver-lined, pain should be reframed, and difficult feelings should be suppressed in favor of gratitude.”
Annie Wright, LMFT
I’m starting to think that the real ‘breakthrough’ isn’t finding the next tool. It’s stepping off the treadmill. It’s admitting that maybe some parts of us aren’t meant to be ‘fixed’—they’re just meant to be lived with.
If you’ve been feeling that crushing weight of needing to be ‘over it’ already, you might find some peace in the pressure to ‘get over it’.
Stop trying to solve the puzzle of your life. You aren’t a puzzle. You’re a person. Just be a person for a while. It’s way less exhausting.