Ever feel like you’ve turned your entire existence into a project? I’ve been there. The endless podcasts, the journals, the ‘shadow work’—it starts as a way to feel better, but eventually, it just feels like another job I’m failing at.
I stumbled across this podcast episode that hit me hard. It talks about how we can actually pressure our nervous systems into a state of ‘fixing’ that just keeps us stuck in protection mode. It’s a wild realization that the effort to heal can actually be the thing blocking it.
Then there’s this piece from The Awakening Begins. It describes that subtle shift where your identity stops being ‘me’ and starts being ‘the person who is healing.’ Once that happens, you start looking for things to fix just to keep the identity alive.
“My focus on what was broken was just creating more brokenness to fix. It’s a subtle, insidious form of self-sabotage that kept me from creating the future I actually wanted.”
Are You Stuck in the Healing Trap?
I also found this video. It’s a quick look at the ‘perpetually healing’ trap—the idea that there’s always one more modality, one more retreat, or one more breakthrough just around the corner if you just work a little harder.
And this critique from Hermesloom really grounded it for me. It suggests that ‘healing’ is often just about the avoidance of pain, whereas true well-being is about imagining how things can get better altogether, not just ‘not broken.’
“For me, “healing” just refers to avoidance of pain, to acknowledging that something is sick and broken, but the only motivation is to stop this from being sick and broken, instead of thinking out of the box and imagining how that thing can get better altogether.”
A Critique of ‘Healing’
The truth is, the ‘healing journey’ can become a treadmill we never actually step off of. We treat our lives like a broken toaster that needs a part replaced, rather than a tapestry being woven in real-time. If you’re feeling the burn of the treadmill, you might find some peace in my thoughts on the violence of ‘healing’.
Stop trying to optimize your pain. Just let it be. The exit is usually through the mess, not around it.