When we picture healing, we tend to imagine a specific ending. You wake up one morning, do a dramatic stretch, open the windows and somehow you are just… healed. Your anxiety is gone, your confidence is through the roof. You drink your morning coffee in peace instead of mentally rehearsing every awkward interaction that has happened in the last week.
Unfortunately, healing is not quite that convenient.
More often, healing is messy, confusing, and uncomfortable. It does not always feel like progress is happening. Sometimes healing looks like feeling worse before feeling better. Sometimes it looks like crying about something that you thought you were “over”. Sometimes it looks like realizing, “Oh, this is a pattern,” and still watching yourself repeat the pattern anyway.
That does not mean you are failing, it means you’re human.
Healing is not a straight line.
We often expect healing to be linear. We imagine ourselves moving steadily from the “dark hole” to “living our best life” with no detours along the way. Although, healing tends to look more like a winding road. There might be progress, a pothole, a wrong turn, and occasionally a moment where you wonder if your GPS is leading you in the completely wrong direction.
You may have a really great week, and then feel a familiar negative emotion. You may feel you have moved past something and months later feeling distressed by the same event. You might handle a situation differently thanks to therapy, and still spend the next few weeks wondering if you handled it “wrong”. None of that erases your progress. Having a difficult day does not mean you are back at the beginning. Feeling anxious again does not mean all your coping skills have disappeared. Needing support again does not mean therapy “didn’t work”.
Healing is not about never struggling again. It’s about what happens when you do.
One of the less glamorous parts of healing is becoming more aware of yourself. Sometimes healing means noticing things you’d rather not notice at all. You may start noticing patterns in your relationships, the way you respond to conflict, or how often you put everyone else’s needs before your own. To be frank, awareness can be so annoying. It’s one thing to automatically people-please. It is another thing to catch yourself people-pleasing in real time and think “Oh this is what is happening.”
Awareness doesn’t always feel good.
Sometimes you realize that something you have been doing for years helped you cope at one point is now the thing that is causing you harm. Maybe staying busy helped you avoid difficult feelings, and now you are too burnt out and exhausted to feel any emotion. Maybe the “easygoing” personality helped you feel accepted by your peers. These patterns may have made sense at one point in time. Although, healing involves recognizing you don’t necessarily need them in the same way anymore. This can be a hard truth, and uncomfortable, but noticing the pattern is the start to changing it.
We often think healing means experiencing fewer difficult emotions. When actually, healing typically means becoming more comfortable with feeling them. Maybe you used to shut down when you are angry, and now you can recognize that you’re angry and talk about it. Maybe you used to immediately distract yourself whenever you felt sad, and now you let yourself cry.
Although, this doesn’t necessarily mean you will feel better. In fact, it can feel harder at first.
When you’ve spent years avoiding certain emotions, learning to sit with them can feel like opening a junk drawer you’ve been ignoring for years. There can be some useful things, but also too much junk to figure out what is actually useful. The goal isn’t to eliminate uncomfortable emotions, that is unrealistic. It is to learn that you can experience an emotion without the emotion taking over your life.
Sometimes healing means doing something that feels uncomfortable. We tend to assume healthy choices should feel good, which sometimes they do. Other times, they make you feel terrible. Setting that boundary might make you feel guilty. Saying no might make you anxious.
Walking away from a familiar relationship may make you feel like you are questioning yourself.
Discomfort does not mean you are making the wrong choice. Sometimes it means you are trying something new instead of repeating the pattern you have grown accustomed to. You can be uncomfortable and still be moving in a healthier direction.
You don’t have to feel better every day to be healing. You’re allowed to have bad days. You’re allowed to have moments where you think, “I have done so much work on myself. Why am I still like this?” Because you are a person, not a houseplant. There is no final version of you sitting on a shelf waiting to be achieved. Healing is less about becoming a completely different person and more about becoming someone who understands themselves a little better, and can meet themselves with a little more compassion along the way.
Sometimes healing looks like feeling better. Sometimes it looks like understanding why you feel the way you do. Sometimes it looks like making a different choice. Sometimes it looks like asking for help. And sometimes it looks like getting through a really difficult Tuesday without giving up on yourself.
You don’t have to be completely healed to be making progress. You just have to keep showing up for yourself, even on the days when healing looks less like a breakthrough and more like putting on sweatpants, drinking some water, and deciding to try again tomorrow.
