healing from the need to heal

Every era has its poison. The Middle Ages had indulgences to escape spiritual reckoning. The Victorians had spiritualism to avoid facing mortality. We have a secular penance that promises redemption not through divine grace but through perfect expert-guided revelations.

Today, healing has become a lifestyle brand. A 24/7 gig. It comes with hashtags, application forms, and a decent chance of being up-sold more healing. Somewhere along the line, we stopped healing and started performing our wounds. What used to be a personal reckoning has turned into a social identity — something to curate, optimise, and sometimes monetise.

Healing has gone pro.

It’s no longer held by those quietly tending to life’s bruises but a booming industry for people who might otherwise be building houses, cooking meals, or raising spirited children. Instead, they’re buying breathwork kits and signing up for trauma-informed alignment packages with names like ‘Reclaim & Rise’ or ‘Root to Radiance’. And who could blame them? In a world this confusing, the promise of redemption is hard to resist.

But here’s the rub: healing is now often just another form of stuckness. A carousel that spins on the engine of “if only”.

If only my parents had been present. If only I hadn’t lost that job. If only my partner understood and supported me. If only I got a different childhood. If only I hadn’t missed that opportunity many years ago. If only my body wasn’t that big or sick. If only the world were softer, fairer, slower.

This litany of if-onlys becomes our lullaby. It rocks us into passivity while “healing industry” sells us the illusion of progress. We become emotional archaeologists, digging endlessly through our past, polishing pain like sea glass. And just when we’re almost done? There’s another psychological framework to adopt, a new modality to try, a fresh round of self-examination to schedule. Each one promises a shift, a closure, a door out.

Anxiety? We say microdose it. Depression? Medicate it. Existential dread? Rebrand it as a spiritual awakening and book a flight to Peru.

None of this is inherently wrong. There are wounds that genuinely need tending, traumas that benefit from skilled support, and practices that create meaningful change. But when everything becomes a salve, it’s easy to forget that some discomfort isn’t a problem to fix. That there’s the everyday friction of being human that we’ve rebranded as damage. And that sometimes discomfort is a signal. A call to go deeper, or maybe just to go outside.

Even coaches get caught in the net. In their rush to soothe and serve, they often become customer service representatives for socially sanctioned narratives. Peddlers of digestible wisdom and downloadable worksheets. If therapy was co-opted by productivity culture in the 90s, coaching is now in danger of becoming its life-affirming twin.

Real coaching — the kind that doesn’t fit neatly on Instagram reels — is not a wellness accessory. It doesn’t coddle. It confronts. It won’t ask how you’re feeling until it’s asked what you’re avoiding. It doesn’t fix; it reveals. Like a good slap in a dream, it wakes you up.

Because maybe what we need isn’t another method, another ceremony, or another insight. Maybe what we need is to stop. To stop trying so hard to be whole that we forget we already are. To stop massaging the scar and start living with the skin.

Maybe transformation begins not in healing but in refusing to apologise for being unfinished. Not in another narrative arc, but in a moment — any moment — when you choose to act instead of analyse. To love instead of process. To live instead of rehearse.

Healing may now need healing too. The cure for our obsession with fixing ourselves might not be another method but a shift in perspective — from seeing ourselves as problems to solve to lives worth living right now, jagged edges and all.

So perhaps it’s worth asking yourself:

• What parts of your life have been paused in the name of preparing to live it better?
• Who would you be without the need to be healed first?
• What purpose does your pain serve now — and who would be left behind if you outgrew it?
• What are you afraid would happen if you stopped seeking and simply lived?

Sometimes, the bravest thing isn’t going deeper. It’s getting up.

This isn’t a pitch, a funnel, or a promise. Just a piece of writing that hopes to be useful. If it was — you can nod back with the little arrow below. Or send me a note. Either way, thanks for reading.

P.S. Every era eventually discovers its antidote. I wonder what might be ours.