Healing to Become Whole

I’m here to bust a major psychotherapy myth. Healing is one of those buzzwords in the world of mental health. People picture it as a calming, serene experience—a peaceful moment of clarity where everything just clicks. Maybe something like a spa day with soft music, warm towels, and deep exhalations.

There’s no doubt that a spa day is healing in its own right. We all need rest and relaxation. But if we’re talking about healing emotional wounds—your trauma, deep-seated resentment, or real, raw pain—then healing isn’t going to feel like a spa day. The honest truth? Healing emotional pain is often incredibly painful.

Healing Hurts Before It Helps

I'll start with a story: let me take you back to 2014 when I had hip surgery. I’d torn the labrum of my right hip (the cartilage that lines the socket), and it needed repair. The injury itself was excruciating, like a hot crochet needle stabbing into my hip joint. The surgery was simple enough—arthroscopic, a few stitches, smoothing out the joint. Post-surgery, I was placed in a hip brace. If you’ve never seen one, imagine a medieval metal contraption holding your entire leg and hip in place to stabilize everything and allow the healing process to begin.

The first two days after surgery? A breeze. I stayed on the couch, half-asleep, with my leg immobilized. I felt no pain, just the relief of rest.

Then came the hard part: physical therapy.

On day one of physical therapy, my therapist removed the brace and bandages for the first time. I about fainted. My leg looked weak and unfamiliar, and I felt a sickening wave of nausea—was it pain, fear, or both? And then they told me to flex my foot, contract my leg muscles, and begin using the joint again. It hurt. I wanted to go back to the couch, where it was safe and painless.

At one point, I asked, “Should I be worried about re-injuring myself?”

The therapist responded, “No. This is how you heal.”

There it was: This is how you heal. Not by avoiding the pain, but by leaning into it and doing the work.

Therapy, Like Physical Therapy, Requires Painful Growth

Healing in therapy is strikingly similar. Emotional wounds, like physical injuries, need care and stabilization at first—just like a hip brace. Early in therapy, you might focus on creating safety: setting boundaries, learning to ground yourself, or just getting through the day. This phase can feel comforting and restorative.

But sometimes, after this period of stabilization, progress can stall—or at least seem like it does. People can get stuck (for lack of a better word) for many different reasons. Let’s explore a few of the most common barriers to deeper healing:

Difficulty Accessing the Root Cause: Getting to the root cause of emotional pain often requires confronting deeply buried feelings, memories, or traumas—work that can be incredibly uncomfortable. For some people, avoidance is an unconscious defense mechanism; their mind protects them from revisiting painful experiences by steering conversations away from them. For others, they may not even realize the root cause exists, especially if the pain has been normalized or repressed for years.

In therapy, this avoidance can manifest as a focus on surface-level topics: recounting daily events, sharing recent successes, or staying within the bounds of what feels “safe.” While these conversations can be productive in building rapport and creating trust, they often prevent clients from addressing the very issues that brought them to therapy in the first place.

The “False Progress” of Intellectual Understanding: Some clients are exceptionally insightful and self-aware. They can articulate their struggles with remarkable clarity, connect their past to their present, and even identify patterns in their behavior. This intellectual understanding of their issues is an important step in the healing process, but it’s not the final step.

The challenge comes when clients stop at the intellectual level and avoid feeling the emotions tied to those insights. Talking about pain without feeling it can create a sense of progress that isn’t fully realized. For example, a client might say, “I know my anxiety stems from being overly criticized as a child,” but if they don’t allow themselves to sit with the feelings of shame, sadness, or anger tied to that criticism, the healing process remains incomplete. Emotional engagement is where transformation happens—not just knowing the story, but feeling its impact.

Focusing on Symptoms Instead of Causes: Sometimes, therapy can become overly focused on managing symptoms rather than exploring their root causes. Clients may seek therapy to reduce anxiety, improve their mood, or better cope with stress—all important goals. However, if the underlying reasons for these symptoms (such as unresolved trauma, unmet emotional needs, or negative self-beliefs) are not addressed, the relief may be temporary.

Symptom-focused work can feel like progress because it often provides quick wins—feeling less anxious, sleeping better, or experiencing fewer conflicts at work. But over time, the unresolved root cause often resurfaces, either in the form of recurring symptoms or in entirely new ways. True healing requires processing and understanding the deeper issues that drive those symptoms, even though that process is more challenging and less immediate.

Real Healing and Root Causes

I know it's tempting to stay at the surface level in therapy. Diving into the deep unknown of our emotional discomfort or distress is scary—it’s messy, painful, and often overwhelming. But the truth is, avoiding the deeper issues doesn’t make them go away.

Emphasis on: avoiding emotional problems doesn’t make them disappear. Pretending everything is fine, forcing ourselves to “look on the bright side,” or minimizing how we feel isn’t healthy. We know this intuitively when it comes to practical problems—ignoring a leaky pipe doesn’t stop the water damage, and avoiding a difficult conversation doesn’t resolve the tension. The same is true for our feelings and emotional wounds.

When we avoid our emotions, they don’t vanish. Instead, they find other ways to make themselves known. Sometimes they grow bigger and louder, showing up as explosive anger, intense anxiety, or even physical symptoms like headaches, fatigue, or chronic pain. Other times, they burrow deep inside us, creating patterns of self-doubt, shame, or disconnection that feel so ingrained we can’t even trace them back to their origin.

Avoidance might feel easier in the short term, but in the long run, it comes with a steep cost. It can keep us stuck in cycles of pain, prevent us from forming authentic connections with others, and rob us of the ability to truly understand ourselves. The feelings we push down don’t go away—they just linger, waiting for their chance to rise to the surface.

Real healing requires honesty. Honesty with yourself, honesty with others, and honesty with your feelings. And yes, this kind of honesty is painful. You might face truths you’ve spent years avoiding. You might have to rewrite narratives that have helped you feel safe, even if they weren’t serving you. You might confront parts of yourself that you’ve buried because they felt too messy or too raw.

But here’s the thing: avoidance doesn’t resolve pain—processing it does. When you allow yourself to feel, to face the discomfort head-on, and to dig into the underlying wounds, you create space for true healing. You begin to understand the “why” behind your emotions. You give yourself permission to grieve, to be angry, or to let go.

And it's worth it. This process of honesty and emotional exploration is the key to breaking free from the cycles that keep us stuck. It’s how we move from simply managing symptoms to transforming our lives. It’s the difference between putting a bandage on a wound and giving it the care it needs to truly heal.

Yes, it’s hard. But isn’t that why we’ve been avoiding it? The good news is that hard doesn’t mean impossible—and it certainly doesn’t mean hopeless. In fact, the hardest work often leads to the greatest freedom.

Doing the Hard Work of Healing

Healing is not passive—it’s an active process that requires commitment, courage, and a willingness to face discomfort. While the process may look different for everyone, I think there are five key steps that can guide the journey: acknowledgment, expression, exploration, processing, and transformation. Let’s break these down.

Step 1: Acknowledgment

The first step in healing is acknowledgment. This means acknowledging your emotions—naming them, recognizing their impact, and becoming aware of the ways they’re causing pain or creating challenges in your life. But beyond that, you also need to acknowledge the emotions you’ve been avoiding and the reasons for that avoidance.

Avoidance isn’t random; it often serves a purpose. It may have protected you at one point, shielding you from pain you weren’t ready to face. But as helpful as avoidance might have seemed, it likely isn’t serving you anymore. Painful emotions, while uncomfortable, carry important messages. They tell us what feels hurtful, wrong, or untrue, and they encourage us to take steps toward healing.

Acknowledgment is about listening to those messages. Once you make sense of what your emotions are telling you, you can begin to address the needs, wounds, or experiences that those emotions are calling on you to heal.

Step 2: Expression

Acknowledging your emotions is important, but it’s quite not enough. The next step is to express them.

Expressing emotions involves talking through the unpleasant and uncomfortable emotions like anxiety, shame, guilt, anger, and grief. It also means overcoming the tendency to avoid feeling these emotions. Humans have a strong instinct to avoid pain, but healing requires us to move toward those emotions, even in small, manageable doses.

You don’t have to dive in all at once. In fact, healing is often most effective when approached gradually. By allowing avoided emotions to surface and tolerating them for increasingly longer periods, you can reduce their intensity and create space to fully process them. The goal within this step (and this is probably my new favorite phrase) is not to "feel better", but to "feel better".

However, expression alone isn’t sufficient for healing. Once you’ve expressed your emotions, you can use them as valuable information—to explore, reflect on, and make sense of what they’re telling you.

Step 3: Exploration

This is where the real work begins. Exploration involves looking for the root causes of your emotions. Why are you feeling this way? Where does the pain come from? What’s at the core of your struggle?

Often, the emotions we express aren’t the whole story. They’re symptoms of something deeper. Exploration helps uncover that deeper layer—the origin of the emotions. For example, anger might mask hurt, and anxiety might be rooted in a lack of safety. Getting to the root allows you to understand the “why” behind your feelings.

Avoidance is when we lock these painful emotions and their root causes away, hiding them behind metaphorical closed doors and hoping they stay quiet. But those doors don’t stay shut forever. Small triggers—seemingly insignificant moments—can crack them open, and the emotions behind them can burst out louder than before. We can try over and over to shut the door, walk away and hope everything stays quiet. Of course we know in order to truly heal, you must confront what’s behind the door. You must open it, face it, and let it out.

Step 4: Processing

Processing is the hardest step, but it’s also the most important step towards healing. It involves connecting your emotions to the experiences they stem from and working through not just the emotions themselves, but also the reasons you avoided them.

Processing requires you to confront uncomfortable truths and rewrite long-held narratives. For example, you may come to realize that your anxiety and low self-worth as an adult stem from a childhood where your emotions were invalidated. Perhaps your parents, while loving and well-intentioned, dismissed your feelings with phrases like “It’ll be okay” or “Don’t worry about it.” Over time, this taught you to distrust your emotions and, by extension, yourself.

Rewriting this narrative might involve grappling with the painful realization that your parents, though they loved you, could have done things differently. Processing is about sitting with that pain, making sense of it, and working through it so that it no longer controls you.

Step 5: Transformation

The final step is transformation. This is where the hard work of healing pays off, as you turn your pain into something bigger, something meaningful.

Transformation involves finding understanding—not to excuse or forgive, but to make sense of your experiences. This understanding can free you from the emotional weight you’ve been carrying.

For instance, in the example of invalidated childhood emotions, transformation might look like this:

“I struggle with anxiety and low self-worth because my parents didn’t give me the space to explore my feelings growing up. They avoided difficult emotions, likely because they didn’t know how to handle them—it’s probably how they were raised, too. While I deserved to have my feelings validated, I now understand that their actions weren’t about me but about their own limitations.”

This understanding creates space for freedom. It allows you to let go of unnecessary emotional baggage, embrace your feelings as valid, and move forward with greater self-awareness.

Final Thoughts

Healing is often romanticized as a peaceful, restorative journey, but the truth is, emotional healing is one of the hardest things you’ll ever do. It asks you to confront the very things you’ve spent years trying to avoid, to sit with discomfort, and to rewrite the stories you’ve long told yourself. It requires bravery, vulnerability, and an unwavering commitment to growth.

But here’s the truth that makes it all worth it: the reward of doing the hard work is freedom.

When you choose to engage with your emotions—acknowledge them, express them, explore their roots, and process their meaning—you stop carrying the weight of unresolved pain. You stop being held back by patterns of avoidance and self-doubt. You reclaim your ability to trust yourself, connect deeply with others, and live a life that feels authentic and whole.

Healing doesn’t mean the absence of pain; it means learning to carry it in a way that no longer controls you. It means transforming that pain into wisdom, strength, and purpose. It’s not about erasing the past—it’s about understanding it and using it as a foundation to build your future.

So, if you’re in the thick of it—doing the hard, messy, uncomfortable work—know that you’re not alone, and know that the freedom and transformation waiting on the other side are worth every step. Healing isn’t easy, but neither is staying stuck. And while the process is hard, the reward is life-changing.

You are worth the hard work. You are worth the reward.