Why Healing Work Doesn’t Always Feel Like It’s Working
I get it. It’s so frustrating when we do a lot of healing work, through self-help, or with a counsellor, and it feels like nothing is changing. Sometimes it even looks like it’s getting worse. I get it. I’ve been there. I’m still there, sometimes.
I felt like there was no progress for almost 20 years, from my early adult years until about 40. No visible change at all. I never saw a counsellor, because they don’t really exist where I’m from in France, and psychologists are expensive. So all my healing happened through self-help. And it is so discouraging when nothing seems to change.
One of my osteopaths once told me a metaphor I’ll never forget. It’s like trying to open a stuck jar lid. You try 99 times and it won’t budge, and on the 100th try, it finally opens. That doesn’t mean the first 99 attempts did nothing and only the 100th one worked. No, every one of those 99 tries loosened the lid just a little, even if you couldn’t feel it happening. The 100th try gets all the credit, but that’s not the whole story.
It’s not that I tried hundreds of techniques over 20 years, nothing happened, and then the last technique I tried was the one that finally worked. No. I had to go through every single one of those other techniques, practices, and modalities, all working quietly in the background, to get to that final shift. I learned so much about myself and about healing throughout those 20 years. If I had started with that last technique alone, it wouldn’t have worked either. It was the compounding of everything before it that made the healing possible, even though I only noticed one big shift, two decades in. And honestly, things even got harder right before that shift happened.
Here’s another way to look at it. Someone I know was diagnosed with emphysema, a lung disease. They were told that many people don’t notice any breathing symptoms until they’ve lost 50% or more of their lung function. That shocked me, and it’s stayed with me ever since. It turns out the same is true for a lot of other conditions or pain.
I think it’s the same principle: we often don’t notice things getting better (or worse) until we’ve gained or lost a significant percentage of what we started with.
Here’s one more way to picture it: imagine a glass of water. Add one drop of black ink. You won’t notice any change in color until you’ve added quite a few drops. And you’d notice the shift faster if you had a second, untouched glass right next to it for comparison, because, as I learned in my photography degree over 20 years ago, the human eye is a great comparer, but a terrible analyzer on its own.
Healing can be subtle in exactly this way, we might not notice it the way we expect to. For me, it was the moment depression finally lifted that I noticed a real difference in how I was living my life. That moment was also unusual enough that it actually took me two or three years to fully understand what had happened.
And to be clear, being less depressed and more emotionally regulated doesn’t mean I’m “all better.” I still have a lot of work to do. In fact, some new things are surfacing now that weren’t visible before. But being more regulated makes all of it so much easier to live with.
So if you’re discouraged, because you’re doing the work, alone or with a counsellor or psychologist, and you’re not seeing or feeling results, I hear you. It can take time. That’s normal. Something is happening. You’re just not noticing it yet, because it’s subtle.
So be kind to yourself. Keep doing the good work.
And also, maybe take a break from healing for a bit and just have some fun. It’s summer. Go enjoy the sun. ☀️
🌱 If you’re struggling with your mental and emotional health, you’re not alone. I’m offering counselling sessions, and I’d be honoured to support you on your path. Reach out anytime 🙂 Contact me
