When you don’t feel good, maybe because you are dealing with an emotional wound, maybe because you are ill, maybe because you are out of alignment, what you want is to feel good and to feel good asap. And you are living in an era of instant gratification, where many of the fast solutions that exist are all about fixes that make the pain to go away. For this reason, it can be both confusing and disheartening to hear that true healing (actual resolution for the problem itself) can make you feel worse, before you feel better. To understand this, let’s begin with one emotional/mental example and one physical example.
Meg is in distress in her life because she is not living the life that feels true to her. Not much fulfilling about it, part of which involves a painful marriage. She recognizes that many of her patterns in life and in her relationships, stem from her childhood experience. So, she decides it is time to actively start healing. In her childhood, she lived in a dysfunctional home where she was treated like a doll rather than a living being with her own wants, needs, preferences, aversions, feelings and thoughts etc. Her mother dressed Meg in whatever she wanted Meg to wear, only met Meg’s needs when she decided it was ok to have those needs, expected Meg to have the interests she wanted her to have, refused to recognize any boundaries and ignored Meg completely when she behaved anything less than sweet. Meg had to abandon her sense of self to conform to her mother. She learned that this was the way to stay safe and have any chance at getting her needs met. Now fast forward. Meg, having adapted to her trauma, has chosen a life for herself that is a direct byproduct of those adaptations. The husband she chose. The life focus she chose. The friends she has. The way she dresses. Where she lives, everything.
When she starts using processes to heal, Meg has to really see the reality of what was not ok about her childhood, and feel that pain that she has been suppressing, ignoring, denying and avoiding. Going through this process, she has to change some of her own patterns, the ones that kept her safe before. As a result, she feels really afraid and unsafe often. Going through this process, she feels worse and worse towards the life she is living. She chose to marry a man who, just like her mother, expects her to be a doll. Nothing more than what he wants and expects her to be. She has less and less tolerance for her marriage. She suddenly isn’t ok with the things she used to act like she was ok with. She starts demanding change in her marriage. And her husband does not react well to this. He reacts badly and marital conflict ensues. She has after all presented herself as one thing, only to begin changing into someone else, maybe someone he would not have wanted to marry in the first place. So, Meg is headed towards a divorce. When she is going through a process like this as a result of healing, it doesn’t feel good. It is necessary, but Meg often doubts whether what she is doing is right because some of this process feels so bad. But as you can see from this example, things that are objectively right and good for someone don’t always feel “good”. Meg’s life is improving. She is starting to feel like she has a core. She is holding healthy boundaries for herself in life. She is changing detrimental patterns. She has defined her values and is starting to feel more and more fulfilled by living in alignment with them. She is feeling better now. But things definitely seemed to get worse before they got better.
Mike is an avid mountain biker who gets into a really severe crash, resulting in a dislocated shoulder that crushed the primary nerve running down his right arm. Immediately after the injury, Mike feels no pain in his arm or hand. However, his arm is pretty useless. He cannot grip his handlebars or feel the touch of his fingers. After a month of rest and physical therapy, the nerve begins to regenerate. Suddenly, Mike wakes up one morning in agony. His arm is not numb anymore. Instead, it feels like it is on fire. Over the next two weeks, he experiences random, shooting jolts down his arm when he moves. Extreme hypersensitivity. Even a soft cotton shirt brushing his skin feels like sandpaper. And he has a constant pins and needles sensation.
Mike panics. He thinks his arm is getting worse or that the therapy is destroying his tissue. But the reality is that he is healing. If the nerve were dying, Mike would feel absolutely nothing.
The burning and other painful sensations are the first successful signals making it through the repaired nerve highway so to speak. Very slowly the sensations dissipate and Mike regains normal sensation and full strength in his arm and hand.
On a physical level, you are aware of the concept of pain killers. The benefits of pain killers go without saying. But there is a downside to them if they are used in the wrong situations or the wrong ways. On a mental/emotional level, there are also many methods, processes, practices and fixes that simply make the pain go away. But pain exists for a reason. Pain is full of information. Pain is the indication that something needs to be paid attention to, known, done or changed so a person can come back into alignment with wellbeing. For example, the pain of touching a hot stove is calling you to remove your hand. If you could not feel the pain, you would leave your hand on the stove and burn it completely. One of the objectives of healing is usually to get to a state that is pain free. But if it were as simple as whatever decreases the pain IS healing, then anything which makes pain go away would be the answer. Things that just make the pain go away are not necessarily healing. And things that are healing don’t necessarily just make the pain go away. This is something that the self-help, personal growth, psychology and spiritual field has got to start getting and accepting. If you want to learn more about this, you can watch my video titled: Novocain Spirituality.
There are several reasons why true healing can make you feel worse before it makes you feel better.
*As we saw in the examples I previously gave, healing may imply a physical process that causes pain signals in the body to increase.
*Healing uses a lot of energy. Your body directs its resources inward to fix deep issues and this can leave you feeling depleted, tired, achy, or mentally foggy.
*When the body is injured or infected, the body initiates a massive inflammatory response. This is an aggressive push towards healing, but it is notoriously painful.
*As is so common with detoxing or fighting a massive bacterial or fungal infection, treating the illness can initially make you feel like you are dying.
*For years, you may have used unhealthy habits to keep your life stable. For example: People-pleasing to avoid conflict, perfectionism to outrun anxiety, or emotionally numbing out with alcohol to survive a painful environment. When you decide to heal and drop these behaviors, the underlying anxiety, grief, or anger that you were running from suddenly floods your system. You may go into withdrawals. You aren't getting worse; you are finally making actual positive change.
*Healing may imply changing adaptive patterns that you adopted so as to stay safe and letting go of or changing those by definition makes you feel unsafe.
*To heal, you may need to make changes that the people in your life are not on board with. This creates instability and insecurity in relationships. Sometimes outright conflicts and even relationship loss. This doesn’t feel good.
*In order to heal, you may need to let go of core beliefs. But you built your whole life on the premise that those things you believed were true. Changing a belief causes you to land squarely in what is wrong about your perception, the things you decided, the ways you behaved and the things you did (or are still doing). The realities you may need to wake up to in the absence of that belief can be terrible to wake up to. Your life that you have already built only really makes sense WITH those beliefs you are now undoing. So, it can be profoundly disorienting and deeply painful.
*Numbing fades. When you start really healing, you often let go of all the tactics you were using to numb the pain. When you finally stop doing that, what you were numbing out before comes rushing to the surface.
*Safety can often trigger a release of pain. Sometimes, your body only allows you to access painful un-healed memories, feel what is really going on with you, grieve or be exhausted when it finally believes it is safe enough to do so. Technically, you are in an improved state of being, because you are safe. But when this happens, it doesn’t feel better. It feels worse.
*When you become more and more aware, technically you are improving and progressing. Awareness is the necessary agent for change. But awareness can make things feel way worse. Not because things are getting worse, but because you are becoming aware of how bad certain things actually are.
The moral of the story is, when you are going through a healing process, sometimes, it doesn’t feel good. It will be an improvement, but it sure may not feel like that when you are in the middle of it.
