Healing Myth: “If things feel worse, healing isn’t working”

One of the most painful myths about healing is the belief that feeling worse means something has gone wrong.

That increased distress, emotional intensity, or instability signals failure, regression, or a wrong turn..

Why Feeling Worse Is Often Misunderstood in Healing

This belief makes sense in a culture that equates healing with symptom reduction and visible improvement. But trauma work rarely unfolds in a straight line.

As awareness grows, what was once managed through dissociation, numbing, or adaptation begins to come into contact with consciousness. Sensations, emotions, and memories that were previously buffered or held at a distance may come forward. Not because healing has failed, but because the system is no longer working as hard to keep them out of view.

The Role of Witnessing in Trauma Healing

This process often unfolds in the presence of a safe witness. Through the therapeutic relationship, new associations of safety begin to form. I can look at this and survive. I can feel these sensations and nothing terrible happens. I can share what I once believed was shameful or unacceptable and remain connected. I am believed. I do matter.

These experiences matter. They slowly teach the nervous system that what once signaled danger no longer does, or that if danger is present, we can now show up for ourselves and take appropriate steps.

Over time, this can allow an internal sense of safety to develop. Not safety because nothing difficult arises, but safety because we are no longer alone with what arises. Eventually, this may become a quiet knowing: I am safe with me.

When this internal trust is still forming, healing can feel worse rather than better. For many people, distress and intensity are tightly associated with danger, because at one point in their lives that association was accurate. Unpleasant sensations were not just uncomfortable, they were unsafe.

Some people have survived by organizing their lives around genuinely unsafe relationships or environments. Others are surrounded by people who are not dangerous, but whose own survival strategies can still feel destabilizing. In both cases, the nervous system may respond as if threat is present, even when harm is not.

What can feel like “falling apart” is often the loosening of protective strategies that once made survival possible. When those strategies soften, the nervous system has to reorganize. This period can be disorienting, exhausting, and frightening.

Feeling worse does not necessarily mean more damage.
It often means more access.

There is a type of bamboo that spends years developing an extensive underground root system before any visible growth appears above the surface. For a long time, it can look as though nothing is happening. And then, once the foundation is in place, growth occurs rapidly.

Healing often unfolds this way. Much of the work happens beneath awareness, in the nervous system, in new associations of safety, in the slow strengthening of internal support. Behavior, as I often remind clients, is the last thing to change. When we measure healing only by what we can see, we risk missing the depth of what is actually taking root.

This is one of the places people feel most unprepared. They expect healing to bring relief, not intensity. Clarity, not confusion. And when grief, anger, fear, or despair arise, they conclude that something must be wrong.

But symptoms are not the enemy. They are information. They point to where attention is needed, where care was missing, and where something has been waiting to be acknowledged. When we rush to eliminate symptoms without understanding what they are protecting, we risk reinforcing the very patterns we are trying to heal.

Healing does not mean we no longer struggle. It means we relate differently to what arises. We develop the capacity to stay present with discomfort, to orient toward compassion rather than judgment, and to recognize that intensity does not equal danger.

Over time, this changes our relationship with suffering. Not by erasing it, but by making it less organizing.

Healing as the Capacity to Stay

The myth isn’t that healing brings relief.
The myth is that relief is the measure of healing.

Sometimes healing feels like stabilization.
Sometimes it feels like unraveling.
Both can be signs of movement.

Healing is not about getting somewhere else. It is about being able to stay, right here, right now, with you, just as you are.