Myth: “Healing will make my relationships better”

What if healing doesn’t deliver what you’ve always hoped relationships would give you?

A common belief is that healing naturally improves our relationships. That as we become more aware, more honest, more healed, connection will deepen in the ways we’ve quietly hoped for.

Often, this belief is rooted in a familiar defense strategy: magical thinking.

Magical thinking develops early. It reflects a young mind blending fantasy and reality, creating hope, in the absence of power or control. In childhood, this strategy is an attempt to preserve attachment and meaning in situations that feel overwhelming. In adulthood, it often travels with us into our relationships and into therapy.

What Healing Actually Offers

What healing actually offers is not control over others, but access to choice. With compassionate awareness, we begin to see what has not previously been witnessed. In that witnessing, our survival patterns become visible, along with the identities that were created to survive. Slowly, we gain the ability to pause, to attend to our inner world, and to respond differently.

Choices that were technically present but inaccessible begin to come into view. Over time and with lots of practice, we begin to distinguish between options shaped by survival and options that support healing. These new healing choices can be activating for others. When the people in our lives are engaged in their own work, there is often more room to meet one another in this shift. When they remain organized around their own survival strategies, the distance can widen.

This is where we come face to face with our hopes, the magical thinking that may have previously been hidden. 

The choices we make do impact relationships, starting with the relationship with ourselves. When we stop over-adapting, appeasing, reacting, or staying silent (all those survival patterns), the relational field shifts. In choosing differently, we stop abandoning ourselves in the hope that the “other” will be for us the way we have not been.

This is initially frightening because it brings us into contact with what once felt unbearable in our earliest relationships. Healing requires seeing how self-abandonment keeps us organized around survival. The fear that emerges here, often the fear of abandonment, can feel enormous. And yet, it is only by meeting this fear directly that it loosens its hold.

Healing also asks us to see how our survival strategies impact the people in our lives. Relationships are co-created, shaped by the interaction between two nervous systems, two histories, two sets of defenses, along with all the traits that once drew us together.

When we cling to the hope that our healing will result in someone else behaving differently, disappointment is sure to follow because we just don’t know. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. But the odds are that they won’t, at least some of the time. And when they do not, what arises is precisely what needs our attention. As Ashwini Narayanan reminds us,

“We cannot transcend what we do not encounter.”

The myth isn’t that healing doesn’t affect relationships.
The myth is that our healing will turn longing into reciprocity.

And the grief that follows the loss of that belief deserves attention and compassion, not correction.

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

Pause here, breathe into what this means for you, notice what arises, and stay with your own experience for a moment.