When Healing Feels Worse Than the Past

Understanding the spirals of healing—and why going “backwards” might actually mean you’re moving forward

Sometimes healing feels like going backwards. It isn’t. It’s a spiral.

Thank you for tuning in this month. Each month, I will be discussing the various phases of healing that you may come across in your journeys, with sprinkles of my own spirals of healing. Think of spirals as phases. The only differentiation is that spirals are phases of healing that feel like going backwards—like you’re re-experiencing something old; but instead of pulling you back in, they’re actually pulling you out and back into yourself. Healing doesn’t always feel like lightness, ease, or clarity. Sometimes it feels dense. Uncomfortable. Even painful. Unfamiliar. Discombobulating. Dissociative. Imbalanced. Sometimes it feels safer to stay outside of ourselves than it is to move back within.

This space is for those moments and for you—for those of you who find yourselves within the spiral. I will talk more in-depth about how to move through these spirals throughout the blog. For now, know this: Spirals can bring us further into ourselves in uncomfortable ways. Part of moving back inside of ourselves is turning towards the unfamiliar parts of ourselves—the parts that were once repressed and now feel unrecognizable. There are aspects of healing that can feel strikingly similar to trauma—complex, messy, nuanced, and painful. Healing does not always look like lightness or peace, but it still moves you toward them. Do not be discouraged by these similarities.

There are more spirals—and more phases of healing—than tri-phasic trauma treatment may suggest. In trauma work, healing is often described in three phases: safety, emotional processing, and integration. As a trauma-focused clinician, I am guided toward this framework. Spirals don’t replace this framework. They move within it. This is important to know, as it can be helpful to recognize that there are low points of healing, points that can often and consistently feel re-traumatizing. The difference between healing and trauma is that these low points help you reach yourself while trauma moves you toward only a refraction of that person. Trauma moves us further from ourselves and continues the cycle of anchoring into fragmentation as opposed to completion. And so, think of spirals as the low points of healing—yet still progressive junctures within it. They are part of what allows you to return to yourself—and fully arrive in the present.

Please take with you that, which resonates within my writing and leave what doesn’t. I have decided to start this blog because there are some experiences of human expression and healing that are extremely difficult to articulate. As a complex trauma and complex dissociation-focused clinician, I, too, feel these implicit experiences that are reflections of my own past showing up in the present. More often than not, what shows up now is what couldn’t be expressed before. Truthfully, it feels worse now. At least in the past, my nervous system protected against it. It is a new form of protection I suppose—protecting against the past by finally experiencing what once wanted to show up, only now in the present by having to feel all of it. Sometimes it feels like repetitions of the same thing. My body signaling me that it is now safe, by feeling the most unsafe I once felt, only in real time. Because it is finally safe to feel. What a concept. A paradoxical one, which is meant to chronicle the spirals of healing that you may be feeling, as well. These experiences are compacted into boxes that get checked off, but even in the most specialized of professional communities, are not characterized and spoken to in relatable ways. I am confident that in the long run, these internal experiences, those that are so hard to articulate, but, nevertheless, are such fragments of myself that are re-integrating, are falling back into place, and are a large part of healing, as they may be for you too. And so I feel that it is part of my calling to speak about them and normalize them.

I will keep this intro. short and sweet. Before I jump into specific spirals of healing, I will speak to the tri-phasic trauma treatment framework and the lenses that I look through in my practice. A little later in the blog, I will discuss the spirals, in depth, and how various spirals can make sense within these three overarching phases of healing (i.e., safety, emotional processing, post-traumatic integration), and how they may be showing up within the context of your own lives.

If you find yourself in the spiral, you’re not alone in it.

We’ll make sense of it—together. And so, food for thought for now…

Kindly,

—Sarah