Healing is not a straight line

Have you ever felt you were doing so well, lighter, freer, further along, only to wake one grey morning back in the old heaviness, as if none of the progress had happened at all? If so, I want to tell you something that took me years to believe: you have not gone backwards. You are healing exactly as healing actually works.

We are sold a tidy story about getting better. A steady climb, each day a little brighter than the last, until one morning you arrive, fixed and finished, at the top. It is a lovely story. It is also completely untrue, and believing it causes a particular kind of suffering, because when the hard day inevitably returns, we conclude we have failed.

Healing is not a straight line. It is a spiral. You come back to the same feelings, the same wounds, the same lessons, again and again. But here is the part that changes everything: you do not come back to the same place. Each time round the spiral you meet the old pain from a little higher up, with a little more capacity, a little more kindness, a little more of the wisdom the last round taught you. It looks like a circle. It is actually an ascent.

There is a phrase in the trauma world that I hold onto: what is hysterical is historical. The disproportionate reaction, the wave that arrives out of nowhere, is usually old material surfacing because you are finally safe enough to feel it. That is not deterioration. That is your system trusting you, at last, with what it once had to bury.

So how do you walk a spiral without losing heart? First, you throw out the calendar. Healing does not run to a schedule, and “I should be over this by now” is a sentence that only adds shame to pain. There is no by-now. There is only the pace your particular nervous system can bear, and that pace is not up for negotiation.

Second, you measure differently. Not “do I still feel this”, because you may, but “how do I meet it when it comes?” The wound may still ache. The question is whether you now bring maitri (loving-kindness) to it rather than judgement, whether you can hold the hard day with a hand on your heart rather than a fist. That, not the absence of pain, is the real marker of healing.

And third, you let yourself be held. Spirals are not meant to be walked alone. A good friend, a sangha (community), a coach, someone who can remind you, on the grey morning, of the higher ground you cannot see from inside the dip.

If today is a hard day, and you thought you were past this, please be gentle with yourself. You are not back at the start. You are further round the spiral than you can feel. Keep going, kindly. The direction is up, even when the day is down.