The Hidden Struggles of Healing: Why It’s Harder Than It Looks
The Messy Truth About Healing: Progress, Setbacks, and Choosing to Keep Going
Hello, I’m Jenn and if you are new here, welcome to Naturally Healing. This space is where I explore mindful, slow living for wellbeing and celebrate the power of nature to help us heal and thrive. This Stack is about embracing the messy, imperfect journey of healing. It’s about the setbacks, the struggles, and the strength it takes to keep climbing out of old patterns. Healing isn’t easy, but it’s worth it—and we’re in this together. Thank you for reading. 🤎
Healing is a word that gets thrown around a lot. It’s become a buzzword in wellness circles, Instagram captions, and self-help books. “Practice self-care.” “Repeat affirmations.” “Focus on your growth.” These phrases sound good in theory, and they’re often well-meaning, but they barely scratch the surface of what healing really looks like.
Here’s the truth no one tells you: healing is messy. It’s not a linear journey or a checklist of habits you can adopt overnight. It’s confronting the parts of yourself you’ve spent years trying to avoid. It’s feeling the emotions you’ve buried, admitting truths you’ve denied, and unlearning patterns that have felt like second nature. And sometimes, it’s falling back into those same patterns, no matter how much work you’ve done.
Falling Back Into Old Patterns
The hardest part of healing is how easy it is to slip back into old ways of thinking or behaving. You can have weeks, even months, where you feel like you’re making progress—feeling lighter, stronger, more “healed.” Then, one small trigger or one particularly bad day can pull you back into a place you thought you’d left behind.
And when that happens, the voice of self-doubt creeps in. Why am I still struggling with this? Shouldn’t I be past this by now? Am I even healing at all?
This is where the work really happens. Because healing isn’t about avoiding those setbacks; it’s about how you respond to them. It’s about reminding yourself that falling down doesn’t erase all the progress you’ve made. It’s about choosing—over and over again—to climb out of that dark place, even when it feels impossibly hard.
The Exhausting Reality of Confronting Pain
What people often don’t realise is that true healing involves confronting your deepest wounds. It’s not just bubble baths and gratitude journals, as lovely as those things can be. It’s sitting with your pain and understanding where it came from. It’s looking at yourself in the mirror and facing the parts of you that feel broken or unworthy.
And that process is exhausting. Some days, it feels like you’re carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders. Other days, you might not even have the energy to get out of bed. Healing asks everything of you—and then some.
What Healing Really Looks Like
Healing isn’t glamorous. It’s not Instagrammable. It’s late-night crying sessions, hard conversations, and moments where you wonder if it’s all worth it. But it’s also the tiny victories that no one else sees:
Saying no to something that drains you, even though it feels uncomfortable.
Catching yourself before you fall too far into an old pattern.
Letting yourself feel joy without guilt, even if it’s fleeting.
Healing looks like progress, setbacks, and progress again. It’s not a destination; it’s a lifelong journey.
Give Yourself Grace
If you’re on a healing journey, remember this: it’s okay to fall back into old patterns sometimes. It doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It doesn’t mean you’re not healing. It means you’re human.
Every time you choose to keep going—no matter how messy, hard, or imperfect that looks—you’re healing. And that, in itself, is worth celebrating.
So, let’s stop pretending healing is easy. Let’s stop glossing over the hard parts. Because the hard parts are where the real growth happens. And if you’re willing to face them, you’re already stronger than you think.
Take care,
Jenn x
This piece beautifully captures the messy and non-linear nature of healing. I really appreciate how you highlight the truth that healing isn’t about avoiding setbacks but about how we respond to them. It’s easy to feel discouraged when we slip back into old patterns, but your reminder that these setbacks don’t erase our progress is so important. Healing is so much more than self-care routines or affirmations—it’s about facing our pain head-on and choosing to move through it, even when it feels impossible. The tiny victories you mention are what make all the difference in the long run. Thank you for sharing such an honest and relatable perspective on the healing journey! 💛
Beautifully written. It is not easy. Even the decision to begin is not easy. It is worth it. We are younger today than we will ever be again and each day is a day closer to taking back our calm nature.