There’s something I finally admitted to myself this week, and it’s been sitting with me in a very real way. I was talking to an old friend, just catching up, and somehow the conversation drifted to those healing programs I once did in church. You know the ones—full of emotion, full of breakdowns, full of promises that this time, this round, this session, you’ll walk out free.
I remember doing the program, feeling cracked open, and then being asked to come back and facilitate for others. Then you join the “community” of people who’ve also done the program. Before you know it, you’re completely entangled in that world, convinced that this ongoing involvement means you’re becoming stronger. But my friend said something that stopped me cold. She told me that these spaces don’t thrive when you truly heal. They thrive when you stay traumatised, even quietly so. That heaviness becomes the glue. It keeps you coming back to facilitate, to serve, to belong. And it keeps the system running.
I had never seen it that way. I thought they were helping people deal with the pain. I honestly believed that the intention was healing. But once she laid it out, it was like a film being peeled off my eyes. If you truly healed—if your body was light and your mind was steady—they would lose you. You would outgrow that world. So the trauma is stirred, revisited, recycled, and wrapped as “breakthroughs,” but never actually released.
The more I sat with that, the more it made sense. Even traditional therapy can fall into that loop sometimes. You go in for 45 minutes, talk through your pain, feel emotionally wrung out, and then leave with nothing actually shifted inside you. You keep returning week after week, hoping for that moment of real relief. It’s not that therapy is bad—it’s just that talking alone doesn’t always move the trauma out of your body. The cycle continues, and you stay stuck between awareness and exhaustion.
My friend, bless her heart, didn’t let me sit in analysis. She gave me two full hours of real work. We found the place where I’d been holding the pain, and she sent me off with simple things I could actually do—things that helped release that weight from my nerves and muscles, not just my thoughts. I walked away lighter. Not “motivated.” Not “inspired.” Just genuinely lighter. And that’s when I realised: this is what healing should feel like. It should move. It should shift something inside you. Your body should know it happened.
I remembered reading Adler and thinking, “This is what he was trying to tell us.” That healing isn’t endless analysis or staying in spaces that keep you tied to the wound. It’s reclaiming your ability to move forward, to feel capable again, to stop circling the same emotional drain.
This new understanding shook me, but in a good way. It reminded me that healing isn’t meant to trap you in a room for years. Real healing frees you. It lets you walk away without looking back. It leaves your body calmer and your mind clearer. And it’s frightening how easy it is to confuse emotional intensity with actual recovery.
I think I finally see the difference now. And it’s changing how I understand myself—how I release, how I rebuild, and how I protect my mind from places that offer comfort but quietly hold onto my pain.
Maybe that’s the real turning point: choosing healing that loosens the grip instead of tightening it. Choosing methods that return you to yourself, not systems that keep you small. Choosing movement over memory.
And choosing to walk out of spaces that were never designed to set you free.