The Healing Trap
One of the first paradoxes I needed to see before anything could truly change was that the moment I began speaking about healing, I had also accepted the idea that something in me was broken. To need healing always means, consciously or not, starting from the assumption that something is wrong. And once that starting point is set, life begins to be lived from within it.
What is striking is that this can happen even when, in practice, things are functioning quite well. One can feel relatively healthy, have a life that works, and still carry a constant sense that something needs to be fixed. Healing relationships. Healing childhood. Healing the body. Healing wounds around money, self-worth, the nervous system. There is always something left undone, something not yet whole. Healing is placed in the future rather than in the present, and for many it becomes not just something one does, but a way of living. A constant state of healing, as if something is fundamentally wrong, and as if one never quite arrives anywhere. And if one does, the relief is often brief, because the search soon begins again in a new area. It becomes a kind of hamster wheel.
Healing touches so many areas of life that it easily becomes an endless task. Even thinking about it can feel exhausting.
I have lived inside this way of understanding myself. It has not always been so. There have been periods in my life when I did not walk around feeling broken or in need of repair, but rather felt that life was actually quite good. Yet for a long time, healing became the lens through which I understood myself and my life. I labeled what had been difficult and concluded that it therefore needed to be healed. It sounded reasonable, even responsible. At the same time, it placed me in a position where the underlying assumption was always that something in me was still not as it should be.
This is where the healing trap begins to take shape. When life is understood as a continuous process of healing, on every level—physical, emotional, mental, relational—it becomes easy to slip into a state where health is always positioned ahead of us. Something to be achieved, rather than something we can begin from. Healing is projected into the future. When I understand more. When I have processed enough. When I have done the right things for long enough.
But what happens if we turn the perspective around?
What happens if healing does not begin with the assumption of illness, but with the assumption of wholeness. Whether we are speaking about the body, childhood, relationships, or money. Not as a denial of pain, but as a deeper orientation. The paradox is that as long as one experiences oneself as sick or unhealed in some area, even subtly, healing is also pushed further away. It becomes something not yet available. And the more effort is invested in reaching it, the more distant it can sometimes feel.
This may sound provocative, especially when speaking about actual physical illness. Of course there are conditions where the body is damaged, where something is not functioning as it should, where medical intervention is necessary. Sometimes a bone needs to be fixed with a screw, or a wound stitched to allow the body to recover. That is not what is being questioned here. What is being questioned is the deeper story we live inside. Whether we fundamentally experience ourselves as sick individuals who must become healthy, or as whole beings who are currently experiencing illness. And this does not apply only to physical or psychological disease, but to every area where we perceive something as broken and in need of repair.
The difference is greater than it appears. When we are able to sense a feeling of wholeness, even in the midst of illness or fragmentation, something else becomes possible. Healing is no longer something that lies ahead of us, but something that can occur here and now. Not because symptoms necessarily disappear immediately, but because our relationship to them changes. And it is often there that the real movement takes place.
We are taught to believe that healing must come afterward. First we are sick, then we become healthy. First something is wrong, then it is fixed. In practice, this often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. We live in a constant loop of searching for the next thing that needs to be healed. And when something finally feels better, the same pattern often appears again, in a new form, in a different area, as if we never quite reached the root.
Perhaps the root is precisely this belief, that something is fundamentally wrong.
In modern society, healing has also become an entire system. A language. An industry. An identity. We are meant to heal ourselves through the right methods, the right routines, the right choices. Infrared saunas. Eliminated foods. Optimized training. Therapy. Treatments. Programs. I am not saying these things have no value. Many of them can be supportive, sometimes even crucial. But when they are layered on top of one another, healing easily becomes a full-time job, something that must be done correctly in order not to remain unhealed.
Being unhealed has become a massive business. Imagine if most people walked around feeling reasonably whole in what is, rather than constantly searching for the next solution. The striving, the searching, the chasing form a profitable cycle that creates both dependency and insecurity, often unnecessarily. Imagine if we had used different words. If we did not call ourselves broken, but whole. Or at least said: I have my wounds, and they are allowed to sit at the table. They do not need to be cast out as a dark monster in the closet that must be healed away.
Here another paradox appears. Healing begins to create stress.
There is little conversation about how exhausting it can be to constantly work on oneself from the assumption of being broken and in need of repair. To continuously scan the body, the psyche, and life itself for signs that something is still not as it should be. To grow tired from trying to become whole. The moment healing turns into a requirement, it also becomes pressure, a responsibility that never quite releases its grip.
One begins to look for faults. In the body. In weight. In energy. In motivation. In how one lives in relation to what is considered healthy, normal, or optimal. There is a harsh, often unconscious judgment about what is the right and wrong way to be human. And that judgment is not only directed outward, but perhaps most of all inward.
The same pattern appears in the increasing reliance on external systems for healing. Someone else is meant to fix us. A new treatment. A new diagnosis. A new medication. Again, this is not a denial that help is sometimes necessary. But as long as healing is experienced as something outside of ourselves, it remains dependent on external solutions. Solutions that may provide temporary relief, but rarely touch the deeper cause.
At a deeper level, none of us are broken. We are whole, but we have been taught to believe that something is wrong with us.
It is easier to say something is genetic than to see how lifestyle, stress, environment, and inner relationship interact. It is easier to take shortcuts than to remain with what is uncomfortable. And often this is entirely understandable. We are tired. We want relief. But the price we pay is that healing is moved further away from ourselves than it ever needed to be. The moment we realize that nothing was fundamentally broken, the entire landscape changes. This does not mean pain disappears, or that we stop caring for ourselves. It means the starting point shifts. From trying to become whole, to living from a wholeness that already exists, even when it is wounded, tired, or ill.
Perhaps this is the most radical idea in this entire chapter. That healing does not lie in the future. That it does not require ten steps in the morning and ten steps at night. That it does not demand that we first become someone other than who we are. But that it becomes possible in the very moment we stop living as if something essential is wrong.
When judgment softens. When comparison loosens its grip. When we no longer measure ourselves against other people’s definitions of health and normality. Life does not become less complex, but it becomes less strained. And perhaps it is only then that healing, in its deeper sense, is finally allowed to take place.