Why Healing Feels Harder Before It Gets Easier (And Why That's Actually Good)

You finally decided to do the work. You booked the session, started the therapy, committed to healing.

And now? You feel worse.

Old emotions are surfacing. Patterns you thought you'd moved past are suddenly front and center. You're crying more, sleeping less, and wondering if you made a terrible mistake.

Let me explain why.

Your Body Has Been Holding On

For years—maybe decades—your body has been storing everything you didn't have the safety or capacity to feel.

The grief you couldn't express. The anger you had to swallow. The fear you had to push down just to survive.

Your nervous system did its job: it kept you functional. It compartmentalized the pain so you could go to school, show up to work, take care of others.

But here's the thing about stored emotions: they don't disappear. They just wait.

And when you finally create a safe space to heal—through therapy, energy work, or any intentional practice—your body knows. It knows it's finally safe to release what's been buried.

Why It Gets Worse First

Think of healing like cleaning out a cluttered closet.

At first, the closet looks manageable from the outside. You can close the door, pretend everything's fine.

But when you open it to actually organize? Everything spills out. It looks like chaos. It looks worse than before you started.

That moment—when everything's on the floor—is terrifying. You want to shove it all back in and close the door.

But you can't reorganize a closet without first pulling everything out. And you can't heal what's buried without bringing it to the surface.

What This Looks Like in Real Life

Old patterns intensify. You find yourself people-pleasing even harder, or withdrawing more than usual. This isn't regression—it's your nervous system's last-ditch effort to maintain control before letting go.

Emotions come in waves. You cry in the car. Feel rage at random moments. Experience grief that seems disproportionate to the present. These aren't new emotions—they're old ones finally getting their turn.

You question everything. "Is this even working?" "Am I making it worse?" "Should I just stop?" This doubt is normal. Your mind is scared of change, even positive change.

This Is Actually Progress

Here's what most people don't tell you about healing: the difficult phase is evidence that something is shifting.

If nothing felt hard, nothing would be changing.

Your body is reorganizing. Your nervous system is recalibrating. The patterns that kept you "safe" (but stuck) are loosening their grip.

It feels like falling apart because, in a way, it is. The old version of you—the one who survived by staying small, staying silent, staying busy—is dissolving.

And the new version? She's not fully formed yet. You're in the in-between. The chrysalis stage. It's uncomfortable because transformation is uncomfortable.

How to Support Yourself Through This Phase

1. Lower Your Expectations

This is not the time to overhaul your life, launch a business, or solve all your problems.

Your job right now is to feel. To rest. To let your system process what's coming up. Give yourself permission to do less and be more.

2. Don't Numb What's Surfacing

The urge to scroll, drink, overwork, or distract yourself will be strong. I get it—feeling this much is overwhelming.

But numbing prolongs the process. The emotions will keep knocking until you let them in. You don't have to drown in them, but you do have to acknowledge them.

3. Lean Into Support

This is not the time to "tough it out" alone. Talk to your therapist. Check in with your healer. Call the friend who gets it.

Healing happens in connection. You don't have to white-knuckle your way through the hard parts.

4. Trust the Timeline

There's no "correct" timeline for this phase. For some people, it's weeks. For others, months.

What matters is that you keep going. The fact that it's hard doesn't mean it's not working. It means you're doing something most people avoid their entire lives: actually healing.

What's on the Other Side

I won't lie and tell you there's a finish line where you're "healed" forever. Healing is layered. Cyclical. You'll revisit things at deeper levels.

But what does shift—what makes this worth it—is how you relate to yourself.

You stop abandoning yourself when things get hard. You start trusting your body's signals. You recognize patterns before they run your life.

The emotions still come, but they move through you instead of getting stuck. You cry and then you breathe. You feel anger and then you release it.

You become someone who can hold their own pain without falling apart—and that changes everything.

You're Not Alone in This

If you're in the messy middle right now—if healing feels harder than you expected—I want you to know: you're not doing it wrong.

This is what real healing looks like. Not the Instagram version with aesthetic journal spreads and morning routines. The real version, where you cry in your car and wonder if it's worth it.

It is. I promise.

And you don't have to do it alone.