Guided meditation mentioned in this video: Sensational Awareness

Hello, Beautiful Souls.

I want to tell you a little bit about why is it when we’re healing, that things get worse instead of better—or rather, why they get worse before they get better.

This happens really consistently in my personal healing work, and when I’m working with clients. It happens so often, and it’s so unexpected and disorienting, that it’s worth talking about.


THE HOW

So, what’s actually happening?
And why is it that things get worse before they get better when we’re healing?

The short answer is: actually, they don’t get worse.

The more complete answer is that, it’s not getting worse, it’s that we’re finally noticing what’s been here all along… Let me explain. Basically, what happens is that when we have something bad happen, like a trauma, it’s too much to deal with. We process what we can, we do what we can, we feel what we can, we experience what we can… and the rest of it we hold on to- we camp it out somewhere in our system.

We can hold it in the physical body; we can experience it as a physical structure, restriction or even illness in our body. We can also put it out in our field—in the subtle energy field that envelopes and interweaves our physical body.

So that’s what happens when we experience trauma. We’ve got some part of an experience, whatever we weren’t able to process at the time, stored somewhere in our field (physical or subtle).

THE WHY

Then, so that we don’t accidentally stumble upon it and—oops!—start feeling that unprocessed experience out of the blue one day, we do things to ignore it. I think of them as detour signs: “Danger! Don’t go this way! Go another way!!!” And most of us do one of three things to when we start getting close, one of these detours: fight, flight, or freeze.

You’ll probably recognize yourself in one of these… Most of us, when we start moving towards that pain, either get really angry and start fighting, or we get really antsy and start fleeing, or we go numb and start zoning out.

Those are really helpful because that keeps us from accidentally feeling this thing when we’re not ready, when we’re not feeling safe. So, when we get to that space where, “Okay, I’m ready to heal this. I’m ready to process what I couldn’t handle before. I’m ready to feel what I couldn’t feel,” now we stop doing all these things. We stop doing the running, the fleeing, and/or the numbing.
We actually turn our attention towards the thing instead of away from it.

Now we allow ourselves to actually feel what’s here.
And guess what? It really sucks. It feels bad.
We go from not feeling what’s here to feeling what’s here.
And so it feels like it gets worse.
It feels like we didn’t have this pain, this suffering, this horrible thing before- and now that we’re trying to heal, now we have this awful feeling.

The worst part is that we can think we’re doing something wrong! “If I’m healing, aren’t I supposed to be getting better? So, if I’m feeling worse I must not be healing!”

Yes and no.

Understand, that at these moments of the healing process- where you’re actually slowing down, you’re feeling safe enough, and you’re turning towards the thing, you’re feeling the thing that’s always been here for the first time—now you’re going to feel worse.

That’s most of what happens. The next part, once you’ve been strong enough to make it here, is that as you start feeling it, and uncovering it, you allow it to—I don’t know what really happens, but to me it feels like it expands… It actually gets bigger… It does get worse in the sense that it was more compressed before and now it can breathe and expand and unpack and unfold and bloom. And that is a bit worse.

But not much.

Most of the “getting worse” is us just facing it and actually feeling what’s here. In any and all cases, 100% of it was already here. So, we’re not actually making it worse in the sense that we’ve already been living with this thing.

It’s kind of like lancing a boil: I’ve already had this infection. I’ve already been living with it, carrying it, and my system has been dealing with it. What I’m doing now is I’m letting it out, and letting it go. And it’s kind of icky and doesn’t feel great when that happens. It’s not very nice in that sense. On the other hand, once you let it go, it’s so much easier. Now your system doesn’t have to spend so much energy holding it in and ignoring it, however you are ignoring it.

This, my friends, is why we feel worse before we feel better. We’ve been so good at detouring around the pain, that when we turn to face it, it feels new. It feels unexpected.

You’ve likely experienced this before, and next time it happens, you can remember that this is sometimes part of the healing process… and that if it were easy and felt good, you wouldn’t have needed to detour around it all this time…

Take heart. At this stage, even if they feel worse at first, things are getting better.

I hope that helps.
Elena