Modern Healing Culture (Are We Ever Truly "Healed")?

This week, we're getting honest about the shadow side of healing culture, and what happens when your healing journey starts to look a lot like another achievement project.

Whether you're...

• Someone who can name every wound, pattern, and attachment style but still finds yourself reacting the same way
• A perfectionist who's turned self-awareness into self-surveillance, or 
• A deep feeler who's starting to wonder if getting triggered again means you went backwards

... this episode will give you both the reframe and the relief you didn't know you needed.

We're diving into:

• Why naming the wound isn't the same as resolving it
• The difference between self-awareness and self-surveillance
• Why real healing happens in relationships and conflict, not in the quiet solace
• What retreats and curated wellness spaces can and can't actually do
• Why capacity is a more honest measure of healing than untouchability
• What it looks like to be inside an emotion and still feel grounded

The Energy Xchange is a podcast for highly sensitive people (HSPs), empaths, INFJs, and deep feelers navigating relationships, business, and personal growth.

Work with me:
If this episode is bringing something up worth exploring, I'd love to connect. Visit JustOneWoo.com or find me on Instagram at @the.energy.xchange.

Links & Resources For This Episode:

• Subscribe to my Weekly Newsletter
• Visit My Website
• Book a Storyboarding Session (for Business Owners)
• Book a Marketing Audit (Website/Messaging/Digital Presence)
• Get the Book: The Empath Detox
• The Get The Empath Detox Oracle Deck

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the Energy Exchange, a podcast for deep feelers and quiet leaders. Here, we explore what happens when we start working with our natural energy in both our business and personal lives. I'm Colleen Wallach. I'm a highly sensitive professional who spends years untangling patterns of overthinking, people pleasing, and playing small just to feel safe. Now, I help others like me step more fully into their power without losing the superpower of their softness. We don't have to be allowed to be seen, and we don't have to push to be powerful. Everything is energy. Let's start this exchange. Welcome into this week's episode of the Energy Exchange. Today I want to talk about healing culture. I think it's really cool that we have so much language now around healing, you know, nervous system regulation, attachment styles, childhood wounds, triggers, all of these things that help us understand ourselves and how we show up. We are, I think, collectively becoming more emotionally aware and much more open to recognizing why we show up the way we do and what parts of us might be contributing to the things that we say we don't want anymore in our lives. That awareness is important, but there's a shadow side to the modern healing space where healing can become another achievement project. And if you are a perfectionist, if you struggle with imposter syndrome, or if you already carry this feeling that you're not doing enough, your healing journey can start to amplify all of that. And trust me, I am all for healing. I have receipts for all of it: retreats, online courses, uh, throw in a few past life regressions, life path astrology stuff. You name it, I've done it or I've thought about doing it. All with the hope of understanding myself better and becoming a more healed, confident version of myself. But it can have us feeling like we always need to be working on something. And then after spending a lot of time working on a pattern or a wound or a trigger, if you get activated again, it can feel like proof that you still have more work to do. So now you're not just having an emotional response, you're measuring it. You're asking, what does this mean? Did I go backwards? Why is this still bothering me? And it creates this self-monitoring of where we sit on the scale of healed versus unhealed. So that's what I want to talk about today because I feel we've started treating healing like it means we should eventually become untouchable. If we do enough work, nothing will steer us off our path, nothing will affect us, and we'll never get activated by the same things again. But that seems impossible. Healing for me has become much more about capacity. That feels like a more honest conversation and more rooted in the reality of how life will show up for us. And here's where I think it gets sneaky. And I alluded to this in the opening, but healing can become another achievement project if we're not careful. And this is especially true for people who already tend to turn everything into proof of whether they're doing well enough. And if you have that perfectionist streak, if you feel like you should be further along by now, the healing space can give you endless material. There's always something to work on, another wound to uncover, another pattern to name, another nervous system response to regulate. Naming the wound doesn't mean you're doing the work to resolve it. And this is where a lot of us get stuck because we can explain ourselves really well. Oh, that's my attachment style. That's my trauma response. That's my childhood wound, or this is why I shut down. All of that might be true, but knowing what the pattern is doesn't automatically mean the pattern's changed. Knowing why you shut down doesn't mean you can stay open. Knowing why you people please doesn't mean you can tolerate disappointing someone. Knowing why you get activated does not mean you can stay grounded when the activation happens. There's work to do. I have personally found a lot of validity in that language for myself. Sometimes having a name for something is the first time you can actually see it clearly. But I do think there's a point where the healing work can start to feel like a treadmill, like you're always supposed to be getting better, becoming more aware, more regulated, more healed. And then when the thing comes up again, when we get triggered again, or when we react in a way that we thought we had outgrown, it can feel like, well, shit, I guess I'm not healed from this. And that's where healing culture can get a little weaponized. Like we do that to ourselves because we're no longer just feeling the feeling, we're evaluating the feeling. We're not just triggered, we're judging ourselves for being triggered. We're now making that emotional response mean something about our progress or our maturity. And it's tricky because it sounds like self-awareness, but it is a little bit of that perfectionism. It's still that same internal pressure, just dressed up in softer language. Instead of, you know, what's wrong with me? It becomes, what wound is this and why haven't I resolved it yet? And we have to be honest about that because there is a difference between self-awareness and constant self-monitoring. At some point, that doesn't create freedom, it creates more surveillance. And that's not the point of healing. One thing that I find really interesting about healing is that it's easy to think that because you've removed yourself from a situation, maybe you've cut someone off, you moved to a new city, whatever you're doing. It's easy to think that you're healing. Real healing happens in relationship, it happens in the situations that are triggering you. So if you just leave them to the side, it's gonna come back around probably in another form. Right now you feel good because nothing is touching the wound. And all it takes is for some new environment or new person to activate the same thing. And all of a sudden, oh shit, here we are again. I love a retreat, I love solo travel, I love wellness spaces, programs, all the things. But sometimes those really highly curated environments create this temporary nervous system relief because nothing is touching the wound. You're in a beautiful place, you're eating nourishing food, you're away from your normal stressors. Nothing's disappointing you. Nothing's misunderstanding you, poking the old story, or asking anything hard of you. So, of course, you feel regulated. You feel clear, you're like, wow, I'm I'm working through this, I am healing. And again, I'm not mocking that. I think those spaces can be incredibly supportive. They give us room to breathe, help us hear ourselves. But removing the trigger is not the same thing as resolving the trigger. Isolation can be part of the process, space can be part of the process, rest is part of the process. But at some point, the thing gets tested in real life, in relationship, in conversation, in conflict for sure, and in disappointment. That's where we get to see what has actually changed. Can I say what I mean sooner? Can I stay present instead of disappearing? For me, this is the biggest one. Can I feel activated and still choose not to punish someone, fix something, overexplain, or completely shut down? For a very long time, that was my mode. Just completely shut down. Of all of the things I've ever done with the intention of healing, I don't think anything has helped me more than sticking around uncomfortable situations. I can name three or four, I won't name them, but I can think in my head of three or four people over the course of my life that are not in my life anymore. I have no reason for them to be in my life anymore, but they have been the most influential people for me when it comes to my healing. When it has come to me really having to do the work and dive deep and see my role in situations, because relationships are basically energy dynamics, right? There are two or more energies creating that dynamic. So, yes, some of the work happened in isolation, but the triggers happened in relationship. And what I couldn't heal within that relationship, what I took with me in my solo work, it showed up again in other relationships. Now I had more tools and I could work through it. And maybe it still wasn't quite there yet, and it'll show up again in another relationship, and it gets worked through a little more, and you just keep chipping away. So take the course, go on the retreat. There are lots of tools to be had that can create awareness around these things, maybe things that you want to dive deep into and understand more about yourself and how you show up in these dynamics. We have so many tools now that can help us make sense of things. We have language that can feel really validating. But awareness is not the same thing as integration. And then there's the bigger question: what are we even calling healed? What does that even mean? Does healing mean we're untouchable, that nothing can steer us off our path, that nothing can affect us? Does it mean that we'll never feel anxious, reactive, insecure, or disappointed again? That's not realistic. We're still in relationships, we're still moving through the world with histories and nervous systems and old stories and real current needs. I have found it helpful for me to think about healing as being more about capacity. When I find myself in that same spot again, how quickly do I recover from it? You know, can I stay in my body while I'm activated around that topic? Can I communicate more clearly much faster? Can I move through this altogether more quickly? And one of the biggest questions for me is can I hold a reality check while being in the emotions of the thing? We don't have to be stoic. We don't have to turn the emotion off. It's not about bypassing the feeling or becoming so evolved, and I'm using air quotes here, so evolved that you don't care. It's about being inside the emotion and still feeling grounded and rooted in your body at the same time. Some examples of what that could look like. Maybe it's saying, hey, this is bringing up something old for me, but I don't actually know the full story yet. Or I'm activated right now. So maybe this is not the moment to make a huge decision. You know, I don't need to send that eight-paragraph text or burn my entire life down right now. Let me pause. That's a much better indicator of healing than whether or not the feeling showed up in the first place. For me personally, I can think of situations that come up again and again, sometimes with the same people or in the same environments, where five, 10 years ago, I would have absolutely lost my shit. I would have been completely taken over by it, reacted very quickly, very emotionally, and probably from the most wounded part of myself. And now the same thing can happen. That same wound can still get touched, but my relationship to it is very different. I tend to resolve it a lot faster. I can communicate more clearly. I can hold both the reality check and the emotion. That wound might still exist, but my relationship to it is much cleaner now. Where I might have ruminated over it for weeks before, maybe it's a couple days. Maybe where it was a couple days before, it's an hour. I have more tools, more capacity. I can process it and move forward much more quickly. And for me, that's a huge win. And guys, that has to count, right? Because if we we can't dismiss, we can't dismiss our own progress because we're still affected. We think, well, if I were healed, this wouldn't bother me. Maybe there is some ultimate level of healing that allows for that. And it could come over time. But the fact that it's coming up for you again does not mean that you're not healing. Ask yourself, does this still run my entire life? Does it make me abandon myself? Does it make me act from panic? Does it take weeks to recover from this? Being able to feel it, name it, process it, reality check it, and come back to yourself sooner, that's not nothing. That is the work. But I don't know that there's ever a point where we say, I'm healed, I'm good to go. But a great question to ask is what is my capacity now? How quickly do I recover? Can I hold a reality check while being in the emotion of it? Can I feel the wound without letting it run the entire show? Or can I be activated about this without making that mean that I'm back at square one, as though I haven't done any work on myself? Healing does not mean that you won't get triggered again, or that nothing will ever affect you. It doesn't mean you become this untouchable, perfectly regulated person who just floats above the human experience, although a lot of people would like you to think that that's what's happening for them. It might just mean that the wound isn't as deep, or that you have better tools, or that you recover in hours instead of days, days instead of weeks. It might mean you can process and move forward more quickly. All of those are huge wins. So when something old comes up again, the first question doesn't need to be why am I not healed from this? It's how am I relating to this differently now? The activation coming back does not mean that your work failed. It just means you're getting another chance to practice the work in real time. And that's what healing actually is: not becoming untouchable, but becoming more capable of staying with yourself when something touches the wound. All right, I'm gonna leave it there. If this episode spoke to you, I would love to connect with you on Instagram. You can find me at the.energy.exchange. That's exchange with an X. That's all I could snag on Instagram. I would also love it if you'd leave a review. That helps other like minded people find this space. All right, guys, thanks for listening. I will chat with you next week.