Why Do I Feel Worse After I Started Healing?
The Pattern
You started doing the work and you expected to feel better. Instead you feel more. The grief is louder. The anger is closer. The old memories are surfacing. You wonder if you broke something by trying to fix it. You did not break anything. The defenses that were keeping the feeling at bay are softening, and the feeling that was already there is finally being allowed to arrive.
Origins & Context
The concept of the healing crisis appears across multiple therapeutic traditions, from somatic experiencing to depth psychology. The premise is consistent. When the protective layer of dissociation, numbness, or suppression begins to lift, the material it was containing comes up to be processed. The increase in feeling is not the wound getting worse. It is the wound finally getting access to the surface.
Bessel van der Kolk's work describes this as the brain's natural healing process when given the conditions to operate. The implicit memory becomes accessible. The frozen affect begins to thaw. The feeling that arrives is not new. It has been frozen in the body for years, sometimes decades, waiting for safety to come up to be felt.
The numbness that kept you functional is lifting. The feeling underneath was always there, waiting to be felt.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
You leave session and cry for hours about something that happened twenty years ago. You start the somatic practice and your body shakes in ways it has never shaken before. You read the book and have to put it down because the recognition is too sharp. You feel, for the first weeks, as if you are getting worse rather than better.
It shows up as the strange paradox that the people doing the deepest work often look, from the outside, the most undone. They are not regressing. They are processing. The mess is not a sign of failure. It is a sign that the system finally has the capacity to feel what it could not feel before, and the feeling is, briefly, taking up all the room.
Named in the Literature As
The pattern is named in the literature as the Healing Crisis (across multiple therapeutic traditions). It is also named through Bessel van der Kolk's work as the natural unfreezing of stored affect when conditions of safety are met. Contemporary therapists describe it through the language of Performing Healing versus Actual Healing, where actual healing often looks messier than the performance of healing did.
Related entries in this library include Performing Healing versus Actual Healing, Healing Is Direction Not Destination, and the Inner Child whose feeling is often the feeling now arriving.
Nikita's Note
The first six months of real work were worse than the years that preceded them. I did not understand at the time that the worse was a sign of the work landing. I thought it was a sign that I should stop.
I am glad I did not stop. The worse was temporary. The numbness it replaced had been permanent. On the other side of the worse was a more textured aliveness than I had ever known. Feeling everything was, eventually, better than feeling nothing, but it did not feel that way at the time, and I want to tell you, in case you are in the middle of the worse, that the worse is often the work.
From the work
The numbness that kept you functional is lifting. The feeling underneath was always there, waiting to be felt.From You Are the Love You Seek by Nikita DatarAbout this book
Related Concepts
More in The Pattern Atlas
See all in The Pattern Atlas →I wrote about this in You Are the Love You Seek — available on Amazon.