Self-Judgment On The Healing Journey

For many, the healing journey can initially seem to offer a wonderful promise of hope and restoration. They can look at it like enrolling in a university, The University Of Healing, and imagine they will graduate (heal) within a couple years.

When years go by and they still don’t feel healed, though, they can feel like they are failing. They may harbor beliefs such as:

“Why am I not healed yet?”

“Why am I still dealing with these same issues?”

“I know this intellectually, but emotionally I just don’t seem to get it.”

“I know healing is a spiral and not linear, but I feel so stuck.”

“It seems like I will be on this healing journey forever.”

“I must be stupid for not ‘getting’ this already.”

And so on and so forth.

While these beliefs may seem like objective evaluations of one’s healing progress, they are actually disempowering self-judgments and, interestingly, they keep us in an unhealed state longer.

But, first, I want to address what healing is, because I think this is fundamental to why people hold onto these attitudes.

Many people think healing is about “fixing” yourself and it is easy to understand why. A person on the healing journey is, after all, trying to heal their wounds, right?

The problem with this view is that many on the healing journey identify themselves solely by their trauma. Even though we are multifaceted individuals, many with this mindset think that their trauma overshadows everything else.

So let me be share what healing truly is: Healing is not about FIXING yourself because of your trauma. Healing is about DEVELOPING your whole self in spite of your trauma.

Don’t get me wrong: this is not about spiritual bypassing or denying that one needs to heal in certain areas.

Instead, this is about shifting from seeing ourselves as “Defective” to “Someone With Trauma.”

The reason why harboring judgment towards yourself for not having “healed” yet is that this reinforces the energy of trauma, much of which developed due to unloving experiences with our caregivers and/or authority figures. It makes us feel there is something terribly wrong with us, which feeds into feelings of disempowerment and shame.

Rather than negative self-evaluation, what we actually need is for our inner witness to hold us with deep presence and compassion. To understand us in the light of our traumas instead of judge ourselves for them.

It is these supportive energies that give us a greater sense of self-love and self-acceptance, not criticism or unsolicited advice.

And when you can embrace the fact that you will continually grow without having such a judgment about your healing progress, you stop seeing yourself only through the lens of trauma. You see yourself as you really are.