We often picture healing like a chart: a line moving steadily up to the right, signifying constant, consistent progress. But when we hit an emotional setback, a physical flare-up, or a return to an old, less-helpful coping mechanism, we feel like we’ve failed.
But the truth is, healing isn’t linear. The non-linear nature of healing is not a sign of failure–it’s a sign of you as a complex system doing complex work.
For years I struggled with anxiety and overwhelm. I would make some progress on feeling less anxious and then I would slip back into old patterns and suddenly feel very anxious. This was very discouraging. I was doing all the “right things.”
Here are some things that I learned along the way on my healing journey that I hope will be helpful to you as well:
Mind-Body Interconnectedness
Healing is rarely about fixing one single thing. It involves a whole host of intertwining parts of ourselves.
- Physical complexity: What I did not realize when trying to heal my anxiety was that there were physical conditions, vitamin deficiencies, and systems out of balance in my body that were contributing to my anxiety.
- Nervous System healing takes time: When the body has been in a state of stress (“fight-or-flight” mode), rewiring it to feel safe takes consistent effort. I had years of stress build up and it was hard to come out of this mode as I had built up many poor habits that needed to be changed and were prone to set back when new stressors like a new job came up.
Healing involves “peeling back layers”
- New Insights, New Pain: Making progress on an issue can give you the space to address a long-buried root cause. This may bring up temporary surges of feelings like anger or sadness, which may feel like a “glitch” but is actually meaningful progress. I was often told I was “too sensitive” as a child. As I learned more about myself, I learned that I am a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP). I realized that there was no “problem” with me, which led me to anger about comments that were said to me and at people who told me I was “too sensitive.”
- The Uncovering Spiral: Instead of a straight line, healing often follows a spiral path. You revisit the same themes, but each time you encounter them, you do so from a place of better self-awareness with better tools. Many different areas in my healing journey spiraled. My stomach started feeling better, but then my migraines got worse. Both were tied in different ways to my high sensitivity and my anxiety. Eventually I learned coping skills that addressed all these areas and then many things started improving, but I still have setbacks and new things I am learning about myself.
Life Doesn’t Stop While you Heal
- External Triggers and Stressors: As I was working on my own healing journey, my parents got sick and passed away, I lost my job and started a new one, my kids grew from babies to toddlers to kids to teens, each with their own stressful phase. I had periods where I didn’t have as much time to get to yoga, I stopped giving myself daily self-Reiki and I didn’t do all the other good things that I now do for my health.
Setbacks are Data–Not Failure
When you have a setback, it does not mean that you have failed or that the entire healing effort was a waste. Instead, reframe the “glitch” as invaluable data. Shift your perspective from “I’m back at square one” to “I’m practicing resilience and self-forgiveness.”
Each time you fall and get back up, you are building the one thing a straight path could never give you: resilience.
So how do we get back on track and reset after a healing setback?
The Glitch Reset: 5 Simple Practices to Get Back on Track
We all have setbacks in our healing. You skip a week of therapy or snap at a loved one. That feeling of failure and defeat can make you feel like you are experiencing a healing glitch. Instead of letting the guilt from one moment turn into self-sabotage, try a glitch reset–a quick, focused action to interrupt the spiral and gently return to your path.
Here are some tools adapted from clinical psychology and behavioral science that I’ve found helpful:
- The 5-second pause
Sometimes it can be as simple as taking five deep, natural breaths to recenter yourself. I like to put one hand on my heart and the other on my belly and take a few slow, natural breaths. If you are attuned to Reiki like me, you can also practice self-Reiki while doing this, but just breathing works fine. If you need to ground yourself further, bring your focus to one thing you see, one thing you hear, one thing you can touch, one thing you taste, and one thing you smell. Doing this brings your focus to the present moment and is a great way to practice mindfulness.
- Self-compassion inventory
Pay attention to your inner dialog. What kinds of things are you saying to yourself? Now think about, if my friend called me and said those things about themselves, how would I react? You would probably be horrified and tell them that they are a great person, everyone makes mistakes, and to not be so hard on themselves. Speak to yourself the way you would to one of your closest friends or a dear pet such as, “Hey, we all make mistakes, it’s okay, you are doing your best.” You deserve the same kindness you would show others.
- The Gentle Reframe
When we don’t make our goals, we can focus too much on feeling like it’s part of our identity rather than a temporary state. We might think we “messed up” and so we are a “failure.” If you missed going to your yoga class, instead of thinking, “I’m so lazy and inflexible,” reframe to “I chose to honor my body and rest today and I will return to my practice tomorrow.” That way you shift the focus to it being a situation that you can change rather than a personality flaw.
- Set boundaries
Typically when we think of setting boundaries, we think about setting them with other people. What I am suggesting here is you set boundaries with yourself. If you are doom scrolling until 1 AM, set an app limit for social media on your phone and stick to it or even just put your phone in another room out of reach. If you can’t stop reaching for the cookies, put them up on a high shelf out of sight that is a pain to get to. Set your email to display an out of the office message so when you take a day off you aren’t tempted to check work email. For me this looked like not following any news media on tv or on-line to protect my nervous system.
- The 1% Rule
This idea is discussed in the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. The idea is that you focus on becoming one percent better each day. You focus on tiny changes you can make. Instead of thinking that you need to journal for an hour, you write one sentence about how you are feeling. Maybe the next day you write two sentences. Instead of going to the gym everyday for an hour, you do a few exercises in your home and you increase them slowly over time. For me this looked like taking five minutes to do some slow, mindful movements like Qigong or doing a few minutes of self-Reiki daily. The focus is on small, incremental progress over time, not on making huge changes now, which isn’t realistic.
Final Thoughts
The truth is, we will all have setbacks in our healing at one point or another. That does not mean that we have failed in our healing or that we are not making progress. While it would be great if healing were a steady upward path where we are more healed each day, the reality is that it doesn’t work like that. The important thing is not to give up on our healing. The good news is, we can reset ourselves when setbacks do inevitably happen and we can then continue making progress, maybe even with a bit more insight and a lot more resilience.
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References
Clear, J. (2018). Atomic habits: An easy & proven way to build good habits & break bad ones. Penguin Random House.
Neff, K. (2011). Self-Compassion: The proven power of being kind to yourself. William Morrow.
