You can’t force your way into healing

This morning I was chatting with a friend who is also both a patient and a practitioner in the chronic illness space about this current social media trend that we can heal our symptoms.

I mentioned it on my socials yesterday, with the idea that we can biohack our way into health, that if we regulate our nervous system enough we can get rid of symptoms and that all illness in the body is a result of suppressed emotion and trauma.

My friend and I both agreed that the pendulum has swung too far. Yes, disease and pain can exist in response to trauma, but we also live in a world where accidents happen, where genetics run wild and spontaneous illnesses develop. If we stay in a place where we control every outcome, where every spontaneous manifestation is our fault, we keep ourselves stuck in activation energy, and prevent ourselves from actually experiencing wholeness and abundance.

The most helpful phrase was one I began using mere days after my son died as a way to make sense of what was happening to me, and it was this: shit happens. I could drive myself crazy trying to find a reason, or to make it make sense, or I could just accept that we live in a world where shit happens. None of us will be able to avoid shit, regardless of how much we control our bodies or only eat organic foods or work out 7 days a week and jump into cold water and sweat it out in a sauna.

Whenever I work with clients, as we’re setting goals for our time together, I usually hear at least once in some way, shape or form the goal of I want to get rid of my symptoms. I want to be healthy.

Usually, I’ll continue asking questions until we’ve uncovered what’s underneath that desire. Not that there’s anything wrong with wanting less symptoms, but that’s never something I can promise. If it was, I would be a millionaire by now. And there’s always this moment of panic once it sinks in that we’re actually not going to “fix them.”

When we say I’m going to regulate my nervous system to get rid of my symptoms, I told my friend this morning and tell every single person I work with, we’re putting fight mode onto ourselves. We’ve given ourselves something to fix, an outcome we need to get to. We are broken, we are the project we need to change to get the outcome we want, and therefore we need to exert effort to get rid of our symptoms and be good again. So we try all these healing modalities, and we add protocols and eliminate toxins, and maybe it works for a hot minute. But in the end, you can’t force your way into change.

We want to take a new shape that can hold under pressure, and when we’ve white knuckled our way into being “regulated” we aren’t in a shape that can hold up when outside forces press in.

You can’t heal in fight mode. You can’t heal by force. And all you have under pressure is a straw man skeleton of wholeness that collapses with the first strong wind.

There’s actually nothing wrong with symptoms. (shocker, I know!) They don’t mean you’re a bad person. They don’t always mean there’s an emergency and you need to fix it right now. They mean your body is talking, and we need to learn how to listen. It’s a relationship, not self domination.

My goal, with my own body and with every person I work with, is to figure out a way to live in the middle of the hard. I might not be able to get rid of it, but can I grow around it? Can I make space for more than just the pain?

What I see in a culture of people so afraid of pain they feel the need to white knuckle their way into healing is a lot of fear. And that makes so much sense. Fear is allowed to belong here. And we can make room for so much more than fear.

If this is resonating with you, I’m currently opening my books for more clients for this winter 25/26 season. If you’re curious about working together, reach out to me here and we can chat about what this could look like. You don’t have to walk this road alone, and you deserve to be supported