People talk a lot about healing, but very few people talk about what healing actually changes inside you, and almost nobody warns you about how healing can feel. This is something we see every day at Abasa. People start healing genuinely, and then they panic because it starts feeling harder instead of lighter.
So if you are in that phase right now and you are thinking, “Why do I feel more chaotic than before?” this blog is for you. Because healing is not only peace and calm. There are 3 things that usually happen during emotional healing, and nobody prepares you for them.
1. Confusion Before Clarity
Think of your mind as a library, and the library is a complete mess. Important books are mixed with irrelevant ones. There are old newspapers, torn pages, and layers of dust. Nothing is in order.
But the thing is, this messy library feels familiar. You have lived inside it for years. So even though it is chaotic, your nervous system knows how to navigate it. You are always busy, always thinking, always functioning, but internally there is constant noise and overwhelm. You are managing your life, but you are not actually aligned with it.
Now, let’s say you begin to organize the library. You cannot organize a messy library without taking everything off the shelves and putting it on the floor, right? The same thing happens when you start your healing journey. You will be looking at your messy mind, and it will feel confusing and overwhelming.
Suddenly, you will start to question everything—your old beliefs, your coping patterns, or your emotional habits. You will start asking: What do I keep? What do I throw away? What even belongs to me?
All your internal mess will finally be visible for the first time. It used to be hidden in the background, but now it is right in front of you, and that will feel incredibly unsettling.
Most people expect healing to feel like an immediate sense of calm, but the first thing it actually brings is deep confusion. You will feel that you were better before you started. But the truth is, you were not better. You were just used to the mess.
So in your journey, you will go through a phase of confusion. I want you to remember that it is a sign that your brain is learning a new order.
2. Loss Before Relief
This is the part nobody talks about honestly. Healing involves loss.
Just like you will have to throw away a few papers, books, and clutter while organizing the library, healing also requires letting go. It is usually not a dramatic loss, but a subtle one.
You will begin to lose old identities. You will lose the version of yourself that survived by people-pleasing. You will lose the part of you that tolerated too much or stayed silent just to feel safe. You might even lose certain relationships because when you stop using your old coping mechanisms, the dynamics change.
When you are going through this phase, you might fear the person you are and who you are becoming. You might start wondering: Am I becoming selfish? Am I becoming cold? Am I even the same person?
But what you have to remember is that you are not losing yourself. You are losing the survival tactics that you never actually wanted anymore.
Healing does not remove things randomly. It removes what your nervous system no longer needs to survive.
Remember, these losses will be tough and uncomfortable. But loss is not failure. It is recalibration. And recalibration is healing.
3. Unfamiliarity Before Safety
The thing is, a messy library is familiar, but an organized one will feel completely foreign at first, even if it is better.
Moreover, healing demands effort, intentional choices, and consistency. That effort creates its own kind of pressure, in addition to being unfamiliar territory. So your nervous system will resist change, but it does not mean that change is wrong. It means change itself feels unsafe initially.
This is why healing will feel incredibly uncomfortable, almost on all levels. Because healing is not about feeling good all the time. It is about feeling regulated and safe. And until your system settles into its new order, discomfort is an essential part of the process.
The most important thing to understand is that you are not becoming a different person. Earlier, you were just managing, coping, and surviving. When a library is a mess of torn pages, it is not truly a library, right? It only becomes what it was meant to be when it is organized.
So healing is not about changing who you are. Actually, it is about allowing you to become who you were meant to be—a person without internal noise, without pressure, and without survival instincts running your life.
I want you to remember one thing: if healing feels uncomfortable right now, that means you are actually doing it honestly.