“We need to teach people more skills for regulating their nervous systems in these troubled times,” a colleague shared during a recent meeting.
She offered this suggestion from a heart-felt place as a somatic therapist, and I know that she is wonderful at teaching such skills. Still, I bristled with low-grade anger. I winced upon hearing the phrase “regulate their nervous systems.”
The power of that wince told me to take a closer look at why the phrase nervous system regulation drives me up the proverbial wall, shouting in frustration. Some of you may be wondering now if I am not in Self, being reactive and showing that I am unhealed by even admitting to such a thing! In my time as a therapist, I’ve dealt with many variations of people and their comments serving as what I refer to as the “healing police.” The golden dingers I’ve heard over the years include, but are not limited to:
“She still carries so much extra weight, she must not really be healed.”
“She isn’t integrated; she’s proud of the fact that she still has dissociative parts. She’s not healed.”
“Tsk-tsk, divorced twice and she never had her own family. It makes me wonder if she ever really healed.”
Variations on these from the general public or from the conservative religious folks with whom I spent the first part of my life are commonplace. Yet it burns me up when I hear it from mental health therapists, especially those who call themselves trauma therapists. Not only am I fed up with the moral grandstanding of it all, I argue that judging how others heal is not very good for humanity right now. We can use any and all of the healing we can get. Even if you don’t resonate with the beliefs of others and have “concerns” about what they consider to be healing, I contend that we still have to check ourselves lest we turn into what we profess to despise.
Before I go on one of my famous rants, let me first offer a disclaimer. OF COURSE I needed to acquire the emotional intelligence of addiction recovery skills and balanced living principles from global wisdom traditions in order to get sober and keep myself alive during the depths of my mental health struggles. Such embodied, mindful skills allow me to love my neighbors, play well with others (mostly), even if I don’t feel optimally safe with these others. I’ve also cultivated the emotional intelligence to know when to walk away. Such skills allow me to keep myself reasonably safe and prevent myself from falling apart in modern America.
Yet not a day goes by when, on social media channels attempting to cultivate therapist engagement, I see an advertisement for a training, a method, or a book that promises “real healing” or “actual growth.” And I’ve also been guilty of being that person posting those things, especially in my early days of zeal for EMDR Therapy. Because of my powerful experiences with EMDR and then devoting my life to learning it, practicing it, researching it, and teaching it, I once thought EMDR and other “brain-based” therapies had the answer to real or actual healing by getting to the root of things. While I stand by the potential power of EMDR and similar therapies, I realize how arrogant I was to think that any modern trauma therapy was the key to healing the world. After all, people were finding ways to heal and to foster resilience long before professional psychotherapy was even a thing.
There are many practices and mindsets, especially when they are used in combination, that can allow people to experience healing as they define it, not as I define it, or as the tastemakers in professional psychology and trauma therapy define it. I am going back to these more organic beliefs about healing just as the trauma/EMDR industry is further exploding with people promoting that they’ve found the best way to heal trauma and that their approach is the right way for teaching others to do the same. If I see one more person in EMDR, other therapies, or in the wellness world promoting real healing, I will pull up my nervous system regulation skills but only after first screaming a bit or climbing up that wall in frustration.
There is no one right way to heal. And anyone who tells you there is, I believe, is lying to you.
This narrative of people being “unhealed” or “not healed enough” is a narrative that floats around trauma therapy circles. While some people might share more than is helpful for them, or be out there helping and advocating while they are still in a tender place themselves, that is fundamentally between them and their therapeutic team to navigate. Too many accusations are flying around from professionals that certain advocates are not “regulated” enough to be speaking out publicly. What you see as dysregulation they and others may see as passion and genuineness. As a recipient of content, while I can appreciate a well-regulated person and their message from time-to-time, I often find it lacking the emotion to really engage me. There is a necessary balance needed in advocacy, and all types of voices are needed right now.
It also concerns me when leaders in the trauma field openly criticize a professional with lived experience for sharing their truth about living with a diagnosis, not just having had it at some point in the past. If a professional shares a story of healing indicating that their trauma or other diagnostic struggles are now in the past, I am also not in a position to judge them for sharing any story of hope. What I want the field to move past, however, is this idea that there is only one way to heal. Healing can take on a variety of shapes, colors, and dimensions.
The unprecedented state of struggle that many people are finding themselves in right now might make the access to the healing that you would like them to have unavailable. And even if a person could read up on a quick method online or in a book that is more cost-effective, perhaps that quick and easy method won’t resonate with that particular human. For any given person, just surviving on a day-to-day basis right now might be the most healing experience they can imagine. Even if you, as a therapist, family member, or outside evaluator know that more is possible, I still ask you to check yourselves. What is your motivation for wanting more for that person? Is it because you truly want to alleviate their suffering, or are you wanting them to be more functional, as defined by capitalist metrics? Does believing that you are saving the world through your work and good intentions make you feel better right now? When you say to a person, unsolicited, something like, “This wonderful treatment worked for me, it can work for you too!,” what is that really about? I am not automatically convicting you here for your motives behind such a statement. I am simply asking that you ask yourself if you are part of the healing police problem.
As someone who has walked an abstinence-based bath of recovery for 23 years, I admit to my complicity. I can worry if people don’t get completely clean and sober in a way that I think might better change their lives. Over the years I’ve done a great deal of work to be more open minded to approaches like harm reduction. I accept that everyone’s goals for recovery (if they want to call it that) may not be the same that have worked for me. Yet I was taken slightly aback late last year when I met someone who works in harm reduction. I mentioned to them that I am a person in long-term recovery, and I am also friendly to the work of harm reduction.
They said rather curtly, “I would congratulate you for your clean time but we’re not supposed to do that.”
I didn’t fight it, even though the comment elicited that wince. The wince that indicates I am being judged for the way I choose to heal.
Instead I said in response, “We’re all just trying to survive out there.”
And that is how I see healing, especially in the world in which we find ourselves in 2026. A world that doesn’t seem to want the healing that so many of us are eager to give. Even for those of us who think we’ve moved past surviving and into thriving, the reality of things right now might make most of your days feel like an exercise in surviving again. And that is okay. No nervous system was built for times like this. And I celebrate you for how you are surviving, hoping that whatever path you are taking is not harming others in the process.
If a person wants to know how I’ve made the shift from surviving to (mostly) thriving, even with moments of dysregulation and dysfunction, I am happy to share it with them. Especially if said person is actively seeking me out for my care, my instruction, or my advice. Sometimes this work may involve me making evaluations or interventions in the spirit of, “Does it seem like you are trying to work something out through these partners that you keep attracting?,” or “Maybe all of that talk therapy and analysis has only gotten you so far?” And if you are seeking out my help and I offer you these thoughts, you have every right to tell me I’m full of shit. If you read one of my books or listen to a video and something there lands for you, great! When I go on a soapbox that doesn’t feel like it resonates for you, please remember that I am not an authority on anything and the opinions I express are my own.
I pledge going forward not to police your healing.
