When Healing Hurts
Most people don’t start therapy expecting it to hurt. It’s supposed to help, right?
Yet therapy sometimes stirs things up before it settles them. And that can feel confusing — like you’re doing something wrong, or like the process isn’t working.
It’s not that therapy makes you feel bad. It’s that therapy helps you feel what’s already there.
When you think about it, it’s not that different from physical pain.
If you sprain your ankle and go to physical therapy, part of healing is movement — stretching, massaging, rebuilding strength. None of that feels good. In fact, it usually hurts. But that discomfort is what gets blood flowing again. And blood flow is what brings oxygen, nutrients, and everything your body needs to repair itself.
Pain is the body’s signal that something isn’t right — but it doesn’t always know the difference between pain that’s injuring and pain that’s healing.
Bigger injuries — the kind that take setting and surgery — add a whole new layer to pain tolerance. A bone that’s been broken has to be forcefully reset before it can heal properly. It’s intense, painful, and terrifying to look at. But without that realignment, you’d end up living around the injury, adjusting your movements to protect what hurts instead of restoring full function.
Emotional healing isn’t so different.
When we’ve been through something painful — loss, trauma, shame, neglect — we adapt around it. We find ways to keep going, to protect the wound. Therapy brings those hidden injuries into view. Sometimes that means pain surfaces — not because therapy created it, but because you’re truly allowing yourself to notice it.
It’s like the old line from the book, Going on a Bear Hunt:
“We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh no — we have to go through it!”
That’s what healing asks of us. To go through. Not to suffer endlessly, but to stop running from what already hurts. Because when we’re no longer fighting the pain and the fear of the pain, we have a real chance to move through it.
Therapy isn’t about staying in the pain forever. It’s about finding a way through the pain that’s tolerable — being able to sit with it long enough that it starts to loosen.
That’s where healing actually happens: not in avoidance or analysis, but in the moment we stop running from what needs our attention.