Until we challenge the definitions that we unconsciously accept we won’t be able to truly understand the depths of our beliefs and behaviours.
Every time we say “I need to heal,” our subconscious hears: “I’m not whole.”
Every time we say “I have trauma,” our subconscious hears: “I am broken.”
But what if we don’t have trauma?
What if we’ve just been taught to believe that growth has to be hard work?
We don’t need to heal. We need to unlearn.
We need to let go of the shit thats not ours.
I’ve never liked the word healing. It suggests that something is missing, that I’m incomplete, that there’s a part of me that needs to be fixed or rebuilt because it was damaged by someone else. For me, it’s never been about finding something, growing something, changing or adding something. It’s always been about letting go: identifying and dropping everything that was never mine to carry in the first place.
What does healing really mean?
The metaphor of wounds and healing in mental health has become widely accepted, shaping how we understand psychological experiences. Maybe these terms were adopted to help articulate the impact of emotional distress in a way that mirrors physical injury. This way of communicating implies that psychological pain leaves scars, requires time to mend and needs external intervention to "heal."
But what if this comparison is limiting?
What if emotional struggles aren’t wounds at all? Unlike physical injuries, they aren’t missing pieces of flesh or broken bones, they’re patterns and beliefs we’ve picked up along the way which modified our natural state of being, straying us from our own individual core. Instead of needing to be "healed," maybe we simply need to recognise what was never truly ours and let it go.
Why healing isn’t working for me
For me, being told I have trauma or a wound tells me I’m powerless, like something was done to me that I now have to carry, endure, and work really hard to heal. It tells me I need to repair something broken, rebuild something missing, and grow something new to replace what was damaged.
This word tells me I’m a victim.
It’s passive.
It’s giving “This happened to me, and now I have to create something out of nothing to fix it.”
That means effort.
It’s exhausting.
How am I supposed to summon the energy to heal?
And so, since I’m already “wounded”, already struggling, already carrying the weight of my experiences, I’m going to put off dealing with it.
And then, because I’m exhausted and overwhelmed, I feel stuck, trapped in a cycle of guilt, anxiety, and self-doubt. I know what I should be doing, but I don’t have the energy to do it. And that only makes me feel worse. Because now it’s my fault.
I deserve this.
Do you recognise the cycle?
Healing vs. Letting Go
Wounds imply that we’re imperfect, that we’re not at 100%. It makes us think we’re starting from the pit lane, when everyone else is on the grid. It subconsciously programs us to think we need to do a lot of work to catch up and join the fun of living.
When in fact, we’re not incomplete, we’re too heavy.
I think we need to find a new way to communicate the process of self discovery, self awakening, observing the unconscious thoughts and behaviours because the words like healing and trauma are subconsciously keeping us down. We are not wounded, we are not damaged, we are not imperfect. We don’t need to heal to be whole.
We just need to drop the weight.
We need to drop other people’s baggage, their pain that we carry, their judgements, the beliefs they have put on us and we accepted. We need to drop the fear other people have instilled on us. Our parents, our families, our culture, our community, our country and everything in between.
Our planet is not full of wounded people, it’s full of fearful people.
An Example of You’re not broken, you’re carrying too much gunk
Let’s say you have anxiety in social settings. You’re told it’s because you have a wound around being seen; maybe, as a child, whenever you showed up as your true self, people judged, laughed or dismissed you. And now, that experience is seen as a wound that needs healing.
But what if it’s not a wound at all?
What if it’s simply a belief your younger self picked up because, as children, we are wired to observe and absorb our environment and adapt for survival. So, you bought into the belief that If I show up as myself, people won’t accept me. You unconsciously learned to shrink and to modify your true self in order to fit in. Not because something in you was broken, but because, at that time, staying accepted felt necessary.
Fast forward to today, and that belief still exists beneath the surface. So when you step into a social situation, your body reacts as if it’s still unsafe to be fully seen. That anxiety is not a sign of a wound, it’s an internal alarm based on an outdated belief that was never yours to begin with.
Everything we often call a wound isn’t something that needs to be fixed. It’s a belief we took on or a connection we made between ourselves and our environment, one that instilled fear in us and, as a result, shaped how we navigate the world. And because these beliefs were originally created to protect our younger selves, when they resurface, we have the choice to release them if they no longer serve us.
So instead of thinking I need to heal, maybe the shift is I need to unlearn. Not fixing, not repairing, just letting go of what isn’t really you.
We are already whole and worthy, and we continue to discover deeper layers of this as we get closer to our core - by dropping the shit that was never ours to carry.
Why healing isn’t the answer
Seeing myself as wounded also means seeing someone else as the cause of that wound. It implies blame - they did this to me - which creates disconnection, resentment, and a feeling of powerlessness.
It’s absorbing me of any responsibility, blaming others for what they did to me. It keeps me stuck in a cycle where I’m focused on what was done to me, rather than what I can do for myself.
It centres around the idea of duality: them vs. me, right vs. wrong, good vs. bad. It traps me in a state where I’m waiting for justice, waiting for closure, waiting for something outside of me to change so I can finally feel whole.
But what if I don’t need to heal?
What if I just need to drop what was never mine to carry? Drop all the shit what’s not mine, things that were given or force-fed and I unconsciously accepted for various reasons, since birth. What if, instead of seeing myself as someone who needs to repair damage, I see myself as someone who can release the beliefs, fears and expectations that were placed on me without my awareness?
The ripple effect of empowering our own being
This will empower me rather than blaming others. Instead of standing on opposite sides, pointing fingers, I can choose to understand. I can acknowledge why people act the way they do, why they pass down certain beliefs, why they project their fears onto others.
And I can decide, do I want to carry that with me, or let it go?
This isn’t about ignoring what happened. It’s about shifting my focus from blame to empowerment.
Because beliefs aren’t absolute truths. What’s seen as right in one community is seen as wrong in another. What’s considered normal in one family is completely different in another. But that doesn’t mean the people behind those beliefs are inherently good or bad.
When we separate people from their actions, we free ourselves. We stop carrying their fears, their conditioning, their limitations. We realise that people are not their actions. And we get to choose whether we continue walking alongside them, or whether we take a different path, without needing to hold onto resentment or pain.
Why is this shift in vocabulary so powerful and important?
Words shape reality.
I think that, whether consciously or not, language holds power over us. We subconsciously associate words with certain feelings or states of being, and the way we communicate, think, and speak influences what we believe is possible or not.
When we use the word wound, it implies damage, incompleteness, something broken that needs to be fixed.
Healing suggests a long, arduous process, reinforcing the idea that we must struggle or "work" to become whole.
But if we flip the script and say, I don’t need to heal, I need to let go of what isn’t mine, the energy completely changes. Now, the journey is one of releasing rather than fixing. That’s a massive mental shift.
We are the creators
We truly are the creators of our own world, but that’s a whole discussion on its own. Even if we believe that intellectually, we don’t fully understand it because we haven’t been taught to recognise or tap into the power we have over our own lives.
Saying I need to heal implies there’s something wrong with me.
Saying I need to unlearn, to drop what’s not mine, to release, to lighten is much more empowering. It means I’m already whole, I’m just carrying extra layers that don’t belong to me.
This perspective aligns with many recognised voices across different fields, science, neuroscience, psychology, metaphysics and spirituality. People like Dr. Joe Dispenza, Carl Jung, Nikola Tesla, Neville Goddard and my personal favourite, Bashar, all emphasise the same thing through their own discovery, that our beliefs, perceptions, energy and vibrational states shape the reality we experience. We have the power to create it rather than staying trapped into an inherited one and how we talk about it determines what we believe to be true.
We Are Conditioned to Feel Powerless
Society, culture, and older-school but (still mainstream) psychology reinforce the idea that growth equals healing and it’s painful, slow, and filled with struggle.
The “healing” narrative, while well-intentioned, often keeps us stuck in a perpetual self-improvement mode, believing that we only be happy once we’ve healed enough.
But what if we just dropped the belief that we are wounded? What if we chose to see ourselves as whole, right now, and simply let go of everything that doesn’t align with that truth?
What if what we refer to as healing is actually the process of finding and dropping the things that do not belong to us?
I think that’s where the anxiety, depression, fear and panic comes from. Pain happens when we resist our natural state of being. Through the beliefs we adopt from others, we unknowingly resist our true state of being, pulling ourselves further away from who we already are.
And the more time passes and the more we resist, the more painful it becomes.
Over to you
Take a moment and think - if no one had ever told you there was something wrong with you, would you have ever thought there was?
If you had never been given the words wounded, trauma, healing, damaged, would you have instinctively assumed that difficult emotions meant you were flawed?
Whenever something uncomfortable arises, fear, sadness, anxiety, self-doubt, imagine if, instead of immediately labelling it as a problem to be solved or a wound to be healed, you simply observed it with curiosity. What if you asked yourself: Where is this feeling coming from? Is it even mine? Would you naturally be more courageous in exploring your emotions instead of fearing them?
Or has the outside world already programmed you to believe that discomfort is something to be avoided, rather than something to be understood?
Have you been taught that the moment a negative emotion appears, it signals that something is wrong with you, rather than an invitation to discover something true about yourself?
What if, instead of assuming you are broken, you assumed that you are already whole, just carrying layers of conditioning that were never yours to begin with? What if, instead of seeing healing as a struggle to fix yourself, you saw it as a process of releasing? Of remembering?
The next time a difficult emotion arises, pause. Don’t rush to label it. Don’t rush to fix it. Just sit with it. Observe it like a scientist watching an unfamiliar phenomenon for the first time.
What if you let go of the assumption that something is wrong and instead asked yourself:
What is this here to show me?
When you remove the external narratives, what do you truly know about yourself?
Petition for a new word
Instead of healing, what if we call it unfolding?
We’re not healing, we’re dropping all the shit that isn’t ours. The weight we’ve been carrying that keeps us at the bottom of the ocean, unable to breathe, see, or feel.
The beliefs and obligations that keep us bent, folded, tied into knots.
Unfolding means we were never lacking.
We were just buried.
Shrunk.
Hidden underneath all the layers of gunk.
Or maybe it’s remembering, because we just need to remember who we are without the layers of fear, conditioning, and external expectations.
Maybe it’s returning, because we are simply coming home to ourselves. Returning to our natural state, the person we were before external conditioning weighed us down.
Whatever we call it, let’s stop speaking like we are broken.
Because we’re not.
We don’t need to heal.
We need to unlearn.
To release.
To free ourselves.
What do you think? Do any of these words feel right to you?
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