Why Those on Healing and Spiritual Paths Hurt More Than Others
Description
Why Those on Healing and Spiritual Paths Hurt More Than Others: Surviving All That Tried to Kill Us
People don’t talk enough about how painful the healing path, or the spiritual path really is, especially for trauma survivors. It’s not just uncomfortable, it often feels gutting. And it’s not something most people will ever understand, nor do most (as I have found) want to.
Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.
For those of us with trauma, the illusion of life, or the way most people live inside a dream of “normal,” broke very early on. We saw behind the curtain long before we were ready. We learned that love could vanish in a heartbeat, that safety was not real, that the people who were supposed to protect us were often the ones who hurt us deeply and at a core level.
That kind of early betrayal does something horribly profound. It shatters the ordinary dream of life - the one built on material success, consumer comfort, and the capitalist patriarchal illusion that happiness can be earned, bought, stolen, hussled for, or achieved. The world trains people to believe that if they just make enough money, find the right partner, build the perfect home, or gain a certain status, they’ll finally arrive - they’ll finally be happy. But for those of us who have seen how hollow, transactional, and gross that system is, the search or chase stops working. The fantasy collapses and it’s realized that the illusion is paper thin. Yet, it still doesn’t compute in many ways because the masses are still looking outward for what they believe is “real” and as our trauma is dismissed, negated, or exacerbated it seems more painful to believe that we are on the right path at all.
I’ve been on a spiritual journey for years, and alongside it, a slow, relentless healing journey. Yet for the longest time, I didn’t believe that as a trauma survivor, I could ever truly awaken or be free. Every trigger, every unresolved wound, every toxic family connection felt like a chain keeping me handcuffed to the collective zombiehood of ignorance and denial. I watched the world chase its illusions - the same illusions I’d been forced to see through too early, and wondered if freedom was even possible for someone like me. It felt like walking in two directions at once -pushing inward toward truth while being pulled outward by patterns and pressures that were almost impossible to escape. And still, even in the moments of impenetrable darkness and despair, even when the illusions seemed undefeatable, something within kept nudging me forward, toward a realness that had always been beneath it all, waiting for me to notice.
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
United States
