When healing becomes another way to hide from living

There’s a point on the healing journey where you have to ask yourself a hard question: Am I actually moving toward something, or am I just circling?

I’ve been there. Years of inner work, therapy, nervous system tools, spiritual practices – and still feeling like something was missing. Still waiting to feel ready. Still convinced that if I just healed one more layer, processed one more wound, understood one more pattern… then I’d finally be able to live the life I actually wanted.

But that’s not how it works.

At some point, the healing has to translate into living. The insights have to become decisions. The awareness has to meet action. Otherwise, we end up using the work as another way to stay safe – another way to avoid the terrifying, beautiful risk of actually showing up for our lives.

The trap of endless processing

I spent a long time in what I now recognize as spiritual hiding. I was doing all the “right” things – journaling, meditating, working with practitioners, unpacking my childhood. And all of that mattered. It built the foundation. But somewhere along the way, I started using healing as a reason to stay small.

If I’m still healing, I don’t have to put myself out there yet. If I’m still processing, I don’t have to make the scary decision. If I’m still working on myself, I don’t have to risk being seen.

It took me a while to realize that this pattern was just another form of the same wound I was trying to heal – the belief that I wasn’t ready, wasn’t worthy, wasn’t enough.

Permission is the doorway

This week’s conversation with Sarah Evangeline cracked something open in me.

Sarah is an author, life coach, spiritual guide, and founder of The Soul-Talk Method. She’s guided over 200 people through inner child healing, embodiment practices, and releasing emotional pain. But what struck me most wasn’t her credentials – it was how grounded she is in the truth that healing doesn’t have to take forever.

She said something that struck me: “Your trauma doesn’t have to dictate the rest of your life. A lot of healing circles are centered around ‘this trauma is going to be forever’ – and I just don’t subscribe to that.”

That’s not spiritual bypassing. That’s someone who has done the deep work and come out the other side with a clear message: you can grieve what happened, honor the wounds, and still decide to stop sitting in it. You can choose to live before you feel fully healed.

Making decisions before you feel ready

One of the threads we kept returning to was the power of decisions – not aligned, perfectly-timed, intuition-led decisions, but messy, uncertain, I-don’t-know-what-I’m-doing decisions.

Sarah shared how in her early twenties, she wasn’t connected to her body at all. She wasn’t making choices from alignment – she didn’t even know what that meant yet. But she kept making choices anyway. She kept moving. And every single one of those decisions, even the ones that felt like escaping, eventually led her home.

I think we put so much pressure on ourselves to only move when we’re certain. To only act when we feel ready. But readiness doesn’t come from waiting – it comes from doing. Clarity doesn’t arrive before the decision. It arrives because of it.

Not waiting for your flaws to disappear

There was a moment in our conversation where Sarah described looking at herself in the mirror, crowded with self-hate, and making a choice: I’m not waiting for my flaws to go away before I love myself.

How many of us are living in that waiting room? Waiting to lose the weight before we wear the dress. Waiting to heal the wound before we pursue the relationship. Waiting to feel confident before we take the leap.

What if we stopped waiting?

What if the radical act isn’t fixing ourselves first – but allowing ourselves to be loved, seen, and alive right now, in the middle of the mess?

The body knows before the mind catches up

I shared with Sarah how disconnected I was from my own body for most of my life. My religious upbringing taught me that my body was wrong, shameful, something to control rather than trust. And that messaging didn’t just disappear when I left the church – it lived in my nervous system for years.

Sarah’s story mirrored mine in so many ways. She talked about not feeling safe in her own body, about being in survival mode for so long that she didn’t even realize she was holding her breath. And she named the thing I think so many of us feel but rarely say out loud: when you’ve been taught that your heart is deceitful, that your desires can’t be trusted, you lose access to your own inner compass.

The healing path, for both of us, has been about coming back. Coming back to the body. Coming back to the knowing. Coming back to the simple truth that you are allowed to ask yourself what you want – and that the answer matters.

What it actually looks like to come home

Toward the end of our conversation, I asked Sarah about the life she’s built now – the peace that radiates from her, the slowness she’s cultivated, the joy that seems so rooted and real.

She told me about her mornings by the lake, how the waves won’t let her rush. She told me about sitting in front of a mirror, not to fix anything, but just to see herself. She told me about giving herself permission to feel good – not as a reward for doing enough, but as a starting point.

And I realized that’s the whole thing.

Permission isn’t the final step. It’s the first one.

An invitation

If you’ve been on the healing path for a while and you’re starting to wonder when it leads somewhere – this episode is for you.

If you’ve been waiting to feel ready, waiting to feel worthy, waiting for your flaws to disappear before you let yourself really live – this conversation might be the permission slip you’ve been looking for.

Not permission from me. Not permission from Sarah.

Permission from yourself.

This episode is now available, click the links below to tune in!

Xoxo, Lauren

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