Healing Isn’t Linear and Neither is Life

Too often, when we embark on a healing journey and begin therapy, we assume that each session will leave us feeling better. While that can and certainly does happen, it’s just as important to recognize that healing requires us to look at the painful, challenging, and messy parts of ourselves and our lives.

That is rarely a welcome invitation.

But it is brave work.

And it is important work.

Healing often uncovers deeper layers of understanding. It can feel like shedding old skin, releasing outdated narratives, or integrating parts of ourselves that were once fragmented. None of that is tidy. And it is certainly not linear.

We are meant to be flexible with all of life — the joy, the sorrow, and everything in between. Healing is about cultivating the capacity to be with it all and to expand into the full spectrum of being human.

And yet, society loves linearity.

We are taught to simplify life into something predictable, smooth, and “right.” Consider our education system — one that often prioritizes standardized testing, memorization, and rigid paths over curiosity and creativity. This linear framing seeps into family systems as well. When something goes wrong, the question becomes, “Who did this?” rather than, “How did this happen?”

In doing so, we move toward blame and individual fault instead of relational understanding (Kelledy & Lyons, 2019). That same lens shapes our workplaces, political systems, and cultural narratives. Of course it influences how we view our own healing.

But healing lives in nuance.

It asks us to hold multiple truths at once — to honor both our resilience and our wounds. It invites us to recognize dysfunction within the systems that shaped us without collapsing into shame or denial. Healing requires radical acceptance. It asks us to wake up to the ways we’ve been impacted and to gently tend to what remains tender.

So the next time therapy feels confusing, challenging, or anything but like an upward slope, remember: that may be part of the path.

Learning to sit with beauty and goodness while also facing despair and pain is the work. One cannot exist without the other.

Look to nature for reflection and guidance. The seasons move in cycles. Wildlife adapts in rhythms. Nothing in nature grows in a straight line.

Healing isn’t linear.

And neither is most of life.

Kelledy, L., Lyons, B. (2019). Circular Causality in Family Systems Theory. In: Lebow, J.L., Chambers, A.L., Breunlin, D.C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Couple and Family Therapy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49425-8_248