After becoming obsessed with self-help, I had to heal from ‘healing'

The Guardian

23-03-2025

I have lied to people. Last year I read twice the amount of self-help books than I logged on Goodreads. The number would raise serious concern and some of the titles would, too. I say I'm a culture journalist, but I couldn't share my Spotify Wrapped because my most listened-to music was healing ambient tracks called things like 'Whole Being REGENERATION'. My podcast listening habits were hardly better: softcore manifestation content or prophesying rants from a growing crop of spiritual influencers who make David Icke look like Stephen Hawking. I've withheld most of my adventures in healing from friends and family. I hadn't known how to explain to people what I was doing.
The why was easier: I'd rather not be my own worst enemy. I'd furiously backstep to the centre of many problems to find myself. I wanted to stop being someone with fairly unhealthy relationships and a discreet but unshakeable suspicion that I'm inherently unlovable, which is probably most people's issue. I knew there was a version of myself with direction, with great intuition, if only I could trust it more. The original sins were not mine but now, a grown adult, they are my responsibility. A few years ago I told a close friend that I'm terrified I'll wake up at 50, like Leonardo DiCaprio, dating a merry-go-round of inappropriately aged people, but without the Hollywood Hills compound and career. That could be fun, but if it happens, I'd rather it be an interesting choice than my unconscious fault.
I found myself with the questions everyone asks at least once in their existence when they scare themselves: 'Who am I? Why am I here? Why am I not happier? And what do I really want with me?' I decided that in order to be a more fulfilled human being, I had to focus on my (admittedly already significant) interest in psycho-spiritual self-improvement. I joined the masses and began – I can just about write the much-parodied phrase if I don't have to say it aloud – my Healing Journey.
I've done plenty of therapy and wasn't interested in more, even if I could afford it. This was about the soul, possibly about the body, but not so much about the mind. What I had, as a freelance journalist, was time and a love of research. There were the tried and tested methods (religion, recovery groups, philosophy); the newly fashionable (breathwork, weightlifting, somatic experiencing); the alternative (tarot readings, kundalini activation, Rapid Resolution Therapy), and then whatever happened the other day when I found myself inside a giant wooden healing egg in Wandsworth getting blasted with sound and light therapy. I've had helpful discoveries and cosmic revelations.
Then came the subtle backlash. I realised I was doing too much. I knew too much. I had too much awareness. I was letting go of my ego (good?), but was more disconnected than ever from what I wanted (bad – in fact, the opposite of what I wanted). One late afternoon, all I had the energy for was to decompose on my sofa and scroll through wellness social-media accounts. I knew I should meditate or journal or read, but I felt exhausted by it all. The signals of my body – limbs heavy, mind racing – told me I was at saturation point with healing. Why did I deserve to be awarded a PhD in the vagus nerve yet, in some respects, felt worse than before I started all this? I realised I had to stop trying to heal and recover from recovery.
It seems clear to me now that excessive focus on self-improvement only enforces a narrative of brokenness. Each time I daydream about how elite my life will be when I have £2,000 to buy an amethyst infrared mat, I tell my subconscious mind that I need to be fixed. The lack of a shared cultural definition of 'healing' doesn't help – what does healing mean, precisely? Though it's used incessantly, the word is vague and full of promise. It sets up a dichotomy of well and unwell, which I found made it slippery, too.
While, two years ago, I had specific goals in sight, like learning to feel my feelings rather than immediately analyse them, and to avoid getting into another self-destructive romantic relationship, those attainable ideals were somewhat forgotten. They morphed into the broader, far more stimulating pursuit of 'being healed'. And I really wanted to be healed. Intellectually, I knew there would be no definitive teen-movie makeover scene in which I would step out like a beautiful Ram Dass with great hair, but now that I had no obvious active addictions (beyond this new one), boy was I going to try.
The online healing discourse tells us to put in 'the work' and it will absolutely result in a tangible change. That might be true of some fitness or health markers, but I no longer believe it's true of our inner selves. Self-inquiry and analysis are necessary for growth and a meaningful life, but it's not as simple as input equals output. To heal is invisible, unquantifiable stuff.
That's not a marketable dream, though. There are enormous amounts of money to be made from the vulnerable seeker (which, given the right circumstances, could be any of us). The Global Wellness Institute projects that the wellness economy will grow to $8.5tn by 2027 (about £6.5tn), at an annual rate of 8.6%. If healing is a lifelong job, which most psychologists and spiritual teachers will tell you it is, then how do we know when to stop? I know a breathwork practitioner called Jamie Clements who went through a similar struggle after healing became his lifestyle and business, only to realise it wasn't improving his life. He noticed the same issue in his clients, who also felt stuck in a healing cycle. Clements identified that while self-inquiry, introspection, and uncovering unconscious patterns are vital, they're just the beginning. In an intellectually-driven society, we often believe that knowledge alone creates change. Clements believes that many get stuck in Healing 1.0 and don't move to the next phase, which is applying self-knowledge to rebuild everyday life and relationships. While I had my theories, they didn't take shape until I met two women, healer Prune Harris and nervous-system expert Ally Wise. Both emphasised that healing works in a spiral shape, not a linear one.
It's only in these last few hundred years where the age of reason has encouraged and valued linear thinking over that more spiral path, Harris told me. When she said this, I remember picturing myself valiantly pursuing something only to zoom out and see that I'm manically looping around and around on a mystical hamster wheel.
I'd heard it before when reading about the work of psychoanalyst Carl Jung, infamous for his study of symbols and archetypes. He wrote that the unconscious process of psychological healing moves 'spiral-wise round a centre, gradually getting closer, while the characteristics of the centre grow more and more distinct.' Basically, we encounter the same problems repeatedly, but each time with additional information about their nature.
When I told Wise about my feelings of being paralysed by my efforts to help myself, she was unsurprised, since healing now is unfortunately very conditioned: 'I need to heal so I can live my life' or 'I need to heal so I can have that relationship.' It puts even more pressure on the nervous system, she told me. In fact, my system – the thing that would actually be doing the healing for me, rather than me doing it to myself through sheer willpower – was so overwhelmed that I should completely take the pressure off myself.
A different phase of life emerged out of Harris and Wise's suggestions: unfollowing wellness Instagram accounts, not buying any more self-help books, having a glass of wine with friends. If I did that and just listened to my body, they promised I would feel a difference.
There is far less 'doing' of healing now. The other day I saw a popular British spirituality lifestyle influencer share an emotionally wrought Instagram reel of herself that turned out to be an ad for a holistic wellness platform she promises will change your life, and I rolled my eyes. A more critical lens has finally entered the chat.
Naturally, I experience compulsions to indulge in self-development (usually prompted by an intrusive worry that I'm wasting my one solitary life being 'unhealed'), but each time I remind myself that I've become exhausted trying to fix the problem of me. Though I get that the idea of calling our self-development 'the great work' came from ancient alchemists – and full respect to them – we are in an era in which everything has become work. Our hobbies, side-projects, bodies, friendships, relationships and now our inner worlds are projects to toil away at. I never want to hear the phrase 'working on myself' again.
It feels like a relief to say that at this junction (humbly, maybe for the rest of my life, who knows) this is pretty much as good as I get. This is as much intimacy as I can bear with people. This is how I communicate when unpredictably activated by childhood hurts appearing in the present. These are the places in my mind to which I occasionally retreat. I could be better but I've been much worse.
Hannah Ewens writes a spirituality newsletter called Heaven Sent and is author of Fangirls: Scenes from Modern Music Culture