The Messy Middle of Healing: When You Feel Worse, Not Better
Healing isn’t a straight line toward feeling better.
For many people — myself included — there’s a stretch where things actually feel worse.
More exhaustion.
Less capacity.
More emotion.
Less tolerance for the life you used to manage.
Often, this happens right when the body starts to feel again.
It can feel like things are falling apart.
This post is about that stretch.
The messy middle.
When awareness arrives before relief
We’re often taught to expect healing to move like this:
Awareness → tools → relief → growth
But nervous system healing frequently unfolds more like this:
Awareness → loss of numbness → destabilization → grief and anger → loss of old functioning → then slow rebuilding
The messy middle lives right after awareness and before steadiness returns.
It’s the phase where your body has stopped suppressing what it once needed to survive — but you haven’t yet learned how to live without those protections.
That gap can feel terrifying.
“I used to feel safe” vs. “I used to function”
Many people in the messy middle say:
“I felt safer before.”
What they often mean is:
“I could tolerate my life before my body started telling the truth.”
Freeze, dissociation, and over-functioning can feel like safety because they allow us to survive environments that aren’t actually safe.
Body-based and somatic work doesn’t create dysregulation.
It removes the anesthesia.
When numbing fades, the nervous system finally gets a voice.
At first, that voice is loud.
What the messy middle can actually look like
I want to be concrete here, because this phase is often described in vague emotional terms — and that can make it feel unreal or exaggerated.
In the last year of my own healing, I’ve gone from being able to load a kayak, manage a camper, and push my body through long, physically demanding days…
to needing a wheelchair.
That transition didn’t happen because I “gave up.”
It happened because my body stopped dissociating through pain and instability.
I had to grieve:
the body I used to rely on
the version of myself who could push through
the belief that endurance meant health
I sat in that grief — not once, but over and over.
And it’s because I stayed with it, instead of bypassing it, that I was eventually able to make the decision to use a wheelchair — not as a failure, but as a form of care.
That is the messy middle.
Not collapse for collapse’s sake.
Not pretending nothing changed.
But allowing reality to land fully enough that a new way of living becomes possible.
Why the messy middle hurts so much
In this phase, several losses often happen at once:
You lose the version of yourself who could push through
You lose familiar coping strategies before new ones exist
You lose the illusion that “nothing was wrong”
You may lose productivity, clarity, or physical capacity
You may feel anger toward the people or practices that helped you wake up
That anger doesn’t mean healing was a mistake.
It means you’re grieving the cost of awareness.
Grief isn’t a setback.
It’s a nervous-system response to loss.
Why this phase is hard to stay with
The messy middle is uncomfortable — for the person in it and for the people around them.
It asks us to tolerate:
feeling worse without immediate relief
uncertainty instead of timelines
support without fixing
It’s also a phase where old measures of success — productivity, resilience, “coping well” — stop working.
If those measures once kept you safe, losing them can feel like losing yourself.
If you’re here right now
If you’re in the messy middle, I want you to hear this clearly:
Feeling worse doesn’t mean you’re broken
Missing your old functioning doesn’t mean you should go back
Anger toward healing or toward people who seem “ahead” is common
The loneliness here is real
You’re learning how to live without dissociation.
That isn’t gentle work.
It’s honest work.
A book that can help you make sense of this phase
If you want language for what’s happening in your body — without pressure to “heal faster” — I often recommend The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk.
Not because it has all the answers (it doesn’t), but because it helps explain why the body reacts the way it does once numbness starts to lift.
For many people in the messy middle, this book can:
validate that symptoms aren’t random or imagined
explain why awareness can increase distress at first
reduce the urge to self-blame when functioning drops
Read it slowly.
You don’t need to absorb or apply everything.
This is a companion text, not a prescription.
Where I’m writing from
I’m not writing this from the other side.
I’m in the messy middle too — just a few steps ahead on the path.
I’m writing this for my partner, my friends, my clients, and the people I haven’t met yet — because this stretch is easier to endure when it has a name.
Healing doesn’t mean returning to who you were.
It means learning how to live in a body that no longer numbs itself to survive.
That transition hurts.
And it doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong.
One thing to hold onto
If healing feels harder before it feels lighter, pause before blaming yourself.
Ask instead:
“What did my body stop doing that once kept me safe?”
That question is often the beginning of compassion.
You’re not alone in the messy middle — even when it feels unbearably lonely.
Some of us are here, walking nearby, holding the truth of this stretch until you can feel that too.
If this resonated
If you’re in the messy middle and this put words to something you’ve been carrying, you don’t have to hold it alone.
I work with people navigating this exact phase through Mind-Body Trauma Healing, which blends somatic work, nervous system education, and supportive life navigation. This work is complementary to psychotherapy, not a replacement for it.
You can learn more or book a session through my website when and if it feels right.
There’s no rush. No expectation to be “ready.”
If nothing else, take this with you:
Feeling worse doesn’t mean you’re doing healing wrong.
It often means your body stopped pretending.