Healing as Rebellion, Not Ritual Performance
I’ve been hearing it in the therapy room for years. This quiet pressure my clients carry, this feeling that they’re never doing enough to heal. That they should be further along. More regulated. More aware. More in control of their triggers. I’ve watched people contort themselves trying to meet some invisible standard of what healing is supposed to look like.
And for a long time, I was only hearing about it secondhand. Because I haven’t been on social media since 2011. I missed the wave of wellness content, instagram therapy slides, nervous system reels, tiktok spirituality. But my clients would bring it into the room. They’d tell me what they were seeing. How it made them feel like they were falling behind. Like everyone else was further along, more healed, more together.
And now, being on substack, I’m starting to see it for myself. And while people say “this isn’t like social media,” I can’t help but notice some of the same patterns.
The repetition. The cadence. The performance of care. And more than anything, the pressure, subtle but steady, to be good. Healed. On the right side of awareness.
So I’ve been sitting with it. Not to judge anyone. We’re all swimming in this, myself included. But to track it. Because this is what I do. As a psychotherapist. As someone devoted to the path of descent. As someone who’s been in healing and spiritual spaces for over two decades.
This isn’t a call-out. It’s a call-in.
Beneath the language of healing, there’s something else moving. Sometimes it’s truth. Sometimes it’s mimicry. Sometimes it’s empire wearing wellness clothes.
I’m interested in what brings us back to ourselves. What’s real. What’s actually felt.
The part that doesn’t need to be performed.
These are some of the patterns I’ve been tracking. In my therapy practice. In descent work. In my own body. I see it in the people around me. In conversations with friends, in the circles I move through. The same threads keep showing up.
What follows is an attempt to name them.
1. Urgency Is Empire’s Hook
I’ve been noticing how often urgency shows up in healing spaces. Not the natural urgency of a body in crisis, but a kind of manufactured urgency. It creeps in when we read something that makes us feel like we’re behind. Like we’re not doing enough. Not healed enough. Not conscious enough.
This urgency doesn’t come from signal. It comes from shame.
There’s a gap between where we think we are and what we see, and that gap becomes a story about what’s wrong with us. And that story generates pressure: to catch up. To fix ourselves. To regulate faster. To become more conscious or self aware.
And let’s be honest, urgency works. It sells. It motivates. It drives clicks. It moves people. But it also hijacks the nervous system. And when we’re hijacked, we’re easier to steer. Easier to manipulate, extract from, sell to, and control.
The thing is, our nervous systems are built to move fluidly between states, sympathetic activation and parasympathetic rest. That back-and-forth is natural. Necessary. But when urgency becomes a constant state, when we’re always chasing, proving, improving—we get stuck.
Stuck in survival mode. Stuck in the sympathetic. And from that place, the body doesn’t know we’re safe. It can’t soften. Can’t integrate. Can’t trust.
Healing can’t happen in a system that’s bracing all the time.
I’ve seen this in my clients. I’ve felt it in myself. The feeling that if we don’t keep up, if we don’t do the next training, read the next post, absorb the next insight, we’ll lose our chance to be safe. Or good. Or worthy.
But true healing isn’t urgent. It doesn’t rush. It doesn’t pressure. It doesn’t threaten us into growth.
It asks us to slow down. To feel, listen, and sometimes, to stop altogether.
2. Resonance Doesn’t Equal Change
There’s this moment that happens all the time in healing spaces. Someone reads something and goes, yes. Yes, that’s me. Yes, that’s true. Yes, I feel that. And there’s a charge in that moment. A hit of recognition. Like something landed.
But resonance doesn’t mean change. Just because something feels true doesn’t mean it’s moving anything in the body. We can feel that electric yes and still stay exactly where we are.
We can understand a pattern, trace it back, connect all the dots, say this is why I do what I do, but that doesn’t mean it’s shifting in the fascia. It doesn’t mean it’s releasing from the tissue where the emotion still lives.
Resonance can feel like progress. That yes, yes, yes of recognition can be powerful. But if we’re not actually feeling the feelings underneath it, if we’re not in contact with the raw material, it doesn’t actually change us.
We’re just looping. In language. In insight. In mimic.
Resonance is not a problem. It’s just not the whole thing.
It can become dangerous when we confuse it for embodiment. When the feeling of getting it becomes a stand-in for the work. When we collect language like armor and start repeating what sounds wise without actually being in it.
Because healing isn’t clean. It’s not a tidy insight or a clever caption. It’s shaking. Sweating. Sobbing. Silence. It’s the body choosing something different, even when the mind still wants to loop.
It lives in the discomfort that doesn’t come with a linear lesson. In the spirals and the repetition. In the moments no one claps for.
3. The Performance of Healing Is the New Moral High Ground
Healing has become a performance. And the performance is rewarded.
Not just with likes and follows, but with belonging. With identity and moral authority.
In a culture that worships control and visibility, the aesthetic of healing has replaced the actual labor of healing. If you speak the language, wear the look, signal the right awareness, you're in. Even if your body is holding its breath the whole time.
This performance becomes a way to manage threat. Especially for those of us who learned that goodness was how we stayed safe. Especially for white folks (myself included) for whom appearing good has long been a strategy for safety. Even if our people weren’t the ones in charge, we were taught to align with power to survive. We learned to perform goodness, to speak the right words and swallow our feelings so we wouldn’t disrupt the status quo. We’ve learned to weaponize awareness as a way to maintain power. Disguising judgment as discernment and authority as insight.
But healing isn’t a virtue. It’s not a status or a costume. And it doesn’t make you better than someone else.
Still, the deeper we’re entrenched in these systems, the more our survival strategies start to mirror them. We mimic the hierarchy even while we say we’re healing from it. Awareness becomes a hierarchy. “Doing the work” becomes a race. The unhealed get positioned as lesser, unconscious, unsafe. And we climb over each other trying to prove we’re no longer down there.
But underneath it all is fear. Fear of being seen as broken. Fear of being left. Fear that we are too much, or not enough, or too far behind. So we keep performing, hoping the performance will protect us.
But it never does. What Empire sells as protection is always harm in disguise.
4. The Myth of the Right Way
So many of us carry the unspoken belief that there’s a right way to heal, and if we can just figure out what it is and do it correctly, we’ll finally feel okay. This creates pressure to get it “right,” to do it in the proper order, with the right language, the right method, the right container.
And when we don’t know what our own healing is asking of us—or we’re too numb, overwhelmed, or disembodied to even ask—we’re vulnerable to mimicking someone else’s process. We see what’s getting applause, or what everyone’s talking about, and we think, maybe that’s what I need too.
It’s like: oh, Kundalini is the thing now? Then I guess I need to do Kundalini. Breathwork? Somatic IFS? Psychedelics? Tarot? Nervous system coaching? Okay. We sign up before checking in. Before asking our bodies. Before even feeling if there’s a question that wants to be asked.
When healing becomes something we consume instead of something we practice, we lose access to our deeper guidance. And when we mimic someone else’s healing process instead of listening for our own, we risk losing the original language of our body, our ancestors, our spirit.
Healing may not look commercial. It may not be aesthetic. It may not even be visible. It may be slow, unshareable, deeply quiet. It may ask you to grieve what’s no longer yours to carry, or say no to the very thing that’s worked for someone else.
There is no single path. The only “right way” is the one that’s actually yours.
And just to be clear—I’m not outside this.
Every single thing I’ve named here, I’ve lived. I’ve watched myself do it. This isn’t a critique from some elevated place. It’s a reflection from inside the mess.
Part of my training as a psychotherapist was to be a blank slate. Don’t feel. Don’t share. Don’t show. That model teaches us to perform healing instead of inhabit it. I think it dehumanizes us.
I don’t want to be a voice from the top of the mountain. I want to be in the thick of it with you. Asking, noticing, returning.
Giving up the performance isn’t a one-time thing. It’s not a clean break or a finished product. It’s a practice—messy, sometimes annoying, humbling, and ongoing.
And it’s not binary. You’re not either “in performance” or “fully embodied.” That’s just another trap. Another empire-scripted game of doing it right. The truth is, we all perform sometimes. Especially when we’re scared. Or when we’re trying to belong.
But what matters is the noticing. The slowing down. The returning.
For me, the most honest compass is my body. When I’m reading or listening to something—whether it’s a post, a podcast, a teaching—I pay attention to what happens in my nervous system. If I brace, I wait. I follow the impulse instead of overriding it. Sometimes that bracing leads me to shame, to urgency, to mimicry. Sometimes it leads me to a deeper curiosity, to a place inside that’s not ready yet, or that needs something else entirely.
And when I do feel resonance, I check that too. I listen slowly. I track the difference between my true signal and the noise. That’s the ongoing practice: not purity, not perfection, but relationship.
Because relationship is the magic sauce in all of this. It’s how we’re shaped, how we’re wounded, and how we heal. We’re harmed in relationship, and we heal there too.
Not just with each other, but with our own bodies, with our emotions, with the more-than-human world, with our ancestors, with our healing process itself.
We need relationship to even know what’s true. To remember what we forgot. To stop performing and start listening.
This is embodied rebellion.
What would healing look like if we let go of being impressive, regulated, or good?
It might look like grief. Like silence. Like rupture and repair. Like spirals and slowness and not knowing.
It might look like being human together—less performing, more feeling. Less branding, more truth.
So I’m curious:
What does this stir in you?
Where do you feel it in your body?
How would you describe your relationship to healing, right now?
With a messy heart,
Alexandra Winteraven🖤
Alexandra offers 1:1 work through Tending the Roots. If you’re navigating a descent of your own — unraveling empire distortions, tending grief, or seeking deeper embodied living — you're not alone in it. This work meets you at the threshold. Reach out to explore how we might walk together. Lets’s connect.
