The Truth About Awakening: Why Healing Doesn’t Make You Feel Better (and Why It’s Still Worth It)

Most people pursue healing, awakening, or transformation because they believe it will make them feel better.

They imagine peace. Relief. Stability. They imagine that once they’ve done enough work—processed enough trauma, deconstructed enough conditioning, reclaimed enough of themselves—they will finally arrive at a place where pain no longer reaches them.

I have bad news for you.

It isn’t true.

Awakening doesn’t exempt you from the human experience. It returns you to it.

My teacher Brooke Castillo talks about the idea of life being 50/50—half positive emotion, half negative emotion. No matter how successful you become, how healed you are, or how much you accomplish, you don’t escape difficult feelings. I don’t know if the ratio is exactly 50/50, but I’ve found the concept deeply stabilizing. It reminds me that when I feel grief, anger, fear, or uncertainty, it doesn’t mean anything has gone wrong. It means I’m alive.

Which raises an honest question: if awakening doesn’t make you feel better, what’s the point?

Why pursue it at all?

The Emotional Landscape Before Awakening

To understand why awakening is worth it, you have to understand what it feels like to live inside a high-control system—or any system where external authority replaces internal trust.

You do experience pain there. But it’s often muted. Diffuse. Misattributed.

It feels like low-grade anxiety. A sense that something is off, but you can’t name it.

There’s often a kind of emotional flatness. You might not feel extreme pain, but you also don’t feel deep aliveness. You feel fine. And fine becomes a ceiling.

I remember noticing this most clearly at Mormon funerals. There was sadness, of course. But the full weight of grief was often spiritually bypassed. Don’t be too sad—you’ll see them again. It’s part of God’s plan. The pain was softened with certainty.

Certainty is emotionally stabilizing. When someone tells you what’s true, you don’t have to wrestle with ambiguity. You don’t have to confront the unknown.

You rely on emotional scaffolding that someone else built.

There is also anger, but it rarely appears as anger. It turns inward. It becomes self-doubt. Shame. Perfectionism.

Anger is a signal that something is wrong. But in high-control systems, it gets translated into something is wrong with me.

You learn not to trust your instincts. You override your feelings. You spiritually bypass your own emotional reality.

This disconnection protects you—from conflict, from uncertainty, from grief.

But it also protects you from yourself.

Awakening Is the Collapse of Psychological Protection

When you begin to wake up, it doesn’t feel like a flower opening to the morning sun.

It feels like waking up in a room you’ve lived in your entire life and realizing the walls were painted to look like windows.

The room hasn’t changed. But your relationship to it has.

And now that you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Awakening is the collapse of psychological protection. The illusion that held your world in place dissolves, and the emotions that were previously inaccessible begin to surface.

You feel grief—for the ways you abandoned yourself, for the certainty you lost, for the relationships that may never feel the same.

You feel anger—at the systems that shaped you, at the people who benefited from your compliance, at yourself for not seeing it sooner.

You feel fear—because certainty is gone. You can no longer outsource truth. You are responsible for your own perception now.

You feel loneliness—because many people around you still live inside structures you can no longer inhabit.

You feel disoriented. Without the identity that once defined you, you have to discover who you are from the inside.

This is painful.

But it’s important to understand this: awakening doesn’t create new pain. It reveals pain that was previously numbed.

Awakening is the removal of anesthesia.

Why Do It, Then?

At this point, you might reasonably think: give me back the anesthesia.

Why would anyone choose this?

Because the real benefit of awakening is not that you feel better.

It’s that you become real.

You stop abandoning yourself to belong. You stop negotiating with your own perception. You stop fragmenting yourself to survive.

The goal isn’t the absence of pain. It’s the absence of internal conflict.

Before awakening, much of the pain comes from self-betrayal. From suppressing what you know. From overriding your instincts.

After awakening, pain still exists. But it’s cleaner. It’s aligned with truth.

You feel more sadness—but also more joy.

More grief—but also more peace.

More anger—but you understand it as information, not evidence that something is wrong with you.

You begin to trust your emotional signals instead of fearing them.

Awakening doesn’t make your life easier. It makes your life yours.

Awakening Changes Your Relationship to Responsibility

One of the most profound changes I’ve noticed in myself is how I respond to injustice.

Before, I believed there was an ultimate system of accountability. That everything would be made right eventually. That wrongdoers would face eternal consequences.

That belief provided emotional comfort. It allowed me to tolerate injustice because I believed it would be resolved later.

Now, I don’t have that certainty.

I feel a deeper grief about the cruelty people are capable of. But I also feel a greater sense of responsibility. If there is no guaranteed future where everything is made right, then what I do now matters more.

Awakening removes the buffer of deferred responsibility.

It makes the present moment more real.

More urgent.

More alive.

Destabilization Is Evidence of Growth

The destabilization that comes with awakening is often misinterpreted as regression.

We’ve been conditioned to believe that discomfort means something is wrong.

But destabilization is not evidence of damage.

It’s evidence that something false is no longer holding you in place.

The goal of awakening is not permanent emotional stability. The goal is resilience. The ability to remain present with uncertainty without abandoning yourself.

Before awakening, uncertainty feels intolerable.

After awakening, uncertainty feels survivable.

That changes everything.

Why Awakening and Creativity Are So Closely Connected

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that people often become more creative after awakening.

Creativity requires tolerance for uncertainty. It requires you to move without guarantees. To trust yourself without external validation.

Painting was one of the first places I learned I could trust myself without permission.

The blank canvas offered no authority. No right answer. Just my own instinct.

It taught me how to remain present in uncertainty. How to stop abandoning myself just because I didn’t know the outcome.

Creative practice became a training ground for self-trust.

Awakening does the same thing.

It removes external authority and invites you to build internal authority instead.

You Are Not Doing It Wrong

If you are on the awakening journey and it doesn’t feel better, remember this:

You are not failing. You are feeling.

There is no path that allows you to bypass grief, anger, or uncertainty.

But there is a path where you stop abandoning yourself in the presence of those feelings.

Awakening doesn’t remove pain.

It removes the distance between you and yourself.

And that is what makes real self-trust possible.

Ready to Rebuild Trust in Yourself?

If this resonated with you—if you find yourself in that destabilizing space where the old structures no longer hold, but the new ones haven’t fully formed yet—you don’t have to navigate it alone.

I’m hosting a free live intuition workshop where I’ll guide you through a simple creative process designed to help you reconnect with your internal authority.

Not by giving you answers.

But by helping you access the part of you that already knows.