On Toxic Wellness Culture & Developmental Trauma
When I was merged with toxic wellness culture I fed into the lie that I needed to be fixed. This led to me spending 10’s of thousands of dollars on programs, coaches and healers because I believed they had the answers. I believe there was also deep value in working with some of these practitioners and they all contributed to bringing me to where I am today. Yet, I was constantly seeking the thing outside of me that would get rid of my experience of discomfort, because I subconsciously associated healing with not feeling discomfort.
I believed in quick fixes and acted urgently. I thought I was valuing myself by spending money on various things to heal myself. At least that’s what I was being told. I tried spiritual healers, therapists, coaches, a shaman and more. I did mindset work, fell into the manifestation high vibe world, did morning practices, pulled cards, and did energy work.
And in the process, I did a whole to of spiritual bypassing. what I realized over time was that many of these things weren’t helping me get closer to myself but distracting me. Pulling me away from my grief and not helping me expand my capacity to tolerate discomfort. When we have early developmental trauma, things can get messy. We can lack discernment. We can appease our teachers and perform to belong.
We can hand our agency over to others, and develop identities around who our teachers are or what we’re being taught. This isn’t healing. When we didn’t develop a strong sense of self we experience an internal void and can end up merging with our teachers, practices and toxic wellness culture in general to fill it. We think we’re healing because we’re taking on a different identity, yet it’s not ours.
We can learn to gaslight our experience with various teachings and use them against our grief. This is the harm that can occur when we don’t do our developmental healing first. What I’ve found happens when we begin to accept that healing is actually about changing our relationship to the parts of us that had to develop to protect us, is that the urgency begins to shift. We settle into healing as a life long journey.
We stop looking for quick fixes. As our sense of self develops we deepen into self-trust, compassion and self responsibility without gaslighting ourselves. We stop abandoning ourselves, We accept where we are and we start to tolerate the liminal space. We bring life to the liminal space rather than waiting to live once we get somewhere else. We feel more deeply anchored within ourselves. We access our yes and our no’s.
We stop looking outside of ourselves for someone to fix us. We stop giving our power and our agency away to others. And I truly believe the right person can support us with this process, because we’re not meant to do it alone. In my experience, the greatest healing hasn’t come from the modalities my practitioners used, but the relationship between us. The opportunity for my shame to be met differently.
The opportunity for repair when a rupture occurs. To be understood and to have support to understand all the layers that surface in any instance. There’s no simple formula for healing. It’s not linear. It’s multi-faceted. It’s the slow integration over time that grows new neural pathways. It’s in the practice of returning to our inner experience when one of our strategies to avoid has kicked up.
And as our true sense of self develops, we find ourselves merging less often. We can be okay within ourselves with difference. We’re not so easily influenced because we feel the anchor within ourselves. There’s no shortcut to get here. No one else can do it for us, yet we can’t do it alone. As we heal we become more discerning in who we chose to work with and what is right for us. Our body let’s us know when toxic wellness culture is present.
May you let it take time.
May you gain your sense of self and your agency.
May you learn to trust yourself and discern the difference between intuition/truth and wounding/trauma.
May you stop running from yourself through self-development.
May you settle into the liminal space where life exists, and meet all the arises.
P.S. I’m not making any of the types of practitioners or practices I’ve named wrong. I am a coach after all. It’s just that how we engage with anything can be insidiously rooted in our wounds if we’re not aware. How these things are being offered can also be insidiously rooted in a culture of supremacy and power over and not actually provide the healing we’re seeking.