by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
What If Healing Wasn’t It What You Think It Is?
The harsh truth about ‘healing’ is that a lot of what passes for healing these days is just a polished version of avoiding reality (which is unfortunate because real always works).
It usually comes wrapped in hashtags, exotic photos, and fancy filters topped with a saccharine self-help syrup and topped off with a sprinkle of faux empowerment.
It’s led to a situation where the dominant narratives about healing in our culture often feel more like marketing than medicine.
Here’s the truth, though:
Real healing isn’t about feeling ‘good’ all the time – it’s about getting real.
And, unfortunately (in the short-term, at least) that means facing life as it is – not as we wish it to be:
It means dropping the stories, the ego strategies, and the illusions that we’ve become dependent on and identified with and returning to wholeness.
That’s what the REALNESS philosophy is all about.
This article will dismantle ten of the most popular cultural narratives about healing and explore the real path to transformation through the lens of REALNESS.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Cultural Lies About Healing: What We Cover in This Article
- What If Healing Wasn’t It What You Think It Is?
- The REAL Path to Healing: Acceptance of Reality
- Practical Steps: REALNESS in Action
- Healing and Realness: The Final Word
1. “Follow Your Feelings”
The Lie:
Your feelings are always valid, define you as a person, and should be followed like a compass no matter what.
The Realness:
Feelings are information, not commandments – they’re like smoke signals from the inner world but not all of them point to truth because the truth is about WHOLENESS and permanence and all feelings are FRAGMENTED and short-lived.
Not only do feelings constantly change (and so can’t be relied on as a guide in life), they’re often also rooted in fear, ego, trauma, or projection. They also often conflict with each other which just leads to confusion (for example, you can love and hate somebody at the same time).
When we’re tapped into our REALNESS, we don’t worship feelings – we simply witness them, feel them, and allow them to do what they need to do without handing them over to the ego/identity.
We let them rise, we feel them fully, and then we ask ourselves:
“Is this something I need to integrate or let go of?”
Then we move onto the next feeling (because there’s always more on the way).
2. “Cultivate Self-Esteem”
The Lie: If you boost your self-esteem, you’ll finally feel whole, and be able to fill the void inside yourself.
The Realness:
Self-esteem often relies on comparison, performance, and fragile ego structures but REALNESS teaches us to move from ego esteem to unconditional acceptance.
To be real, you don’t need to trick yourself into thinking you’re the best by comparing yourself to others and chasing their appreciation, applause, approval, and acceptance – you just need to stop resisting the truth of who you are and to start embodying and expressing it through real action.
Wholeness doesn’t come from ‘liking’ yourself more – it’s so much deeper than that:
It comes from dropping the need to evaluate yourself at all and accepting yourself but constantly challenging yourself without judgement and moving forward in life.
3. “Just Love Yourself”
The Lie:
You just need to ‘love’ and ‘care’ for yourself more. Cue the candles, affirmations, and love letters to the self.
The Realness:
Real self-love is gritty because it means accepting yourself completely – ‘good’ and ‘bad’, light and dark – and taking responsibility for what you might need to change in your life.
In other words, it’s about embracing the fact that love is the same as acceptance and that you don’t need to be anything other than REAL (not that being real is a fairy-tale, though).
Healing yourself in this sense isn’t all about bubble baths and vision boards – it’s about staring your shadow in the face and refusing to flinch when it presents a threat to your ego.
It’s about doing the hard thing because it’s right and real – not because it’s comfortable and serves as a way of tranquilising yourself or hypnotising yourself to tolerate your unhealed state.
When it comes to REALNESS, self-love means integrity: aligning with truth, acting from it, and not betraying it for short-term pleasure.
(All you really need to do is: 1) Uncover the truth, 2) Live the truth).
4. “Time Heals All Wounds”
The Lie:
Just wait and, eventually, the pain will fade without you having to do anything.
The Realness:
Time alone heals nothing – it’s what you DO with the time that makes a difference.
Though you might forget a little bit and hide behind new routines and distractions, avoidance just buries the wound deeper in the Shadow Territory of your unfaced ‘stuff’ and, eventually, it will creep back out and ask you to face it.
REALNESS is about directing your attention by realising that it’s what you do with the time that matters:
Healing happens when you bring awareness, acceptance, and action to the areas you’ve been avoiding so that you can face it, integrate it, and then start acting from a foundation of trust in yourself and life no matter what happens.
5. “Your Truth Is What Matters Most”
The Lie:
Speak and live ‘your’ truth and everything will align for you.
The Realness:
This sounds empowering until you realise that most people mistake their opinion, interpretation, or pain story for truth itself.
The whole point of tapping into your REALNESS is to align the way we live with truth itself – not just our narrative about it.
That means surrendering what we want to be true – or, more accurately, what our ego wants to be true – in favour of what actually is. When you do that, clarity returns because truth isn’t a personal thing but a universal one.
6. “You Are Enough”
The Lie: You don’t need to change at all – just accept yourself as you are and don’t work to change in any way because it’s already enough.
The Realness:
This is a paradox because in you’re realness you’re always enough (at your essence) because realness is about wholeness.
At the level of your ego and your identity, though? It’s a different story because even though you’re ‘enough’ at the basic level of having inherent human worth, there are always changes that can be made and things to let go of so we can go into a deeper expression of that worth (and our potential to act on it).
REALNESS requires radical honesty: most of us are living fragments of a life, disconnected from purpose, numbing instead of growing and living what Thoreau called those “lives of quiet desperation”.
Real acceptance is the only path to actually ‘healing’ because it puts you back on the path to wholeness and so this means accepting the parts that are misaligned so you can change them when that’s the realest way forward.
7. “Heal So You Can Be Happy”
The Lie:
The goal of healing is to feel better and be ‘happy’ all the time and to get whatever you want from life.
The Realness:
Happiness isn’t the point; wholeness is and that means accepting yourself and life in all of it’s ‘good’ and ‘bad’.
This means that it’s perfectly possible to be healed without being ‘happy’ (because you’re still accepting life as it is in a given ‘unhappy’ moment and flowing with it and growing into deeper wholeness).
REALNESS isn’t just about chasing comfort or a ‘nice’ safe life where everything is kept in neat little boxes (that’s control freakery) – instead, it teaches you how to hold joy and grief, clarity and confusion, love and loss.
Life isn’t being lived to make you comfortable – it’s being lived to make you conscious.
A related ‘lie’ here is the idea that when you’re finally healed you’ll be able to manifest whatever you want from life and to acquire great success or whatever:
The truth is that you can be completely healed without being successful or rich or anything else (the belief that this is the case is often just a case of spiritual bullshittery).
The real gift of healing is freedom: freedom from your illusions, not from your humanity.
8. “Healing Is a Solo Journey”
The Lie: You can do it all on your own – just journal harder and sort your mind out.
The Realness:
The realest healing happens in relationship because many wounds (not all) are formed in disconnection and have to be healed through connection.
REALNESS includes the relational dimension because it’s about embracing the fact that we’re all interdependent and not independent and separate from one another (which is what the ego makes us believe).
Learning to trust, communicate, and be seen without the mask is what helps us to heal and grow real and we can only do that with other human beings.
Yes, solitude matters but so does showing up in community, being mirrored, and letting yourself be loved.
You won’t know if you’re ‘inner work’ has worked until you get out there and interact with others.
9. “Therapy or Coaching Will Fix You”
The Lie: Just find the right modality and practitioner and you’ll be sorted once and for all because you’ll finally be ‘fixed’.
The Realness:
No one is coming to save you – save yourself .
REALNESS-based coaching, therapy, or any other modality can guide and support you but it can’t do the work for you.
This is because you’re not a broken machine to be fixed but a fragmented being returning to wholeness through your own commitment.
The best support simply reflects what you already know and challenges you to live it by taking real action (that’s why I keep all my coaching clients accountable daily throughout the week).
10. “Healing Is Linear”
The Lie: There’s a neat roadmap to healing: first this, then that, and then…enlightenment.
The Realness:
Healing is a spiral that never ends because you can always go deeper into wholeness.
You’ll also keep returning to revisit the same themes at deeper levels as you experience more and grow in wisdom and perspective.
Sometimes, you’ll relapse and old patterns that you thought were long gone will creep in; other times you’ll simply revisit just to reframe.
When it comes to realness, we we drop the fantasy of arrival of ‘completion’ and embrace the ongoing dance of awareness, acceptance, and action.
There is no final destination – there’s only deeper presence and a greater sense of awareness, acceptance, and action.
The REAL Path to Healing: Acceptance of Reality
At the heart of every REALNESS journey is this one truth:
Healing can only when you stop resisting reality.
It’s not about being more positive, more confident, or more in control – it’s about being more real.
That means:
- Feeling what you feel without indulging or suppressing it to keep your familiar sense of identity (ego) in place.
- Seeing the story but looking beyond it (because you know it doesn’t define you and can be changed).
- Accepting the parts you hate without identifying with them (because it’s not about ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but about being real).
- Taking responsibility for what you’re becoming and acting in alignment with who this is.
- Trusting that reality, not fantasy, is where your power lives and so focusing on the facts of your realness, not the fiction of your ego.
Practical Steps: REALNESS in Action
1. Awareness (Deconstruct the Ego):
Start paying attention to the narratives you’re living by and how they feed into your unreal sense of identity (created because of underlying shame, guilt, and/or trauma and the reason you feel like you need healing):
Are they real or just emotionally or culturally conditioned scripts?
- Journal prompt: “What stories about healing have I been believing and are they actually working?”
2. Acceptance (Integrate the Shadow Self)
Name the parts of your life that feel ‘off’ or that you wish you didn’t have to deal with.
Don’t fix them yet – just face them.
- Practice radical honesty for one week and peak truth in your relationships, even if it’s uncomfortable.
3. Action (Trust Yourself and Life)
Take one small, aligned action each day that reinforces your realness and takes you deeper into wholeness.
- Example: Instead of numbing out and vegetating with your phone, choose to sit in silence for five minutes. Instead of blaming, take one act of ownership and just fess up to yourself and what you can do.
4. Integrate Relational Healing:
Have one conversation this week where you allow yourself to be fully seen – no mask, no script. Just realness.
5. Return to Truth Daily:
Create a morning practice where you check in with reality, not your thoughts (the free thought log tool on this website can help: Hamster Wheel Thought Log).
- Ask: “Which of my thoughts are serving my growth and which are holding me back?”
A lot of the time, the thoughts that we experience aren’t ‘ours’ but just an extension of the ‘stuff’ inside us that’s unhealed. We can reverse engineer this by looking at our thoughts and seeing what they might be hiding.
Healing and Realness: The Final Word
Healing isn’t a fantasy – it’s a returning, a remembering, and a radical act of realness.
You don’t have to chase it – you just have to stop running from what is.
Stay real out there,
P.S. If you’re interested in coaching and ready to grow real in your own life then let me be your guide – book a free coaching call today to experience my coaching and get moving.
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