by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness
The Realness of Pain On A Transformational Journey & How To Grow THROUGH It, Not INTO It
There’s an unfortunate badge of honour floating around in modern ‘healing’ circles:
The idea that if it hurts more, it must be ‘working’ more.
Once you start looking, you’ll see it everywhere:
People pushing themselves into emotional breakdowns in the name of ‘growth’, others digging endlessly and relentlessly into their past or the shadow self only to re-traumatise themselves with ‘stuff’ they never really needed.
Intensity and pain are seen as a kind of virtue and calmness and safety (the qualities that ‘healing’ eventually leads to as we return to wholeness) are seen as a kind of ‘failure’ or simply just too ‘boring‘ or something.
The unspoken belief underneath it all is pretty simple when you break it down:
“If I feel more pain, I’ll heal faster“.
On the surface it sounds committed, brave, and maybe even a little ‘spiritual‘ but…it’s a myth that – for many people – ends up being the very thing that keeps them ‘stuck’.
This article will dismantle that myth – not by denying that pain plays a role in growing real or ‘healing’ but by putting it back in its rightful place – because, yes, there is definitely pain on a real healing journey but chasing pain is not the same thing as healing.
In fact, it usually does the opposite.
Let’s dig a little deeper:
Pain & Realness: What We'll Cover in this Article
- The Realness of Pain On A Transformational Journey & How To Grow THROUGH It, Not INTO It
- Healing Is a Return to Wholeness (Not a Quest for Suffering)
- Why Healing Can Hurt (At First)
- The Three Stages of Real Healing (A Spiral, Not a Straight Line)
- Some Pain Is Inevitable but It’s Not Meant to Be Overwhelming
- Where the Myth Creeps That “More Pain = More Healing”
- What Actually Happens When We Chase Pain Instead of Letting It Come To Us
- Reality Is Medicine But Only If We You Take It
- The Real Shift: From Excavation to Integration
- Practical Steps: Healing Without Chasing Pain
- Pain & Realness: The Final Word
Healing Is a Return to Wholeness (Not a Quest for Suffering)
When we talk about healing – whether it’s psychological, emotional, spiritual, or otherwise – we’re really talking about one thing:
A return from fragmentation to wholeness.
“Wholeness” can be seen as our natural state:
It’s what we are at the core of our BEING underneath all of the adaptations, masks, and strategies we learned to survive in the world with.
Due to this being a broken and fallen world (or whatever you wanna call it), very few of us make it into our adult lives without this connection to wholeness being severed in some way:
Through shame, guilt, and/or trauma, rejection, or simply not being ‘seen’ on some emotional level that was required for our healthy development, we end up disconnecting from ‘parts’ of ourselves and splitting.
Out of that split, something ‘else’ emerges: the ego.
The ego isn’t a villain (though it’s often sold as this) – it’s just a survival mechanism that’s gone slightly askew because we ended up identifying with it and thinking it’s who we really are (when it’s just a filter between ourselves and reality).
At the end of the day, the ego is just the mask we created so we could be acceptable, lovable, successful, or at least safe enough to get through life without feeling more pain than we could handle at the time.
This is a completely normal reaction to a messed up situation:
The problem isn’t that the ego ‘exists’ – it’s that over time we forget it’s a mask and start to believe it is us.
Once we’re filtering life through a fragmented ego ego rather than a natural experience of wholeness, certain patterns start to emerge:
- Persistent friction.
- Repeating frustration.
- A background sense of misery or having to ‘force‘ life instead of being able to flow with it.
- A feeling that life is something to manage or control rather than participate in
We can live like this for years – maybe even decades – but the odds are (unless we’re particularly good at holding on to unrealities that don’t serve us), we eventually reach a turning point where something stops working, a relationship collapses, motivation dries up, anxiety creeps in, or we just get tired of performing in stead of being present.
This is usually when the ‘healing’ journey finally begins as we can start to return to our realness.
Why Healing Can Hurt (At First)
Returning to wholeness is essential but it isn’t always comfortable but there’s something important that you need to know:
The short‑term pain people experience on a healing journey doesn’t come from ‘healing’ itself – it comes from what healing requires.
What healing ‘requires’ is starting to raise awareness and acceptance of:
- Emotions we’ve avoided resurfacing and processing.
- Beliefs that no longer match reality.
- Identities that can’t hold up to the light of truth.
There’s a reason I often say “The truth will set you free (but first it will piss you off and make you miserable)” and it’s because reality in truth is medicine but – like many kinds of powerful medicine – it can taste bitter when you first swallow the pill.
What hurts on a ‘healing’ journey isn’t the truth itself but the loss of the familiar illusions we’ve been depending on to survive as the stories, self‑images, and interpretations that once protected us now start to dissolve.
Of course, the ego never likes this because the ego is rooted in all of these things:
In fact, the ego’s entire ‘job’ is to keep things predictable and controllable so that when truth shows up in our lives again and says, “This isn’t who you really are” (or some variation of this) it feels like death to the system that’s been running the show.
That’s where much of the pain comes from: not from the ‘healing’, but reconfiguration as we return back to wholeness over fragmentation and realness over ego.
The Three Stages of Real Healing (A Spiral, Not a Straight Line)
Real healing tends to unfold in three fundamental stages which aren’t linear but as a spiral that you can revisit again and again, going deeper into wholeness each time round (though, of course, things can happen in life that cause us to also become fragmented temporarily).
These are the three stages of Awareness (Deconstruct Ego), Acceptance (Integrate Shadow), and Action (Trust Self & Life) that I talk about in my books and walk clients through in coaching containers:
1. Awareness (Deconstruct the Ego)
This is where we start looking honestly at the self‑image we’ve built in reaction to underlying shame, guilt, and/or trauma.
As we do so, we notice the patterns, defences & coping strategies, the roles, compulsions, and other ways we distort reality to stay safe.
Awareness isn’t about judging the ego but about seeing it clearly so we can understand how it formed and what emotional material it’s protecting.
When we understand in this way we can start to make choices that are more REAL and aligned with our purpose instead of our programming.
2. Acceptance (Integrate the Shadow)
As awareness grows and the ego is reconfigured, exiled parts of us that were sent into the Shadow Territory begin to surface:
These are the emotions, impulses, needs, values, qualities, goals, and truths – ‘good’ and ‘bad’ but always real – that had to go into hiding so the ego could function. Shame lives here. Grief lives here. So do anger, vulnerability, desire, fear but there’s also a lot of strengths and good qualities like your ability to trust, your joy, and your strength.
Acceptance means making space for these ‘parts‘ without trying to ‘fix‘ or eliminate them which is what allows fragmentation to begin to heal.
3. Action (Trust Self and Life)
Eventually, healing stops being an internal process of excavation and starts becoming a lived practice where we take ourselves back ‘out’ into the world on a solid foundation of Awareness and Acceptance (which means that we have regulation first).
What this looks like is that we begin taking real action – not doing things for the sake of doing things (as a kind of distraction) or acting from fear or a need to ‘compensate‘ for some (mis)perceived untruth about ourselves – but from acting from trust.
Trust means that we trust ourselves in our ability to meet life so that we can “do our best” and take the action that’s ours to take but also that we trust life to fill in the blanks so that we can “let go of the rest” and don’t need to control every outcome for things to work or to feel ‘worthy’.
This is where wholeness starts expressing itself in the world because we’re in touch with the essence of our realness.
Some Pain Is Inevitable but It’s Not Meant to Be Overwhelming
There will be emotional pain on the journey from the unreal to the real – that’s unavoidable but also an important part of the process:
If you’ve spent years – or decades – away from reality, then the return can feel abrupt because there’s a gravity to it (as the saying goes, “what goes up must come down” and so if you’ve been up in the air for a while there is gonna be at least a bit of a fall back to solid ground)
What’s important to remember, though, is that pain doesn’t have to be overwhelming to be effective – in fact, overwhelming pain usually signals that something has gone wrong.
A strategic approach is what can make all the difference to dealing with the pain of old emotional ‘stuff’ when it’s time to face it:
- Regulate the nervous system: So the body feels safe enough to process emotions.
- Work with thoughts: Using tools like a thought log to challenge distortions and refocus on vision.
- Break emotions down: Into components like physical sensation, meaning, and story instead of attaching to them and trying to deal with it all at once.
- Let go in the moment using approaches like the Sedona Method when appropriate.
Healing works best when we’re in the stretch zone – not when we’re overwhelming ourselves and end up shifting into the panic zone.
Of course, as regulation improves, emotional waves still arise but they’re smaller, shorter, and easier to integrate.
Where the Myth Creeps That “More Pain = More Healing”
At a certain point, some people take a ‘wrong’ turn that ends up overwhelming their system and causing their fragmentation to become even more rigid and grasping.
Usually it happens when the ego gets involved in the healing process and we allow our sense of fragmentation to create urgency, insecurity, and a need for results NOW.
This idea that we need to rush through our ‘healing’ or be perfectionistic about it just ends up being a mental block that stops us from trusting the natural drive towards wholeness (as the unconscious becomes conscious and life moves towards more life).
That’s where the myth comes in and we can start believing that intensity equals effectiveness – that if we can just dig deeper, feel more, break down harder, we’ll finally be free.
It sounds nice but this is just ego using healing as another control strategy because wholeness doesn’t work like that:
Wholeness unfolds at its own pace and our only ‘job’ is to fit ourselves into its rhythm whilst still moving towards our greatest vision for ourselves and life.
What Actually Happens When We Chase Pain Instead of Letting It Come To Us
When people go looking for pain instead of allowing it to arise naturally – which it always will if you can be still enough to allow what needs to come to come – then several things tend to happen:
- They find it because there’s always some unresolved thing we can face as nobody’s ever completely ‘healed’.
- The nervous system becomes overwhelmed, triggering fight, flight, freeze, or dissociation.
- Intensity becomes addictive, because it feels familiar even when it’s destabilising (our identity is just ‘used to’ feeling a certain kind of intense energy).
- Calmness gets mistaken for resistance, even though being calm is a sign of integration.
- The focus gets stuck in the past, rather than moving towards a real future and a vision for realness.
- Healing becomes fragmented and loses balance and coherence.
Perhaps most importantly, persistent pain is feedback.
The bottom line is that our relationship with the truth communicates at the level of experience and so if something hurts continuously, it’s often signalling misalignment, because reality is medicine and so endless pain is a sign of frequent distortion.
If you believe that pain is proof of progress, then you ignore the feedback that reality is giving you and just and push harder.
All that ends up doing is keeping you stuck in a ‘healing’ loop for years.
Reality Is Medicine But Only If We You Take It
Reality IS the medicine.
That means it gives feedback, guides you back on track, and course corrects until you know that you’re in tune with your realness.
The natural drive towards wholeness is always unfolding in our relationship with ourselves and ourselves but also with ourselves and life which what makes it possible to “trust the process”…what blocks this drive isn’t a lack of ‘pain’ but mental and emotional resistance, clinging to outdated beliefs and ideas, forcing life to meet the ego, and outcome‑dependence.
When we step back and stop interfering, the process self‑organises which means that pain arises when it’s ready to be processed and not a moment before.
This requires trust but it’s way more effective then poking around where we don’t belong, hurting ourselves, and calling it ‘healing’.
The Real Shift: From Excavation to Integration
If we’re lucky (or REAL), something eventually ‘clicks’ and we realise that we don’t need to process everything in order to move forward because we already know enough.
At that point, ‘healing’ stops being about hunting for wounds and starts being about leaning into a real vision that will take us deeper into wholeness:
Who am I becoming?
How do I want to show up?
What would real action look like from here?
As we move forward, whatever still needs integrating will surface naturally without force and we can take it on board as fuel for the process instead of an unnecessary detour.
Check out Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace if you want to go deeper into your own realness and building true momentum in your life.
Practical Steps: Healing Without Chasing Pain
- Prioritise nervous system regulation over intensity: If your system doesn’t feel safe, healing will stall no matter how deep you go so only go as deep as you need to. It’s not a race or a competition.
- Use pain as information, not instruction: Ask what it’s pointing to instead of assuming you need more of it. Pain is just a signal that shows you something needs attention (if you let it arise naturally).
- Work with what’s present: Don’t dig for emotions that aren’t arising organically. You don’t (and can’t) ‘heal’ absolutely everything.
- Challenge urgency: Healing isn’t a race but urgency is usually ego and nervous system dysregulation in disguise.
- Focus on the present and future: Let the past integrate as you stay present and move towards something real.
- Trust the process: Wholeness does its thing without the ego’s involvement so stop getting in the way.
Pain & Realness: The Final Word
‘Healing’ isn’t about suffering more – it’s about resisting less reality so you can feel better.
When resistance drops, pain doesn’t disappear because it’s been chased away but dissolves because it’s no longer needed.
That’s the difference between intensity and integration and the way back home to wholeness.
Stay real out there,
P.S If you’re ready to work on growing real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you to start acting in alignment with wholeness instead of against it.
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