Sometimes the way we think about healing is the very thing keeping us from it.

I’ve been thinking about this as I’m reading Hillary McBride’s book Holy Hurt. What she’s describing — I’ve lived it for years inside religious spaces, and I didn’t have the language or understanding of what was actually happening until I read her words.

Here’s what I know: I learned to manage my pain in ways that worked. For a long time. The relief was real. I’m not dismissing that. When I was in pain, I had a place to put it. I had language for it, rituals for it, a community that affirmed I was doing the right thing. And I would feel better. More normal. More okay.

But the pain didn’t go away. I just got very good at holding it under.

The image that keeps coming to me is a plastic boat being pushed beneath the surface of water. It takes constant effort to keep it submerged. Let go for even a moment and it comes right back up. That’s what I was doing — not healing, but holding. And because the holding worked, because it produced real if temporary relief, I called it healed. I believed I was healed. I was told I was healed.

That’s where it gets incredibly complicated.

If I had turned to alcohol or numbed out behind a screen, I would have known those were just maladaptive coping mechanisms. We recognize those. But in a spiritual community, the coping is often presented as the cure. You’re not just managing the pain — you’re told you’re being transformed by it. You’re told to believe it. And for a long time, belief is enough to keep the boat down.

The particular shape this took for me was a theology of forgiveness that moved way too fast. I was taught that healing meant forgiving — forgiving others, forgiving myself — often before I had any real understanding of what I was actually forgiving, or whether I’d been given space to grieve it first. The message was: place it down, let it go, believe it’s covered, and move on. And I did. Over and over again. It worked, until it didn’t.

What I couldn’t see then was that real healing — the kind that actually changes something — usually requires the opposite of relief. It requires staying with the pain long enough to witness it. To grieve it. To give the hurting parts of yourself what was missing in the first place: someone who sees it clearly and doesn’t look away.

I’ve had a friend in my life who has done this for me. She has listened. Sat with me in it. Offered presence without trying to fix or reframe or rush me through. I don’t think she knows how much that has shaped my understanding of what healing actually feels like — not the relief of having something taken away, but the strange, quiet steadiness of being accompanied in it. Her witness taught me how to begin witnessing myself.

McBride makes a point in the book that has stayed with me: what makes spiritual trauma so difficult to heal isn’t only the wounds themselves, but that we don’t know how to be with them. We are left alone with our pain, or we cover it, or we feel shame that it exists at all. And that shame — the message that we should be over it by now, that others seem fine, that maybe we aren’t praying enough or trusting enough or believing hard enough — that shame is itself a wound laid on top of the original one.

We can’t shame ourselves out of shame. We can’t control our way out of wounds that came from control. The healing asks for something different: the willingness to feel what we’ve been working so hard not to feel, and to stay present with ourselves while we do.

I’m still learning this. And I’ll be honest — part of what I’m grieving right now is the years I spent in spaces that told me I was healing when I was only coping. That grief is real too. It belongs here, in the witnessing.

What I want is something that goes deeper than symptom management. Not just getting by, but genuinely living in better harmony with myself. I don’t think that’s naive. I think it’s what becomes possible when we stop running from the pain and start learning to stay with it.

Relief isn’t always healing. But healing, when it comes, is worth the difference.

I’m grateful for the work of Hillary McBride in Holy Hurt — if you’re in or emerging from spaces that caused spiritual harm, her writing is worth your time.

If any of this resonates, I’d love to hear from you. These conversations are better together, and you don’t have to navigate this alone.

A few questions to sit with

– Have you ever been in a space — spiritual or otherwise — where you were told you were healed before you actually were? What did that feel like when you realized the difference?

– Is there someone in your life who has witnessed your pain without trying to fix it? What did that presence mean to you?

– What messages did you receive about what healing was supposed to look like — and have any of those messages gotten in the way?

– Where are you right now in your own journey — still holding the boat under, starting to let it surface, or somewhere further along? There’s no wrong answer here.

You don’t have to have it figured out to share. Sometimes the most helpful thing is just knowing someone else is asking the same questions.

A note on process: The ideas, experiences, and voice in this post are entirely my own. I worked with Claude (Anthropic’s AI) to help organize my thoughts and develop the reflection questions at the end.