You were doing so well. The therapy was working. The practice was deepening. The insight was flowing. You were feeling things you had not felt in years - joy, connection, hope. And then, without warning, you fell apart. Here is the thing most people miss.Not in a small way. In a catastrophic way. The depression returned with a force that made the original depression look manageable. The anxiety spiked to levels you had not experienced since the worst period of your life. Old behaviors resurfaced - the drinking, the bingeing, the isolating, the self-destructive impulse you thought you had outgrown. You are worse than you were before you started healing. Or at least that is what it feels like.
It is not what it looks like. What you are experiencing is regression in service of the self - a concept from psychoanalytic theory that describes the temporary worsening that occurs when deep material is being processed. The healing did not fail. The healing went deeper than the system was prepared for, and the depth activated material that had been stored below the level that your previous work had reached. You are not going backward. You are going underneath - underneath the first layer of wounds to the foundational layer that the first layer was built on top of.
If you want to understand how trauma lives in the body, The Body Keeps the Score will change everything. *(paid link)* Seriously. Van der Kolk doesn't just talk theory ~ he shows you exactly why your nervous system freaks out when someone raises their voice, or why certain smells make your chest tight for no damn reason. The guy spent decades watching how trauma literally rewires our brains and bodies. Think about that. Your anxiety isn't weakness. Your hypervigilance isn't paranoia. It's your system doing exactly what it was programmed to do after getting hurt. This book will make you stop fighting yourself and start understanding the incredible machinery that kept you alive.
Think of it this way. You renovate a house. You strip the wallpaper, sand the walls, repaint. Beautiful. The house looks new. Then one day a crack appears in the new paint. And when you open the crack, you discover that the wallpaper was covering water damage. And the water damage goes all the way to the foundation. The renovation did not cause the water damage. The renovation revealed it. And the revelation looks, temporarily, like the house is in worse condition than before the renovation began. It is not. The damage was always there. It was just hidden. And now that it is visible, it can actually be repaired - not cosmetically, but structurally.
What Is Actually Happening in Your Nervous System
When you begin healing work - therapy, somatic work, spiritual practice, any sustained engagement with your inner life - the first material that surfaces is the most accessible. Recent hurts. Identifiable patterns. Nameable wounds. This stuff sits right there at the surface, waiting to be talked about. This material is stored in the upper layers of the psychological system, in the narrative brain, in the explicit memory network. It's the psychological equivalent of cleaning your desk - you can see the mess, you know what needs organizing, and you can actually do something about it. It responds to talk therapy. It responds to insight. It responds to the conscious mind's engagement. You can literally think your way through this layer, and it fucking works. Know what I mean? And when it is processed, you feel better. Sometimes dramatically better. You get that "therapy high" where everything clicks and you walk out feeling like you've figured something out. It's intoxicating, honestly. You start thinking, "This healing thing is easier than I thought." Explore more in our healing hub guide.
But underneath the accessible material is the foundational material - the developmental wounds, the pre-verbal injuries There was a period in my life when the nights stretched long and empty, and my breath caught in my chest like a trapped bird. I was working through a dark night of the soul, trying every breath technique, every shaking exercise I’d learned, but it felt like I was sinking deeper into that pit instead of climbing out. The body was no friend then. It held the pain tight, and the nervous system screamed for mercy. But I kept showing up to that raw edge, knowing the breakdown was the doorway. Years ago, during one of my workshops in Denver, a client broke down mid-session — all the anger, grief, and shame she’d stuffed away came roaring out. The shaking took over her whole body, uncontrollable and fierce. She was convinced she was losing it, but I knew what that looked like. That’s the body rewiring itself, clearing the stuck energy. It’s ugly, messy, and absolutely terrifying if you don’t know what’s happening inside the skin where old wounds live., the attachment ruptures that occurred before you had the cognitive capacity to encode them as memories. This material is not stored as narrative. It is stored as sensation, as autonomic state, as implicit body memory. It does not respond to insight because it predates the capacity for insight. It does not respond to talk therapy because it predates the capacity for speech. It responds only to embodied, relational, nervous-system-level intervention. And when it surfaces - often after months or years of successful upper-layer work - it surfaces not as a thought or a memory but as a state. A state of terror that has no object. A state of grief that has no story. A state of rage that has no target. A state of collapse that has no precipitant.
A weighted blanket can feel like a hug from the universe, especially on nights when the mind will not stop. *(paid link)* There's something about that gentle pressure that tricks your nervous system into thinking you're safe. Like someone's got your back. I used to think weighted blankets were bullshit marketing until I tried one during a particularly rough patch where sleep felt impossible. You know those nights when your thoughts ping-pong between regrets and worries? When every position feels wrong and your skin feels too tight? That's when the weight becomes your friend. It's not magic - it's just physics meeting psychology in a way that actually works. The pressure activates something called deep touch pressure stimulation, which sounds fancy but really just means your body stops being such an asshole to itself for a few hours. The weight doesn't fix everything, but it gives your body permission to let go just enough. Sometimes that's all you need to stop fighting yourself long enough to heal.
This surfacing is the healing. Not a failure of the healing. The system is bringing up material that it could not bring up before because the system was not strong enough to hold it. Think about that. Your nervous system literally couldn't handle this shit when it first happened... so it buried it deep. The successful processing of the upper layers built the capacity to hold deeper material. It's like building muscle. You don't start deadlifting 400 pounds. You work up to it. And now the deeper material is emerging, trusting that the system can handle what it could not handle when it was originally experienced. Your body knows what it's doing, even when your mind is freaking out about going backwards. The regression is a sign of progress. Seriously. The getting-worse is evidence that the healing has reached a level that most people never access. Most folks quit when they hit this phase, thinking they're broken or the work isn't working. But this is where the real magic happens ~ the deep excavation that actually changes your life. Paul explores this deeply in Forensic Forgiveness.
Most people are deficient in magnesium, a good magnesium supplement can transform your sleep and nervous system. *(paid link)* Seriously, we're talking about a mineral that's involved in over 300 enzymatic reactions in your body, yet most of us are running on empty. Your muscles can't relax properly without it. Your brain can't calm down. And here's the kicker... when you start taking quality magnesium, you might actually feel worse for a few days as your system recalibrates. Think about that. Your body has been compensating for this deficiency for so long that giving it what it actually needs feels like chaos at first.
How to Survive the Descent
First - do not pathologize it. Do not conclude that the therapy is not working. Do not decide that you are unfixable. Do not let the regressed part of your system - the part that is drowning in foundational material - write the narrative of what is happening. The part that is drowning cannot see the shore. That does not mean the shore does not exist.
Second - increase your support, do not decrease it. The instinct during regression is to isolate. To retreat into the old patterns. To stop the therapy, stop the practice, stop the engagement with the inner world. This instinct is the old survival system reasserting itself - the system that learned to manage unbearable material by shutting down. Honor the instinct without obeying it. Instead of pulling back, lean in. See your therapist more frequently. Call the friend who can hold space. Attend the group. Know what I mean?Let someone know what is happening. The material that is surfacing was originally experienced in isolation - without support, without co-regulation, without another nervous system to help your nervous system process what it could not process alone. Processing it in isolation again is not healing. It is retraumatization. Processing it in relationship is the completion of what was interrupted. You might also find insight in Your Body Wants to Shake - Why Somatic Tremoring Is the R....
Third - track the trajectory, not the moment. In the moment, you feel worse. That is real and valid. But if you zoom out - if you look at where you were six months ago versus where you were a year ago versus where you were five years ago - the trajectory is forward. The regression is a valley in an ascending space. You cannot see the ascent from the bottom of the valley. But the valley is not the whole picture. It is one section of a journey that has been consistently, if unevenly, moving toward something more honest, more embodied, more free. You might also find insight in This Is Your Life and It Is Happening Now - The Final Inv....
Pema Chodron's When Things Fall Apart is the book I give to anyone going through a dark night. *(paid link)* I've probably bought thirty copies over the years. Given them to friends, clients, strangers on airplanes who looked like they needed it. Hell, I gave one to my mechanic when his wife left him ~ he still brings it up when I get my oil changed. The woman understands something most spiritual teachers miss ~ that falling apart isn't the opposite of healing. It is the healing. She doesn't try to fix you or rush you through the mess with some bullshit positivity. She sits with you in it and says, "Yeah, this is awful. And it's also exactly where you need to be." No sugar-coating. No promises that it'll all make sense someday. Just raw truth about how breaking open actually works. That kind of honesty is rare as hell in the wellness world, where everyone's selling you the next miracle cure instead of teaching you how to be with what's already here.
And fourth - let the completion happen. The material that is surfacing is surfacing because it wants to be completed. The terror wants to be felt fully and then released. The grief wants to move through the body and then rest. The rage wants to be expressed and then dissolve. These processes have their own timeline. They cannot be rushed, intellectualized, or meditated away. They can only be allowed. And in the allowing - in the patient, unglamorous, sometimes agonizing allowing of your own deepest material to surface, be felt, and complete its circuit - the foundation of your psyche is being rebuilt. Not renovated. Rebuilt. And what is built on a true foundation, rather than a cosmetically concealed damage, is a life that does not need to fear its own depth. Because the depth has been met. And the meeting has changed you at a level that no amount of wallpaper could have reached. If this strikes a chord, consider an working with Paul directly.