When Healing Gets Hijacked by the Ego

I was facilitating a group last night when something common about this work presented itself again.

Once people begin to heal, it’s very easy to center healing as the main priority of one’s life. It can become the organizing principle, the identity, and even the meaning. Healing turns into a role we inhabit rather than a process we move through.

We often start out wearing the “broken person” mask. When that becomes uncomfortable or limiting, we swap it for the “healing person” mask just as easily, trading one personality for another without ever touching the essential center of ourselves. Healing, or more precisely the performance of healing, becomes another form of bypassing.

Healing is not the purpose of my life. Living in joy, connection, and community is the purpose of my life. Healing exists to remove the obstacles between myself and that purpose. When I make healing my personality, I’m no longer clearing obstacles; I’m adding one more.

The point isn’t endless repair or constant self-management. The point is joyful participation. Being in relationship. Letting life move through me instead of standing at the edge, narrating my progress.

And if my so-called “healing journey” starts to interfere with joy, connection, or belonging, if it becomes a reason to delay living rather than a way back into it, then it has stopped being medicine. At that point, it’s just another subtle game that the ego has invented to amuse itself.

And that kind of thing doesn’t need to be refined; it needs to be put down.