Healing Is Nonlinear

By Nyrobi Manuel

Healing is often imagined as a straight path forward, step-by-step, progress neatly measured, pain left behind. But in truth, healing rarely unfolds in a straight line. It moves in spirals, cycles, and layers. Sometimes it feels like climbing, sometimes like circling, and often like standing still.

Each new phase of healing brings unfamiliar terrain and in those moments, it’s easy to believe that all progress has been lost. The presence of pain doesn’t mean the absence of growth. Healing isn’t about erasing emotion, it's about learning how to carry it differently.

The Illusion of Regression

There are times when healing feels like starting over. The ground that once felt steady becomes soft again, and familiar thoughts or behaviors begin to resurface. In these moments, confusion and emotional fog can convince the mind that progress has disappeared.

But what if that murkiness is simply the edge of something new? When entering a new level of self-awareness or navigating unfamiliar environments, it's natural to feel ungrounded. The discomfort doesn’t signal regression, it signals expansion. What once felt easy now feels uncertain not because of failure, but because it’s uncharted. Growth often disguises itself as disorientation. What looks like falling back may actually be moving forward, just through a different door.

Healing doesn’t remove the possibility of struggle. It simply builds the ability to meet it differently with insight, reflection, and choice.

Integration Over Erasure

There’s a quiet myth that healing means never hurting again. That if pain reappears, the work must not have “worked.” But healing is not the absence of old emotions, it’s the presence of new capacity.

The same wounds may resurface. The same thoughts may echo. But the way they are held shifts. Instead of collapsing into the spiral, there’s a pause. A breath. A moment to observe, reflect, and choose again. The pain may be familiar, but the response is no longer the same.

Integration is the process of allowing these contradictions to coexist: wanting to return to an old version of safety, while knowing that version no longer serves. It’s holding multiple truths at once both the ache and the wisdom it brings. Healing doesn’t demand perfection; it invites presence. It asks, How will this moment be met now, with who you are today?

Grace in the Spiral

Grace becomes essential in the spiral. It sounds like gentleness: This is part of the process. It looks like pausing before reacting. It feels like separating shame from self-awareness and choosing softness instead.

When healing gets hard, returning to the body can help. Grounding practices like mindful movement, journaling, stillness, or walking outdoors can reconnect what emotional overwhelm tries to sever. Rituals—whether morning routines or midday check-ins—offer structure that makes space for self-return.

Recognizing old patterns often begins with sensation. There may be a familiar discomfort, a quiet sense that something is out of alignment. Noticing this moment is an act of awareness. Choosing to listen before acting is a form of wisdom.

Grace is also trust, the knowing that one hard day does not erase the entire path. That stumbling is not the same as stopping. That there is always another moment to begin again.

Healing is nonlinear. And in its winding, repeating, rising rhythm it makes room for deeper becoming.

5. DBT Integration: Dialectics, Radical Acceptance

Nonlinear healing doesn’t just show up in real life because it’s also woven into the foundation of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), a therapeutic approach built on the truth that two things can be true at once.

This is the essence of dialectics: I love them, and I know I can’t be with them. I feel lost, and I still trust I’ll find my way. I’m hurting, and I’m healing.Holding contradictions doesn’t mean something’s wrong, it means being human. Life is made of opposites, polarities, and paradoxes. Healing isn’t about resolving every contradiction; it’s about letting them exist without letting them control you.

Radical acceptance is the practice of fully acknowledging reality as it is not because it feels good, but because fighting against what’s true keeps us stuck. Accepting something doesn’t mean approving of it, but rather it means making peace with what can’t be changed in order to move forward. When acceptance happens, new insights often follow. Healing opens not by erasing the past, but by integrating what it’s taught.

And beneath it all is the non-judgmental stance. The skill of observing thoughts, emotions, and patterns without labeling them as good or bad. This stance creates space: to notice without spiraling, to pause instead of react, to choose from intention instead of impulse. It invites softness into places where shame once lived. Together, these practices aren’t just therapeutic tools. They’re survival skills for anyone walking the spiral of healing gently, imperfectly, and with growing compassion.

6. Healing is The Permission to Spiral Forward

Spiraling forward isn’t about perfection. It’s about motion. It’s the act of returning to yourself over and over again even when your knees are scraped, your chest is tight, your eyes are puffy, and your heart is tired. Healing doesn’t mean pain disappears. It means when the pain resurfaces, there’s more room for self-trust, reflection, and compassion. It means we keep showing up anyway. That is the healing.

So many of us think we have to transcend our struggles to grow. That we have to wait until we feel “above” the ache before we deserve softness, rest, or even joy. But the truth is, our struggles are part of us and not a detour from the path, but the path itself. The spiral isn’t a setback. It’s a sacred motion of becoming. It’s messy. It’s non-linear. And it’s needed.

Let growth be chaotic and still aligned. Let it be slow, sacred, and clumsy. Let yourself fall forward. Let yourself be held not just by others, but by your own evolving self-awareness. You don’t have to feel “ready.” You don’t have to feel “better.” You don’t have to be above your feelings to move through them with grace.

You’re not failing. You’re spiraling forward.

Journal Prompts for Spiraling Forward

• What’s one moment I judged myself for “going backwards” and what did I actually learn from it?

• How can I honor the progress that doesn’t look like progress?

• What would it look like to give myself grace the next time I spiral?

• What part of me is still healing and what does that part need today?

• How can I move through this pain with more curiosity than shame?

• What does it mean for me to fall forward?

• What am I learning to accept, even when it’s hard?

• Who am I becoming as I spiral toward healing?