The Self-Help Trap and the Between

I used to treat healing like a job.

Not metaphorically. Literally. A full-time, unpaid position with no weekends, no benefits, and no retirement plan—just the dangling promise that if I worked hard enough on myself, forgave fast enough, stayed positive enough, I’d earn my life back.

My résumé was impressive in the saddest possible way. Reiki initiations. Regression work. Angel cards. Mushrooms. Juice cleanses. Affirmations taped to mirrors I could barely see myself in anymore. I was a one-man spiritual franchise, always driving to the next seminar with a notebook and a credit card I shouldn’t have used.

And underneath all of it—under the serene smile, the “I’m doing the work” voice—I was still in misery.

My nervous system was fried. Fibromyalgia. Nerve pain. A spine that felt like it had been lit and forgotten. The body became both the prison and the guard. Doctors offered pills. Healers offered mantras. Both offered hope with an expiration date.

The New Age aisle told me I’d manifested it, that the pain was a lesson I’d called in. The church I grew up in told me it was sin. Same message, different lighting: you did this to yourself.

That’s when I started to see that healing itself had become a religion. New hymns. Same machinery.

What I didn’t understand yet was how old that machinery was.

In my family, work wasn’t just practical—it was moral. You earned your right to exist. Rest was suspect. Stillness was laziness. The belief ran so deep it felt biological. Do something. Anything. I can still hear it in my body.

So when my back gave out and I had to close my business, it wasn’t just a financial collapse. It was an identity collapse. If I wasn’t producing, who was I? That question nearly killed me.

There were days I didn’t want to be alive. Days I ended up under hospital lights, staring at ceiling tiles, wondering how I’d become the thing I was raised to fear most. I had played by the rules. Built something from nothing. Believed the system would catch me if I fell.

It didn’t.

The net was there—but it was barbed wire. We’ll keep you alive, it said, but barely. Don’t take up too much space. Don’t cost too much. Be grateful.

That’s the unspoken scripture: only the productive are worthy.

By the time I made it to Oak Harbor, my body was already kindling. The move wrung out whatever was left—packing, painting, sleeping on an air mattress while pretending this was just another chapter. Then one morning I couldn’t move. Not metaphorically. Literally.

The inflammation in my spine had edged into dangerous territory. The kind where one wrong movement can change your life permanently. So I stopped moving.

For three months my world shrank to ice packs, pain medication, and the distance between the bed and the bathroom. That was it. No healing practices. No affirmations. No effort left to try.

And that’s when something I hadn’t planned for happened.

The story died.

Not dramatically. Quietly. I didn’t decide to let it go. I just couldn’t keep it alive anymore. I didn’t have the energy to miss who I used to be, or bargain my way back to him. I wasn’t manifesting wellness. I wasn’t fixing anything.

I was just here.

What replaced the noise wasn’t bliss. It was silence—the kind that doesn’t ask anything of you. The kind that doesn’t need to be interpreted. Presence, without a job attached to it.

Now I sit on my porch and watch sailboats come and go without the feeling that I should be somewhere else. No internal supervisor. No guilt disguised as motivation. Just fog lifting in the morning light, and the quiet surprise that my body feels as good as it does.

Healing didn’t mean pain-free. It didn’t mean “healthy” in the way the system defines health—ready to clock back in, useful again. It meant being okay with life as it is. Not resigned. Not euphoric. Just here.

This is what I mean by living from the Between. Not a breakthrough. Not an achievement. A release of the need to perform your worth.

Nothing mystical happened.

Nothing was earned.

Nothing was fixed.

I stopped trying to get better—and something gentler took over.

That kind of healing can’t be sold. It costs everything you thought you were. And it gives back something quieter, sturdier, and finally your own.

If there’s a question here, it’s not how do I heal?

It’s where am I still working for permission to exist?

You don’t have to answer it. Just notice what happens when you let it sit.

That noticing—that simple, unforced awareness—is the Between already doing its work.