You’re Allowed to Be Tired of Healing (Downloadable Zine)
A new year tends to invite reflection whether we want it to or not. Even if you are not someone who sets resolutions or buys into fresh-start energy, there is often a quiet pause that happens in January. A looking back, noticing of how much ground has been covered.
For many people, the past year has involved real effort. Time spent in therapy. Conversations that were hard to have. Patterns that were named instead of ignored. Feelings that were stayed with rather than pushed down. That kind of work adds up. Even when it has been meaningful, it can leave people tired in a way that is difficult to explain.
If you are entering a new year feeling worn rather than inspired, that does not mean the work failed. It may mean you have been engaged in it deeply. Healing asks for presence, honesty, and patience over long stretches of time. It asks you to notice what survival once required you to set aside. That is not light work.
When people say they are tired of healing, they often say it with embarrassment. As if tired means ungrateful, weariness means something has gone wrong and knowing more should automatically make things easier. But healing was never meant to be a performance. There is no timeline your body agreed to. Insight does not guarantee relief, and effort does not always feel rewarding in the moment.
Much of healing involves staying with experiences that once had to be ignored and slowing down enough to feel what was once managed through distraction or competence or control. Over time, even meaningful work can start to feel like labor. Not because it is wrong, but because it requires so much attention.
Sometimes the exhaustion is not asking for less honesty or less depth. It is asking for less management. Less monitoring. Less self-surveillance. When every feeling becomes data and every reaction something to analyze, life can start to feel narrow. Even rest can turn into something to do correctly.
This is often where play disappears. Not dramatic play or forced joy, but the small, unplanned experiences that are not in service of growth or insight. Moments that are unserious, movements that are inefficient or choices that do not need justification. When healing becomes the organizing principle of life, aliveness can quietly slip out of view.
Being tired of healing is not always a request to stop. Often it is a signal that life has become too effortful and too intentional. That everything has started to mean something. That there is little room left for surprise.
Playfulness and spontaneity are not rewards for doing the work well. They are not signs that someone is finally better. They are part of how aliveness returns when life has been organized around survival and self-improvement for a long time. They loosen the grip of constant reflection. They interrupt the feeling that everything needs to be understood before it can be lived.
This does not require becoming a different person, positivity or reclaiming anything that feels out of reach. It often looks ordinary. Doing something without a reason. Letting boredom exist without solving it. Choosing something unnecessary because it feels mildly interesting. Allowing yourself to be a little off-script.
For people who have lived with high responsibility or chronic vigilance, play can feel strange at first. Even uncomfortable. Seriousness often developed for good reasons. Letting go of it, even briefly, can bring up fear alongside relief. That does not mean play is wrong. It means it is unfamiliar.
This is not something to push through. It is something to approach slowly. Noticing what feels possible. Noticing what feels like too much. Letting lightness be optional rather than corrective.
You do not have to be healing every moment of your life. You do not have to turn every experience into insight. Sometimes what supports healing most is living in a way that is less focused on healing at all.
As this year begins, one gentle question may be whether there is room to invite more aliveness alongside the work. Not as a goal. Not as proof of progress. Just as a reminder that life is still happening while healing continues.
You can download our therapy pocket zine for extra support this new year!
At Mind + Full Therapy, we work with people who have already done a lot of inner work and are noticing the cost of always being in effort. Therapy here is not about fixing you or pushing you forward. It is about creating space for clarity, relief, and aliveness alongside the work that is already happening. If you are curious, you are welcome to explore working with us.