Why Healing on Your Own Is Difficult

By Wade Eames

co-regulation

We live in a world that praises two things when it comes to healing: do it on your own, and do it faster. Push through. Get better. Don’t need anyone. At the same time, we’re flooded with stimulation disguised as support. Another podcast. Another tool. Another insight. Another breathwork app. Even healing has been swept up in this culture of overdoing.

But the reality is this: most people I sit with are not struggling because they’re not doing enough. They’re struggling because they’ve been doing too much, too fast, for too long—without ever feeling safe. They’re trying to heal with an overwhelmed nervous system, alone. And that rarely works. Healing isn’t about trying harder. It’s about slowing down enough to actually feel. And most of us can’t do that alone. Because we were never meant to.

This idea that we should be able to fix ourselves in isolation runs deep. Hyper-independence is often praised as strength. But more often, it’s just what people learned to do when they had no other choice. They learned to keep it together. To get on with it. To stop asking for help. And underneath that toughness is usually grief. Grief for what they didn’t receive. Support that never came. Feelings that had nowhere to go.

So it makes sense that healing feels foreign when it involves someone else. Especially when the old belief says, I should be able to handle this. But the truth is, you were never meant to hold it all by yourself.

Co-regulation is not just a therapy concept. It’s a human need. When we’re distressed, we reach for connection. When we’re supported by someone calm, grounded, and present, our nervous system picks up on that. The breath deepens. The heart slows. We begin to come back into ourselves. This is co-regulation. It’s what infants do with their caregivers. It’s what we’re wired for throughout our entire lives.

But when you grow up without consistent attunement, it’s easy to confuse independence with survival. And survival doesn’t always make space for healing. We don’t learn to regulate by being left alone with our pain. We learn it when someone sits with us in it. And then, slowly, we carry that capacity forward.

Insight is valuable.

But insight doesn’t always create change. Especially when your system is in survival mode. Before you can reframe, rewrite, or rewire anything, your body needs to know it’s safe. That’s why people can do all the inner work, read all the books, and still find themselves stuck. Because they’ve skipped the step that comes first. Regulation. And not just self-regulation—co-regulation. Letting someone else help you come back to ground.

Therapy is often where this happens for the first time. Not because a therapist has magic words. But because they’re there. Attuned. Calm. Not fixing. Just staying. That kind of presence can shift something you didn’t even realise was still bracing.

We are flooded with noise. Our nervous systems are overstimulated. And the world tells us the answer is more—more action, more content, more breakthroughs. But for a system already on edge, stimulation is not the solution. It’s the problem.

Before we stimulate, we regulate. We create space. We connect with someone else who helps us feel safe enough to stop running. We breathe. We feel. We remember what it’s like to exhale. From there, healing isn’t something we have to fight for. It starts to unfold, one moment at a time.

If this resonates with you, or reflects where you are in your process, I invite you to reach out. At Next Steps Counselling, this is the work we do. Slow. Relational. Regulating. Real. You don’t have to do it alone. www.nextsteps.au