You’re Not Broken
Why Does Your Brain Still Feel Stuck Even After Healing?
You’ve done the work.
You’ve journaled, reflected, maybe even gone to therapy.
You know the relationship is over.
You know you’re safe now.
You know you’ve grown.
And yet…
Your chest still tightens when someone raises their voice.
Your stomach sinks when you don’t get a text back.
You hold your breath when things feel too good—because part of you expects it to fall apart.
It’s frustrating. You know better. So why doesn’t it feel that way?
Here’s the truth:
You’re not broken.
You don’t need fixing.
Your brain is simply running an old survival pattern.
At some point in your life, your brain learned how to protect you.
Maybe it decided that people-pleasing was safer than being rejected. Maybe it linked love to anxiety, or stillness to danger. Maybe it learned to numb out with food, freeze when overwhelmed, or procrastinate to avoid failure.
These weren’t failures. They were intelligent adaptations.
Your unconscious mind is always trying to help. It’s not sabotaging you—it’s working from a script it wrote long ago, one that hasn’t been updated yet.
Why Logic Alone Doesn’t Work
You can understand something fully and still not feel different.
That’s because the part of your brain in charge of logic—the prefrontal cortex—isn’t the one running the show when you're triggered.
Here’s what’s really going on behind the scenes of your mind:
Amygdala – Your brain’s alarm system. It reacts fast to potential danger—even if the danger is no longer real.
Hippocampus – Stores emotional memories and links them to present-day cues, sometimes without context.
Prefrontal Cortex – Thinks rationally, knows you’re safe... but often loses the argument when fear shows up.
So even if you’re telling yourself, “I’m fine,” your brain might still be scanning the room like something’s about to go wrong.
You can’t think your way out of a fear response. But you can teach your brain to stop seeing what’s familiar as dangerous.
The Goal Isn’t Fixing—It’s Updating
Healing doesn’t mean “fixing” yourself. It means helping your brain realize that the danger has passed.
That anxious, reactive, hypervigilant part of you? It’s still trying to protect you—from something that already ended.
What it needs isn’t more evidence or self-talk. It needs a new map.
When your brain understands that it’s safe to relax, connect, speak up, or succeed—it stops reacting like it’s in survival mode.
That’s not something you force. It’s something you teach.
A Real-Life Example
One client came to me after years of healing.
“I know my ex was emotionally abusive,” she said. “I know I don’t want someone like him again. But every time someone new doesn’t text me back, I spiral. My heart races. I feel like I did something wrong.”
Her logical conscious mind had moved on. but her unconscious mind that controls her nervous system hadn’t.
Her unconscious mind had linked love with danger.
Connection with risk.
Silence with abandonment.
As we worked together, we didn’t need to analyze it further—she already understood it, her conscious mind already knew it.
We needed to help her unconscious mind unlearn the pattern of responding with fear and install a new pattern of her choosing.
So that’s what we did.
Not by rehashing stories or trying to convince her otherwise, but by guiding her unconscious mind to feel safe again.
Once that happened, the reactions started to fade—because the brain stopped protecting her from something that was no longer happening.
Stop Chasing Healing Like It’s a Job
If healing feels like an endless task—like you always have to do more—it might be time for a different approach.
Your brain already knows how to store pain, just like it does with physical injuries.
It just hasn’t filed this one yet.
And the more you reinforce the idea that you’re still broken, still healing, still stuck...
The more your brain believes it’s true.
You’re not stuck because you haven’t worked hard enough.
You’re stuck because your brain hasn’t been shown a new way yet.
What If There’s Nothing to Fix?
The truth is, you don’t need to become someone new.
You just need to let your brain catch up with who you already are.
You’ve outgrown the old patterns.
You’ve done the work.
You’ve survived.
Now it’s time to help your mind realize that you’re no longer in danger.
To show it how to live, not just how to cope.
Because you are not broken.
You are patterned.
And patterns can be rewritten.
Click the link below to set up a strategy call to get you from reactive to being proactive in your life!
