Stop Looking For The Magic Pill — Healing Is Not Linear
Note to self: you don’t need to “fix yourself” to heal
For the past decade, I’ve struggled with a host of mental illnesses ranging from eating disorders to mood disorders and depression. And most of the time, I also spent looking for magic pills.
That one miracle solution that would solve all my problems and heal me, from one day to another.
My way out.
I can’t possibly recount the times I experienced the feeling of euphoria and hope rushing through my body when I thought I had stumbled across “it”. The solution. But that feeling was eventually always followed by despair, frustration, and shame when I realized “the solution” didn’t work for me. Especially so if it had (allegedly) worked for others.
I kept asking myself, was I too broken to fix?
I Tried All The Magic Pills Only To Discover That There Are None
Mental illness is rough, but at least it got me desperate and curious enough to try all the different things that could make me feel better. Some worked better than others, and — spoiler alert — not one single thing “healed me”.
Here are some of the “magic pills” I’ve tried:
- Books: I don’t know how many books I’ve read that promised to solve your problem by the time you finish reading it. It’s helped so many others overcome their problems, the authors say. And the worst part is, you finish the book and actually believe this may be it. That you may hold the key. Until you realize it’s not, and then you feel terrible for not being able to put the theories into practice, even if seemingly all those other people in the book were able to do so.
- Lifestyle choices: Going vegan, quitting alcohol, a new workout routine, becoming a Yogi— you name it. These are all excellent decisions to improve your well-being. But for some reason, I always cling to them, thinking this is the one thing that will cure all my eating issues, or that will erase my mood instabilities. When I first discovered Yoga, I thought this would be the answer to all my problems. I became obsessed with Yogis who had overcome life adversities and thought this would be my path too. Yoga has been fundamental to my well-being, but it certainly was not a magic pill that cured me. I eventually learned to not put all my eggs in one basket and avoid the temptation to be naive, thinking that one single thing could fix your likely deeply rooted, complex problems.
- New therapists: I’ve worked with three different psychotherapists, and an additional three eating disorder specialists. None of them helped me overcome my issues for good. Some of them however helped me for a little. It’s almost like they gave me parts of a puzzle, neither them nor me seeing the entire picture with all the pieces. I’m an advocate for talk therapy, don't get me wrong. And I think with eating disorder recovery especially, coaching can be super impactful. But it wasn’t enough for me. Every time I started with a new person that offered a novel approach to treating me, I was instilled with hope and optimism. Sometimes that lasted a few weeks, sometimes months, but it never lasted. My struggles always continued.
- Travels and retreats: I don’t know how many solo trips I’ve taken thinking “this will be the trip that will change everything”. Whether it was backpacking, a yoga retreat, a course at a meditation center, or a plant medicine retreat. I’d arrive full of hopes, find the experience to be transformative, and return home. I’d be a little better, but maybe not yet fully well. Soon enough the despair would set in. “This was your chance to jumpstart your healing, you were doing so well, and now you blew it.”
- Modern or alternative medicine: I’ve never taken traditional Western medicine for any of my mental illnesses. I had a strong intuitive nudge that they wouldn’t improve my health in the long term, and to this day I’m incredibly thankful that I followed that gut feeling. I later did my research to find out that while antidepressants are sold as magic bullets, there’s a mountain of research proving that they may not be as effective as we’ve been conditioned to think. While they work for some, many people don’t respond to them at all — and in some cases, they may even make conditions worse. The underlying premise is that your depression is the result of faulty brain chemistry, and that these are pills that can fix it. Except, according to Robert Whitaker’s work, it may not just be faulty neurotransmitters, and it most likely will not be solved by pills. But there’s also natural medicine, especially psychedelic plants, and those are the magic pills I have tried. I drank Ayahuasca and the San Pedro cactus, ate magic mushrooms, and tried microdosing. Again, helped me tremendously. But did not heal me.
The Magic Pill You May Need Is A Mindset Shift: Healing Is Not Linear, and It’s Never Just One Thing
The more years passed, the more frustrated I became.
“But I’ve tried so much.”
“Yes you have really tried everything”, even my therapists would admit.
The problem was my expectations. I had these issues that were the result of belief systems and behaviors I had cultivated for years, and I expected to find the one thing that would reset me completely over the course of just a few days, or a few weeks.
“If I just find the right tool, I can finally get better”.
I wish I’d come across Gabor Mate’s work earlier. As he says:
There is not “it” that has to work, “I” have to work.
Yes, I “worked” a lot on myself. But I made two dangerous mistakes:
- I thought that one thing outside (or even inside!) of me would heal me.
- I believed that I could be healed “spontaneously” if presented with the right tool.
The reality is, healing from complex mental illness will never be sudden, and will never rely solely on just one solution. The reality is, healing mental illness is a long and rocky path, and it’s very unlikely that your path will look a lot like the path of those who’ve walked it before you.
Those are not the answers we want. Those are not the answers that sell books, retreats, or coaching programs.
Yes, there may be people who read a book and are forever changed. But in all honesty, the likelihood that that’s you or me is rather dim.
What’s way more like is that the book will have a positive impact on your life, but it doesn’t heal you fully, so you get discouraged and pretty much throw out whatever you learned in the hopes of discovering something new, something that will heal you.
Two Things That Actually Do Work: Relentless Reflection And Compassionate Curiosity
So I don’t want to be a Debbie Downer here and only deliver bad news to you.
The reason that I’m writing this article is that I’ve recently realized that I’m much, much, much healthier than I used to be. But it’s easy to forget because when you’re still struggling, it’s tempting to focus on all the things that are still wrong. Our brains are primed to do so, it’s the negativity bias inherent to all of our minds.
There are two tools that I want to share with you that will propel you forward. They won’t fix you, but they will make sure you remain on an upward trajectory in your healing journey. And as long as you’re on that upward trajectory, you will continue to get better.
Relentless reflection is the practice of periodically checking in with yourself to determine what has worked for you in the past. As I mentioned, it’s easy to lose sight of what made you feel better historically when you just tried something new that again didn’t permanently fix your problem. My advice: Every two weeks, reflect on the things you did that week that made you feel better. Healing is extremely bio-individual, and rather than focusing on what worked for someone else, or what you read in yet another article about someone else’s life, you absolutely need to define your own path. Start collecting the puzzle pieces. And trust me, you’re picture will end up looking very different than everyone else's.
It was only when I started doing this that I realized how far I had come. It prompted me to double down on those things that worked well in the past. For me, this was plant medicine, specifically Ayahuasca, which had an immensely positive impact on my mood and drastically reduced my depression. It was intuitive eating, free from any restriction. It was daily meditation and movement practices. Being open about my struggles with other people. Finding comfort in community. And so on.
Compassionate curiosity is then how we look forward (if relentless reflection is how we look backward). Of course, we don’t want to ignore that things are still in the way of you being healthy. Reframing how I related to my symptoms really helped me. Instead of being frustrated or angry, I would simply get curious. If I still have this problem, it means there is something deep down that still needs to be healed. Symptoms are great because they are your compass to your root cause issues. It’s your body, soul, or mind going in direct dialogue with you. Try to listen without judgment, and instead, cultivate compassion.
In Eastern medicine, there’s a saying: “when the symptoms get worse, that’s when healing begins”.
You better believe I clung to that sentence.
It gave me comfort in my darkest hours.
And I can confirm that this was true for me.
In order to be free, you absolutely need to heal the root causes of your suffering. And the closer you get to those root causes, the more pain you’ll encounter. After being better on so many levels and having completely normal eating behaviors the majority of the time, I still struggled with increasingly violent episodes of bulimia.
As Ryan Holiday puts it, “stop looking for an epiphany, and start looking for weak points”.
So I investigated further.
Through Vipassana meditation, Internal Family Systems therapy, and another plant medicine retreat I recently ended up uncovering sexual trauma that I had completely erased from the surface of my awareness. (I still find it wild to think that the mind has the capacity to do this.)
I unearthed another puzzle piece because I went into dialogue with the part of me that was still caged in compulsive habits.
I gave this part in me space to be seen and heard.
Will this revelation mean that I healed the last bits of my eating disorder?
Probably not.
Because I, too, have to remind myself that there are no magic pills.
My healing journey has been a wild ride. I read hundreds of books, spent hours and hours in talk therapy, traveled across the globe for various healing retreats, drank Ayahuasca, got coaches, took time off from work, confided in friends and family, and discovered the world of psychedelic medicine.
Even if it’s sometimes hard to see, all these things did elevate my baseline. They made me healthier and happier, contributed to varying degrees.
While you’re in it, a setback may feel like you’re worse off than you were before. But please remember, just like the Tesla stock, you’re just working yourself slowly but surely towards that upward trajectory, and eventually, everything will fall into place. You may or may not still struggle from time to time, you may still incur losses. But you will absolutely recognize the value of your hard labor, and that value will continue to compound over time.
Keep going, reflect relentlessly and inquire compassionately, but keep going.
And don’t forget, healing will come not from learning about a new tool, but from putting in the work.
At last, all will be well.
And if it’s not well yet, it’s not the end of your story.
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