You're Not Meant To Heal From Trauma

Your wounds aren't pesky problems, they're necessary portals to discovering who you really are.

I was seventeen when I was first prescribed a cocktail of anti-depressants, sleeping pills, and anti-psychotics.

I had spent the previous year (and most of my youth, really) in a state of nihilism, grief, and existential dread. But what the doctors saw as symptoms to eliminate were actually natural responses to waking up to an extremely sick world—necessary indicators that I was ripe for evolution.

After six weeks on medication, it became clear that a lifetime of pharmaceuticals wasn't my path.

Looking back, I now understand that if I had accepted my given pathology and stayed medicated, I might have been able to stunt my anxiety and depression, but I would have also stunted my development as a human being.

Numbing myself into oblivion would have made maturation impossible. I would've never had a fighting chance to face the necessary shattering of my worldview and begin the long journey of initiation into adulthood.

There's an increasingly urgent conversation happening about the loss of initiatory practices in our culture. Most of us understand that our culture has forgotten about initiation and it's hurting us.

But I would argue we haven't just forgotten about initiation—we're vehemently opposed to it.

The Pathologization of Modern Society

We live in a culture terrified of any disruption to the status quo, especially when it comes to our individual psychology.

We rush to address, name, claim, and label even the slightest shift in our mental health. Every day there's a new string of letters representing our own little niche of disorder.

Feeling low for more than a year? Prolonged Grief Disorder.

Experience anxiety while trying to navigate our soul-crushing society? Social Anxiety Disorder.

What's worse, modernity has sold us this hyper-fixation on healing our individual trauma, identifying as neurodivergent, and classifying everyone as some particular breed of chemically unique progress.

As Josh Schrei of The Emerald podcast notes, "Half of TikTok is people announcing their pathologies... Everyone's processing all the time. The purpose of everything in one way or another is assumed to be psychological. It's all about the individual process."

We've squeezed the entire human experience into neat little diagnostic boxes, each with its prescribed solution.

But like any good reductionist approach, all this knowledge hasn't led us to any more wisdom. Our society's mental health hasn't improved just because we've invented new terminology for self-diagnosis.

The endless identifying and processing of our trauma hasn't actually created less traumatized people. It hasn't stopped us from bombing innocent children or raping the earth in the name of progress.

These labels and diagnoses, whether from a TikTok influencer or a doctor, are just another strategy for avoiding our dissolution.

The tragic irony is that dissolution leads to the very experiences required to access deeper wisdom that would actually heal us. The places our culture fears to descend are exactly the landscapes we must traverse to create meaningful change in ourselves and the world.

Are Wounds Aren’t Problems, They’re Portals

The truth is, our wounds aren't meant to be fully healed. They can be tended to, but like any deep wound, they leave lifelong scars that remain present in our awareness.

This isn't tragic—it's necessary.

The depression you feel isn't just yours—it's the earth's grief moving through you.

The anxiety isn't just personal—it's the collective knowing that we're living through the death of our one precious world.

Given the state of our world, the fact that more people aren't racked with grief and sadness is truly disturbing. Fully letting the devastation of the planet into our hearts is the most normal, human response possible to a world that is this fucked up.

But where do we begin?

After a century of being force-fed western psychology as the panacea to our existential woes, how do we face our demons, wounds, and traumas in a way that moves beyond the black/white, sick/well clinical paradigm?

How do we step into the garden of our wounds, where if we hang out long enough, we just might actually learn why the fuck we are alive?

In other words, how do we dissolve gracefully?

Here are a few ideas.

Unraveling Requires Sacred Space

When is the last time you really let yourself collapse?

When you didn't feel like you had to "hold it all together," but rather just let yourself feel whatever devastation lives in your heart fully.

No distraction.

No reasoning.

No rationalizing.

Just pure feeling.

There is a time for stoicism, and there is a time for being as unstoic as possible. Most of us need more of the latter.

Because our culture hates our humanness and our emotions—ultimately teaching us to hate our own feelings—liberating ourselves from this toxic paradigm is the first step towards reclaiming our aliveness.

Most of us have hit edges where we just utterly collapse (and those who don’t die of horrendous diseases far too early.)

But there is a difference between getting so overwhelmed with stuffed emotions that we break down sitting in our car in the parking lot, and creating a sacred space to allow ourselves to dissolve fully.

Though dissolution is not always a choice, we can certainly enact rituals that help take it deeper.

Creating a space to go deep into our own psyche is crucial.

These spaces act as portals into the terrain of soul, where we can fully release into the darker dimensions required to uncover our gifts and access our feral wisdom.

When we carve out a corner of our world that's dedicated solely to relating with the bigger mythos of our life, we are saying yes to allowing Mystery to have her way with us.

Build a simple altar with objects from the natural world—stones that caught your eye, wild materials that speak to you, water from places that hold meaning.

The key isn't the objects themselves but your relationship with them.

Spend time here daily, even if just five minutes, in complete silence. This is not a meditation practice. This is a ritual—an invocation that only requires you showing up.

No phones, no guidance tracks, no goals.

Just you in the fullness of your humanity.

Let whatever arises from the depths of your being arise. Things will arise. Deep wells of emotions. Allow them space fully.

Invite them in like an old friend. Bless and love them without judgment.

A five-minute commitment may turn into an hour experience of full-catastrophe feeling.

Or it might not.

You may feel numbness. You may feel resistance and rejection.

Invite that in with an equal amount of grace and love.

This resistance, too, is showing you something—probably how protected and shut off you've become from feeling anything at all.

That’s a good thing to notice.

Learn The Art Of Offering

We've forgotten how to feed the holy, how to give thanks and gratitude for our life.

Why is it important to give offerings during our own dissolution?

Because it reminds us that there’s more to life than our experience.

Building a reciprocal relationship with the world where we are giving and taking makes the whole process a little more...real.

We remember that we are active participants in an unfolding story much bigger than us.

Our trauma, our wounds, our pain isn't just ours to hold.

When we give offerings, we are reminded of the constant web of relations we are always a part of. W we can fully allow ourselves to be held by something much bigger than ourselves.

If we want to ask for guidance and healing from the world, we'd better learn to give first.

Start simple: leave water out each morning as an offering.

Feed the birds in your backyard.

Pour libations for your ancestors.

Learn the traditional songs of your ancestors and sing them, even if your voice shakes.

Give away things you're attached to.

The point isn't what you offer but developing the consciousness of offering itself.

Build A Community Of Fellow Down-Goers

Offering reminds us of our non-human allies. But it’s equally important we know our fellow humans are going through the same journey.

In a world where most people are terrified to share that they are struggling or lgoing a bit crazy, it's more important than ever to find or create spaces where our falling apart is embraced.

This path is not meant to be walked completely alone.

Join a men's or women's circle. Join ritual groups studying traditional practices.

Find people who you can be absolutely real with and commit to meeting regularly.

Create containers, rituals, and practices where others can remove their masks and be seen in their wholeness - including their brokenness.

This isn't a group where you just go and talk about your problems and do even more processing. It’s an intentional community coming together to deepen the process.

Often times the most powerful experiences are simply resting in the depths of your shadows in the presence of others.

Cultivate Relationship With Your Ancestors

Your ancestors knew how to dissolve gracefully—they wouldn't have ever made it long enough to plant the seed of your existence if they were uninitiated.

Remember— you are carrying hundreds of generations of wisdom in your body.

Every single one of your cells is made up of the people who came before you. The ability to dissolve gracefully is stored in your bones, if you learn how to listen.

Cultivating a relationship with your ancestors doesn't mean buying an Ancestry.com account.

This relationship is much more intimate.

Speak to your ancestors daily—not with formality but like you're talking to family (hint: you are).

Learn their stories. Cook their foods. Study their traditional practices. Put pictures of them or the places you come from on your altar.

This is another dimension of being held—by the Earth, by our living community, and by our lineage.

Your ancestors prayed for and dreamed of your initiation. They're waiting to teach you, to hold you as you unravel.

They've walked this path before. Honor them by letting them show you how to walk it now.

Remember: None of these practices are things to master or check off your list to feel something or heal or whatever. They're ongoing relationships you are cultivating. This isn’t something you endure, it’s a lifelong process of deepening into the essence of who you are.

There's no "right way" to dissolve. The only failure is trying to control the process. Let these practices be doorways into deeper mystery rather than items to check off a list.

The World Needs You Walk Through Your Personal Hell

The world doesn't need more well-adjusted people right now.

It doesn't need more individuals who have processed all their trauma or achieved some mythical state of psychological wellness.

What it needs are people willing to let the world's pain crack them open, to stand in the fire of dissolution and emerge transformed.

Real change—the kind that shifts cultures and awakens possibilities—has never come from those who are well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

It comes from those who have walked through the darkness and found something precious there: a vision, a gift, a deeper way of being that can only be accessed through descent.

Our wounds, when approached with reverence rather than resistance, become portals.

Our depression might be carrying messages about what needs to die in our culture.

Our anxiety might be whispering about what needs to be born.

Our trauma, rather than something to be healed away, might be the very initiation required to birth the medicine our world so desperately needs.

This is how we become true agents of change: not by processing ourselves into numbness, but by learning to dissolve gracefully.

By creating sacred space for our unraveling.

By remembering how to give offerings to the holy.

By building communities that can hold our descent.

By listening to the ancestors who've walked this path before.

It's through our wounds that we find our gifts.

It's through our darkness that we find our light.

And it's through our willingness to dissolve that we discover who we really are—a unique being far more powerful and precious than any diagnostic manual could ever capture.

There’s eight-billion people on this planet, and there’s only one of you.

In the words of Josh Schrei, The revolution will not be psychologized.

It will be ritualized, sanctified, and held in the arms of community.

And it begins with our willingness to break open, to dissolve, to become something entirely new.

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PS: If you're enjoying Feral Wisdom, please consider referring this edition to a friend.

And whenever you are ready, there a few ways I can help you:

1. Join our 2025 planning workshop - DITCH RESOLUTIONS, EMBRACE REVOLUTION​. For the next few days, we’re offering the 2.5 hour masterclass at a 42% discount!

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