Why the Same Feelings Comes Back: Even After You've Healed and Done the Work
You've done the work. You've healed your trauma. Here's why the same feelings keep showing up again and again.
Do the inner work of healing trauma and live with joy, peace, and happiness. At least that’s the promise everyone sells you.
It’s only half true.
Here’s what I have never said out loud…
I’ve done the deep inner work of healing my childhood abandonment. I have held my inner child like she was the most precious thing in the world, because she is. I have sat in ceremony, cried in sessions, and felt genuine, real, bone-deep release.
And I still carry a grief in my heart that has never fully packed its bags and left.
Maybe grief isn’t your thing though. Maybe what keeps circling back for you isn’t grief at all.
Maybe it’s shame that shows up the second you say what you actually want out loud.
Maybe it’s guilt every time you choose yourself over someone else’s comfort.
Maybe it’s resentment toward a person you swore you’d already forgiven, or that old, familiar ache of not feeling worthy, the one that whispers you have to earn your place at the table every damn time you sit down.
Whatever yours is, if you’ve done the work, all of it- the therapy, the journaling, the breathwork, the energy healing, and it’s still lurking in there somewhere, I need you to keep reading because this one is for you.
Ten Days in the ICU
I have lived with life-threatening asthma my entire life. Hospitalized more than two dozen times. One of those trips, I almost didn’t make it back home.
I had just turned thirty. I was deeply stressed and ignoring it, the kind of stress that eats at your gut and makes your appetite vanish completely. I wasn’t talking about any of it. I was doing what I had always done, dealing with it quietly and moving forward, because that’s all I had ever known.
My husband, bless him, had become an NPC (non-playing character) in our own family. He was working every waking hour of every day, leaving me to care for two toddlers, a household, and a growing real estate career on my own. I was lonely in a marriage. I was stressed in a body that had been holding trauma since before I could form full sentences. And eventually, my body did what bodies do when we won’t listen to them on purpose. It made me listen.
I had a severe asthma attack that no amount of breathing treatments or steroids would touch. I was intubated and placed into a medically induced coma, fifteen days after celebrating a milestone birthday. I caught pneumonia while I was under and spent ten days in the ICU. I also had a near-death experience. I’ll save that story for another day.
My daughters were one and three years old. It was Christmas 2007, and I was laid up in a hospital bed.
It Was Never Just in My Mind
Here’s what I know now that I couldn’t have understood then.
That grief was never only in my mind. It was living in my cells, my fascia, the tissue of my body, waiting for a moment when my system got quiet enough, or desperate enough, to finally speak up.
I have spent almost a decade since then repairing and restoring my own sense of sovereignty and power. Some days I feel like I’ve climbed the entire mountain and reached the peak.
I look out at my life like a view from the summit and feel victory over what happened to me as a child. Death of my mother at 10 months old. A house fire I nearly escaped. Real torture and abuse at the hands of my father’s live-in girlfriend. 5 years and 6 foster homes later. Adopted to unloving parents who saw the system as a business. I was a survivor. I was a victor over my circumstances.
What I didn’t know, for years, was that I was still carrying that grief in my body, and that it was the actual root underneath my life long asthma.
Some days that sadness, that old longing for love, still peeks its head out just to remind me, oh hey, I’m still here.
For you, it might not be sadness that peeks its head out. It might be the shame that shows up right before you set a boundary. The guilt that arrives the moment you finally rest. The resentment that flares when someone you love disappoints you the exact same way, again. Or that low hum underneath everything, the one that says you still have to prove yourself to earn an abundant life.
It doesn’t come to punish you. It comes because there’s still something inside asking for a compassionate witness without judgment.
Healing Isn’t A Straight Line, It’s a Spiral
Healing is not a mountain you climb in a straight line. It’s a mountain you climb in a spiral.
You circle it, switchback after switchback, and every so often you pass a view that looks exactly like one you already stood at months or years ago.
The anger you thought you’d conquered.
The grief you thought you’d already felt all the way through.
The shame you were certain you’d released for good. And there it is again, same ache, different shape, right in your path.
You question it. Haven’t I already dealt with this? Why is this coming up again?
I know how annoying that feels. Healing was never meant to be a convenient, one-and-done experience.
You’re not back at the bottom of the mountain. You’re higher up the same switchback, looking at a familiar view from a new altitude, one that finally lets you see it from a different vantage point. That’s your soul taking you deeper, on purpose, because you’re finally strong enough to go there.
Your pain isn’t only from the years you can remember in this life either. Most of us carry imprints from many lifetimes, woven into our energy field long before this body was born.
Here’s the part most healers, teachers, and coaches will never tell you, because it doesn’t sell as well as a transformation story with a bow on it. Your healing journey has no finish line, and no countdown timer.
It rarely shows up wearing the same face twice.
Grief might first look like sadness in your chest, then next time, sudden exhaustion for no reason.
Shame might first look like overexplaining yourself, then next time, going quiet in a room full of people who love you.
Guilt might first look like overworking to earn your rest, then next time, an uncomfortable denial when someone offers you help.
Resentment might first look like a sharp comment you didn’t mean, then next time, a cold, quiet distance.
Worthiness wounds might first look like chasing achievement, then next time, sabotaging the very thing you worked so hard to build.
Same felt sense, different disguise.
When any of this resurfaces for me now, whatever shape it takes, I don’t judge it. I don’t shove it back down where it came from. I feel it, all the way through, fully and completely.
None of this means you’re doing something wrong, or that the work you’ve done hasn’t shifted something real within you. It means you are a soul in a body, still remembering, still unfolding, one layer at a time.
But if you’re only ever meeting this work with surface-level techniques, positive thinking, a few deep breaths, a quote you screenshot and never revisit, the same lessons will keep showing up, again and again, dressed in slightly different clothes, until you’re finally willing to go to the root.
Our subconscious mind holds roughly 80% of our thoughts, beliefs, and ideas, all of which are buried below what our conscious mind can perceive.
Real healing, the kind that truly lasts, requires you to intentionally go into the depths of your own psyche and soul to find where this it lives. Whether that’s grief, shame, guilt, resentment, or the quiet, constant question of whether you’re worthy at all. And even once you find it, the root runs deep enough that it takes time to pull it all the way out.
Patience and loving kindness toward yourself are the greatest gifts you can give in this process. Shame, guilt, and judgment have no place on this path of awakening.
You Need to Remember This One Thing
Whatever keeps resurfacing for you, grief, shame, guilt, resentment, or that old ache of not being worthy, its return isn’t evidence the work didn’t stick, no matter what your ego tries to convince you. It’s proof you’re a layered, multidimensional soul, and your healing was never destined to be a single event.
Your feelings aren’t only a story you tell; they’re stored beyond the conscious mind. That’s why thinking your way out of it, on its own, was never going to be enough, no matter how many books you read, workshops you attend, or sister circles you sit in.
Every time this comes back around, you meet it from a slightly higher place than the last time. What feels like failure is actually soul growth.
The Junk Drawer Memory
Just last week, I was thinking about my aging father and the relationship we have, or more honestly, the relationship we don’t. I wanted so badly to find one good memory to hold onto. I searched for it the way you search a junk drawer for something you know should be in there but can’t seem to find.
Absolutely nothing came to mind, and I began to cry.
Sobbing, the kind of tears that hit you like a bullet straight to the center of your heart. I recognized that feeling instantly, because it lives quietly in the background of my life, waiting. I’d love to tell you I just got over it years ago. That’s not how any of this really works.
Here’s what was different this time, though. I didn’t shame myself for still feeling it after everythingI’ve done to heal it. I didn’t rush to spiritually bypass it with a lesson or a silver lining. That would have been the old me. I didn’t ask why this is still here, as if the grief owed me an explanation for existing.
I let myself sob. I let it have its full moment without making it mean anything at all.
If your recurring visitor is shame instead of grief, you let yourself feel the heat of it without following it into a story about being a bad person.
If it’s guilt, you notice the tension in your shoulders when you rest, without rushing to fix it.
If it’s resentment, you feel the heat without swallowing it whole or aiming it at the person nearest you.
If it’s worthiness, you sit with the discomfort of receiving something good without doing a thing to earn it first.
Feel it, all the way through, without turning it into evidence against yourself.
I don’t want to carry the pain of my past for the rest of my life. And somewhere underneath all of it, there’s a deep knowing that it will release when the timing is right. Could be a week. Could be a year. Could be a decade. I’m not trying to make a prediction. As long as it’s here, I choose to love and honor myself through it rather than fight it or make myself wrong.
That’s what our soul craves, full self-compassion with no list of requirements attached.
Five Things To Honor Yourself
If something old surfaced in you while reading this, here’s where to start. Not a twelve step ritual, because who has time for that? Just a few simple places to begin, whatever the feeling turns out to be.
Name it without the story. The next time something old shows up unexpectedly, whether it’s grief, shame, guilt, resentment, or that sense you’re not enough, name it in one word before your mind builds a whole Dateline drama around it. This is grief. This is shame. This is guilt. Naming it takes back some of its power.
Let it be inconvenient. Skip the why is this happening again. Tell yourself instead, this is inconvenient, and it’s allowed to be here anyway. That one sentence removes shame before it takes root, especially if the visitor today is shame itself.
Ask your body, not your mind. Your mind will try to explain or argue the feeling away. Skip that conversation. Place a hand on your heart and ask, where does this actually live in me right now? Let your body answer first.
Go to the root, not just the story. In meditation, your journal, or your own Akashic practice, ask one question. What is this feeling really protecting, and how far back does it go? You may not get a full answer today. You’re planting a seed of curiosity, not demanding a full-on harvest.
Release the finish line. Write this down: this feeling has no countdown timer, and I am allowed to feel it all the way through. Some of what you’re carrying isn’t grief, shame, or guilt itself. It’s the deadline you were quietly putting on your own healing. That’s not embodiment, that’s performance. There’s a difference.
You Are Not Behind. You Are Human
Choose to love yourself as you climb the mountain back home to your True Self. The switchbacks are tough, and the views aren’t always what you had imagined, but that never means you’re going in the wrong direction. Keep the pace, and know that every turn brings a new level of awareness and, hopefully, a little more loving-kindness for yourself along the way.
Your Soul Signal At Work
If something in this had you nodding yes, whether that was grief, shame, guilt, resentment, or the quiet question of your own worthiness, that’s not a coincidence. That’s your own soul signal, asking you to see her.
If you’re not sure exactly how your Higher Self speaks to you, take the Soul Signal Assessment. It takes a few minutes, and it will show you how she naturally communicates with you.
👉 Take the Soul Signal Assessment
And if you’re done spiraling through the same feeling alone, Soul & Mind Alchemy was built for exactly this moment.
It’s a 90-day private mentorship moving through four phases: Remembering, Releasing, Returning, and Living, where we go straight into your Akashic Records and your subconscious mind, where eighty percent of your beliefs remain hidden. It’s not another framework to read about and forget by Thursday. This is where you don’t just realize your truth; you embody it. Me, you, and your soul, the whole way through.
If you’re on a spiritual journey of awakening and want to receive more insight and guidance on your path, become a subscriber.
Which one keeps circling back around for you? Grief, shame, guilt, resentment, or worthiness? Tell me in the comments, I read every single one.
Be sure to share this with the woman in your life who needs to know she was never broken, she’s just human.