Drowning In Self-Help Addiction: The Search For The Non-Existent Happily Ever After - An Essay
How To Know When You've Healed... And The Taboo Skill It Takes To Thrive Afterwards
“How do I know when I’m healed?” - that’s the question.
I’ll give away a little secret…
It’s not in the light, where you’ll find the answer to this question.
It’s not in a Life Coach’s video call talking about your happy plans and dreams, or your angelic values with your big, candy-coloured heart.
It’s where you don’t want to look…
Table of Content
1.True Peace Lives At Your Own Front Doorstep
2.A World Of All Give, And No Take
8.Can We Be Brutally Honest Here?
9.No Good Buying A New Costume, If The Stage Isn’t Set
10.Healing Comes In The Big Bangs, And The Small
11.The Flow From Victim To Victor
12.Half Of Healing Disappoints Others
Supposedly when John Lennon was asked in school what he wanted to be when he grew up, he answered, “to be happy”… even he got it wrong.
Seeking, achieving and experiencing only happiness as the success marker in life, is the biggest bullshit we’ve ever been fed as kids…
Santa Claus works through the night all across the world
The Tooth Fairy gives you their hard-earned money for your gross-ass teeth
That Disney music that plays as the main character gets the love of their life
And yet “Happily Ever After” - the biggest crap of them all.
True Peace Lives At Your Own Front Doorstep
Self-help addiction is simply another symptom of the Happily Ever After.
They say our brains are becoming obese with it.
The mental scrutiny, the over-intellectualisation, the analysis by PowerPoint.
All of this excavation helping to create fat minds and empty hearts.
With all of our souls becoming these empty mansions in the meantime.
All because our search for happy happens outside our own walls.
A World Of All Give, And No Take
I spend a long time working with Young People to get their heads out of this Happily Ever After crap and it’s my mission to help people lift the same shame we’re all bred to have…
The “why can’t you just be happy?” nonsence of avoidant expectation.
If you are happy, even forced, then the world doesn’t need to help or care...
If you’re happy, then the world can take from your abundance and you’re somewhat then useful.
We’ve been lied to for this very reason.
Love & Light = Want & Wait
Nobody was designed for constant happiness, buddy.
And if you think that’s the goal, then you’ll be putting off your real life forever and arrive at your deathbed realising how much you avoided living whilst you were so busy just wanting and waiting to be happy.
Life isn’t about happy (light only), life is about experience (light and dark).
Ever question why we never have enough? Why we always want the next thing once we have what we’d always wanted?
It’s because our soul wants expansion and experience, not comfort and coexistent avoidance.
But by that definition, the soul wants more experiential growth… not simply more “experiences and stuff”.
The sooner we learn, understand and then believe that, the more we’ll take the stabilisers off…
Because emotions and feelings are temporary experiences (or should be).
We can’t demand our brains, bodies and souls to constantly deliver that positive state 24/7/365.
That’s just fucking ludicrous.
Am I Healed Yet?
This delusion in life means we expect to grow and bloom into this human version of a bright sunflower with a big smile, hopping across from cloud to cloud on a unicorn, whilst dry humping the odd rainbow along the way.
We can’t benchmark if we’re healed by how happy we are.
Because it only takes a rude driver one day, to careen our years of hard work off the highway of completeness.
It’s deluded and yet we’ve been taught this way.
If emotions and feelings are so temporary then, how can we know if we’ve healed enough? Happy enough?
The answer, for me, didn’t lie in whether I was “happy” enough or how often, rather it was more, “are my darkest demons slayed?”
The Audit of Darkness 🕳️
Therapy, at its basics, is having an audience, a witness, to provide space for your human experience and every nasty nugget within it.
And through therapy, self-help books, self-reflections, journalling etc, we can become quickly aware of the areas we’d like to solve… because our pain and daily projections are currently right there with it.
A job you hate, a partner you despise, an Instagram lifestyle you covet, a health condition you want gone…
All areas driven by pains of people’s today’s.
And even though these current issues can be soooo hard to work through, there’s a reason why a therapist will no doubt want to ask questions like “and when did you start to notice that feeling/ behaviour?”
They want your back story, your past, your wounds… your most shameful and painful shit.
For good reason.
Because it’s in the worst swamps of the soul that you’ll find the water lilies of resurrection and ultimate growth.
It’s in the most icky, embarrassing, violating and violent decay that the seed of your biggest evolution is just waiting to pop its head through.
So my answer to “how do I know when I’m healed?” is…
“Are you through all the worst things that’ve ever happened to you?”
Not “over” the worst thing, “through” it.
Because so much of our life, our patterns and our habits, are driven by the stories we tell ourselves, based on those very awful times… with the symptoms of today simply being mirrors staring back, aching for us to address it already.
A Dark And Dreary Example
If I give you one example here; Depression.
Now there’s many types and I’d like to think if they were Pokemon cards, I’d be a fucking millionaire.
Gotta catch em all: I’m probably near completion.
And not in a fucking fun way.
Have you ever heard Jim Carrey’s definition of depression?
I’ll repeat it here, cause he ain’t wrong in my book (and never will be).
“Think of the word ‘depressed’ as ‘deep rest.’ Your body needs to be depressed. It needs deep rest from the character you’ve been trying to play.”
There are a million justified reasons to feeling the symptoms of Depression.
And underlying the causation of impact, the root of the response (not necessarily the reasons for the flair) will be all down to how you specifically meet those life’s circumstances and how you specifically react to them based on your history of inner-development.
In other words; why you allow it to hurt you.
What a plane crash is to one person’s Depression is another person’s Bali holiday with the lawsuit money.
And so, I find power in that.
My depressive episodes have never come from what’s gone on, not even what’s happened in modern life to trigger the feelings… they’ve come from how I’ve grown and spawned as a human prior to that.
It’s the self-belief I have, the narratives I’ve created, the people I’ve let in, the choices I’ve made and how I’ve responded to the worst treatments I’ve ever faced.
And in that case, it’s not been the current situation that needed to change first, it’s been me.
Each time.
As Jim Carrey says, it’s my “character”.
And we’re often in need of a new one.
Schrödinger’s Closet
The biggest issue I see with people not knowing if they’re healed and “cured” of things is the fact that we’re too busy being distracted and stressed in order to test drive their new, healed skinsuits.
Because, the therapy sessions end and we have to return to our “normal” life.
(PLEASE NOTE: I’m not making out that we have an ultimate healed state, I’m talking about healing from the biggest battles we’ve faced in general terms here).
If we therapeutically dig through our closet of skeletons, give them a good clean and pop them back on the rack with some nice air fresheners, how do we know if they’re ok when we close the doors back on them and crack on with our busy lives?
It’s a case of the Schrödinger’s Closet - are these skeletons staying clean if we can’t find the time, energy and empowerment to check in on them often enough?
With full-time jobs, childcare issues, caring for elderly parents, conflict with spouses, worrying about the rent payment: how can we spot improvement each time we return to that same blueprint of life?
The solution: we life audit to make space for our new “character”.
We consciously see how all the shoes still fit… it at all.
Can We Be Brutally Honest, Here?
This is the part where I get controversial and lose half of y’all.
I am going to talk literally, ignoring ALL emotional attachment for things.
Get ready… cause I’m going to use CAPS and SLAPS.
YOU👏🏻 LIVE👏🏻 THE👏🏻 LIFE👏🏻 YOU👏🏻 ALLOW
This is an extreme version of a list. You ready?
You chose to go to uni and therefore get in debt
You stay with your partner despite wanting more or different
You follow society’s expectations of hair appointments, mortgage payments, school systems and work contracts
You get the extra credit card out at Christmas time
You burnout because you people please and don’t prioritise yourself
There’s just five things there.
The common denominator isn’t life, it’s you.
Don’t get me wrong, I have my own list.
And I am HARSH with myself more than anyone.
I’ve now spent a year working my arse off getting to the life my new character actually wants and with it, now experience more peace, safety, love and inner joy than I’ve ever felt - because I’ve put a mirror up to my own mess and called out the things I’ve made myself believed were fixed.
(I have much more left to do.)
And anyone else can do the same.
No Good Buying A New Costume, If The Stage Isn’t Set
The healed self (character) needs a new stage to try in this theatre we call life.
If we stick our new self back into our old life, the resistance will tempt us to relapse and our same people and circumstances will be judging our newness and wants to change.
Instead, we must look at these things, places and people that no longer fit, make (sometimes extreme) edits and figure out how to utilise the gaps left behind.
It’s these very gaps that help the final stage of healing.
The living of the new life!
Healing Comes In The Big Bangs, And The Small
Picture this example, it’s crude and extreme, but stay with me…
Trigger warning: domestic violence.
A woman (let’s call her Joan) has been married to a violent and abusive man for over ten years.
Without him knowing, she seeks a new counsellor.
Through working with them she discovers that this abuse and violent treatment isn’t at all her fault, but her response to it is where the accountability falls.
She has two options.
Work on developing coping mechanisms for this current day issue or to dig deeper.
She chooses to dig deep. She’s desperate.
Through this work, she discovers that childhood wounds have created patterns where she has unintentionally designed reenactments, creating a reality for herself that would always end up with her returning to the same husband or even potentially finding another man with the same behaviours.
Through months of work she manages to leave her husband.
That could be the end of it, couldn’t it?
Society would see that as a success story… wouldn’t we?
Where the next work starts (and the helpful tool of avoiding relapse and return) is for her to assess where the gaps now are and to find remedies and resolves for them.
She is healed only to the extent that she’s been made aware of a pattern and has performed the first big shift required of her in order to move on.
But in the editing of her life, what does her new, truer character need in order to move forward with a fresh zest for life and new opportunities for experience and expansion?
Because what we often forget to empathise with, are the little cuts left behind when an audit of the gaps aren’t looked at:
The lonely nights sleeping by herself in bed after 10 years of married life
Her grieving lost time
Having to rebuild lost relationships
The judgement of herself as she looks back at what she put up with
Her fear of ever trusting a man again
Feeling self-hatred because of “failing” her wedding vows
Doubts where she “could have done more” to fix it
The support dying off after she finds somewhere safe to live
Not knowing who she is now with this newer '“character”
The aftermath.
I’m sure you might be able to see some parallels, in your own way.
The Flow From Victim To Victor
So when does Joan know when she’s “healed”?
You see the list above? Those “cuts” are all creating lack.
They’re gaps where her previous life used to be, her previous character.
In my own experience, healing is going through a new cycle when you’re recovered from the impactful decisions and you start to intentionally decide how those gaps are filled.
With each one filled, comes with the emotions and experiences we were grading life to begin with:
The degree in which we embody ourselves
How much we connect with our own bodies
The growth in our sense of self
Our spiritual capability
The ways in which our self-awareness evolves
The level at which we experience awe, peace, joy, abundance
How we develop further our relational skills and the way we can empathise with humans, animals and nature
Our priority to serve and build community around us
And, most importantly, how we utilise the wounds now that they are sealed scars (and also how we don’t too)
Half Of Healing Disappoints Others
We’ve all seen the trauma versions of the Rags-To-Riches stories.
The “I went through all this and now I’ve pulled through and I’m giving it all back” type stuff.
When you strip back the fanfare and the Insta shares, there’s a nugget of gold in there.
The final stage of healing is two-fold:
It’s how you use your scars to define purpose(s) in your life going forward. Allowing yourself to take from the pain rather than it just take from you.
But…
It’s also the release, and building what and who you are without that narrative too.
And for me, we don’t like to talk about that last part.
Society can’t reward a hero for putting their cape down for five minutes and going scuba diving or zumba class once in a while.
Which leads me to our taboo solution to this epic problem.
One solution to rule them alllll…
SELFISHNESSSS 🥳🥳
There has to be an element of selfishness.
This is what my stuff is all about.
Authenticity (the highest frequency we can ever aspire to) cannot exist without the balance between serving and selfish.
It is impossible.
Carve this shit on my gravestone cause I ain’t budging on this.
The last stage of healing is selfishness.
It’s the opposite of victimhood.
Because, unfortunately, when we’re wounded and need to heal, that was the state we were in, no matter how we responded to damage, trauma etc in the very moments of impact.
We. Were. Victims.
And so, it makes perfect sense to me, that on the opposite side of being overpowered by something, is the healed ability to be empowered.
Empowerment is birthed from selfishness.
And therefore, so does true healing.
To Wrap Up…
So follow me as I dig deeper into all of this.
That Sacred Decay is about heading toward the divine dark day of death with as much of a life behind us as possible.
As Charles Bukowski said it better,
“We are here,
To laugh at the odds,
And live our lives so well,
That death will tremble,
To take us.”
Because we are always motivated by the fear of death, whether we want to admit it or not.
And the only antidote is to live a life so incredibly whole, that it’s truly worthy of one, big, beautiful ending.
Lilith x
Thank you so much for reading and being here with me on this messy, beautiful journey.
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