Why Self-Help and Endless Healing Don't Work

Here's what the invisible gorilla can teach you about personal growth.

Join my free masterclass, How to Create Your Reality Through Archetypal Magic, to learn how to step off the healing journey and jump onto the heroine’s path. Save your spot here.

There’s a famous psychological study known as The Invisible Gorilla experiment. Participants are asked to watch a short video and count the number of times players pass a basketball. The participants were pretty good at keeping score.

But what many of them don’t notice is that, halfway through the video, a person in a gorilla suit walks right through the scene, and stays for about nine seconds. About 50% of the observers don’t even notice a gorilla in the middle of a basketball game.

Because their attention was directed at counting the passes, they filtered out other information. This demonstrates how focused attention can cause us to overlook what is right in front of us. It also reveals that we don’t see with our eyes alone; we see with our attention.

So you might be asking yourself, “What’s the point? And what does this have to do with healing?”

Well, my friend, everything.

When you’re hyper-focused on one thing (like keeping track of passes), you’ll likely miss everything else—even something as outrageous as a dancing gorilla.

Self-help and healing work the same way.

The more you focus on what’s wrong, the less you’ll be able to see what’s right, or more importantly, what’s possible. So, all that work on healing your inner child, soothing your anxious attachment, or silencing your inner critic is actually keeping you distracted from what you truly want: to live a pretty cool life.

How do you know if you’ve fallen down the self-help or healing rabbit hole and might have become overly distracted with fixing and healing?

Some common symptoms include:

• A stack of half-read (or never-read) self-help books

• Late-night scrolling to self-diagnose your “issues”

• Feeling like you’re always working on yourself, but never arriving anywhere

• Being “on a healing journey”… for what feels like most of your adult life

If you found yourself nodding to any one of those, keep reading.

Hyper-focusing on healing and what’s wrong is not entirely your fault. You’ve been conditioned to believe that something is wrong with you. Read my post, The Shadow Side of Self-Help, to learn why.

You’ve been told that the reason your life isn’t the way you want it is because there’s a part of you that needs to be “healed.” So, before you can write the book, fall in love, make the money, or speak your truth, you need to do the work!

And so you set up camp in the realm of healing, tending to wounds, processing trauma, naming patterns. It becomes a cycle with no end. Because healing, by nature, is infinite. There will always be another layer. Another “block.” Another reason to wait.

But there’s a plot twist. Ready for it?

There’s nothing wrong.

Sure, we all have our trauma, karma, and dharma to contend with, but that’s sort of besides the point. What if the real problem was that you just weren’t looking in the right direction?

Look Where You Want to Go

I didn’t grow up with a bike. My childhood home was at a chaotic intersection, filled with speeding cars and frequent accidents. It just wasn’t safe. As a result, I never had any confidence riding a bike.

But when my kids were around six and eight, I decided it was time. I got a bike and started pedaling. There was a little wooden boardwalk that ran through the nearby forest—and I could never ride across it. No matter how hard I tried, I’d veer off, my tires sliding into the brambles, my shins getting shredded by thorns.

Then someone gave me a piece of advice that changed everything:
“Look where you want to go—not where you don’t.”

Simple. Obvious. Game-changing.

The moment I focused on the other side of the boardwalk instead of the edges, I made it across.

That, to me, is personal growth. Not hyperfocusing on what you believe to be broken. Not steering away from the pain, but choosing to look toward the life you want—and learning how to ride toward it.

Shift from Healing to Becoming

This doesn’t mean bypassing real pain or pretending the past didn’t shape you. It means not letting your pain define you.

It means shifting your focus from healing wounds to summoning power.

Instead of endlessly tending to your inner child, what if you summoned your inner Lover into your relationship, or called on your inner Warrior to face that legal battle head-on?

Instead of analyzing your every attachment wound, what if you invoked your inner High Lady—sovereign, self-honoring, deeply rooted in her worth?

You don’t need to be fully healed to be fully here.

Marianne Williamson defines a miracle as shift in perception from fear to love. That’s true here too. When you change your perspective, you unlock your magic.

Healing alone will never be enough: it keeps your gaze on the past.
But transformation requires a vision. A forward pull. A myth to live.

So ask yourself:

• Who are you becoming?

• What kind of life would make your body exhale and your soul say yes?

• Which inner archetype do you need to embody to take the next step?

Let healing be a chapter, not the whole story.

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Ready to stop fixing and start creating?

Join me for my free masterclass: How to Create Your Reality: Tap into Archetypal Magic to Transform Your Life from the Inside Out.

You’ll learn how to work with inner figures like the the Lover, Wild Woman, and High Lady—so you can get off the healing journey and begin the heroine’s journey.

▶️ You can save your spot here.