When Healing Doesn’t ‘Work’
Why Your Past Attempts Weren’t a Waste
There’s a special kind of hopelessness that only shows up after you’ve already tried to get help.
Not the “maybe one day I’ll work on myself” phase.
I’m talking about the phase where you can say things like:
“Yeah, I’ve done therapy.”
“I hired a coach once.”
“I’ve taken the courses, read the books, done the retreats.”
…yet you’re still waking up with the same anxiety, the same patterns, the same belief that your break will never happen.
At that point, it stops feeling like “I haven’t found the right thing yet”
and starts feeling like:
“Maybe I’m just the one person this stuff doesn’t work for.”
If that’s where you are, this is for you.
The quiet belief underneath: “I must be the problem.”
High achievers rarely say it out loud, but I hear it in the subtext all the time:
“Therapy didn’t really do much for me.”
“Coaching felt good in the moment, but nothing really changed.”
“I get the concepts, but my life is still my life.”
If you’ve invested time, energy, and money into healing…
and you’re still struggling, the brain does what it always does:
It looks for a story that makes sense.
Here are the three most common ones:
“The practitioner wasn’t that good.”
“Those methods are kind of bullshit.”
“I’m just broken / resistant / too much.”
The first two might be partly true sometimes.
But most people secretly land on #3.
“If I’ve already tried, and I’m still here…
That must mean I am the problem.”
That belief hurts more than the original pain.
Because now your nervous system isn’t just carrying stress, shame, or trauma.
It’s carrying the conclusion:
“Help doesn’t work for me.”
So you stop reaching.
You keep functioning.
You call it “managing.”
And inside, you feel more alone than ever.
My “failed” help
I’ve had multiple rounds of support that, at the time, I mentally filed under:
“Nice… but didn’t really change my life.”
I worked with a career coach years before I left my corporate job.
He told me, straight up:
“Your passion isn’t sports. It’s people. I see you as a life coach.”
I nodded. It landed.
Then I went back to my old life.
7 years later, after a panic attack, a near-breakdown, and a move across the world, I suddenly realized:
That one sentence had been echoing in the background the whole time.
The career coach didn’t “fail.”
The timing and layer of work just didn’t match where my system was.
I also did therapy that didn’t touch my nervous system at all.
We talked about patterns.
I understood myself better.
I could explain my issues in beautiful language.
But I’d leave the session and still:
Numb out the same way.
React to my kids the same way.
Drag myself through the week the same way.
At the time, I thought:
“I guess talking about it doesn’t actually change anything.”
Now I can see:
Those were first passes.
They gave me language, context, and a tiny bit of self-compassion.
They didn’t fix it.
But they quietly softened the ground for what came later.
Insight is not the same as integration
One of the biggest traps for high achievers is confusing understanding with change.
You walk out of a session thinking:
“That makes so much sense.”
“I can see exactly where this pattern comes from.”
“I never connected those dots before.”
That’s insight.
It’s important. It matters.
But insight lives in your head.
Integration lives in your body and your daily choices.
A lot of traditional therapy and coaching stays in the “insight” layer:
You talk about childhood.
You analyze thoughts.
You build clever frameworks.
But when your nervous system is still in chronic survival mode, insight alone is like giving a TED talk to a house that’s on fire.
Useful information.
Wrong timing.
It’s not that the work “failed.”
It’s that the sequence was off.
Your system needed:
Stabilization – getting your baseline out of constant fight/flight/freeze.
Then story and identity work.
Then integration into relationships, work, and leadership.
Most people only ever get #2.
So they walk away thinking:
“I can explain exactly why I’m messed up.
I just still feel messed up.”
You were in survival mode the whole time
Here’s another hard truth:
A lot of people do their first rounds of therapy or coaching while their life is on fire.
Career on the brink.
Marriage hanging by a thread.
Health deteriorating.
Kids absorbing all of it.
You’re trying to “heal” inside the exact environment that keeps your system lit up.
In that state, your body isn’t prioritizing integration.
It’s prioritizing getting through the week.
So yes:
You show up to sessions.
You cry.
You share honestly.
You maybe feel better for an hour.
Then your phone lights up.
Your calendar takes back over.
You go right back into old grooves.
And because you’re a high achiever, you blame yourself:
“I guess I didn’t apply it well enough.”
“Maybe I didn’t really want it.”
“If I’d done the homework properly, this would have worked.”
No.
You were doing healing work inside a war zone.
That doesn’t mean it was useless.
It means your system was using 90% of its energy to survive, and only 10% was left for anything else.
What your “failed” attempts actually did
If we zoom out, here’s what I almost always see with people like you:
Those earlier rounds of support:
Gave you language for things you couldn’t name before.
(“Oh… that’s what anxiety / trauma / people-pleasing actually is.”)Gave you at least one moment where you felt fully seen.
Even if you didn’t know what to do with it.Planted ideas that didn’t take root at the time…
but are now the exact truths you’re bumping into from all directions.Showed you what doesn’t work for your system.
(Pure mindset work, or purely cognitive therapy, or 6-week miracles.)
That doesn’t sound like failure to me.
That sounds like a series of seeds.
Some of them are still underground.
Some of them have cracked the soil and you can’t unsee them now.
That’s why you’re even reading this.
A part of you knows:
“Those attempts weren’t the end of the story.
They were the warm-up.”
Why The Return Home is built differently
I didn’t design The Return Home from a textbook.
I built it from:
What didn’t work for me.
What only half-worked.
And what finally created lasting change.
So the structure assumes:
You are not starting at zero.
You already have insight, language, and tools.
You are still stuck in certain patterns.
That means:
We don’t waste time pretending you’ve never done work before.
We honor everything you’ve already tried and mine it for gold.We start with your nervous system and environment, not deep story excavation on day one.
Because your system can’t rewrite anything it doesn’t feel safe enough to touch.We move slowly and deliberately.
No solving the world overnight.
No “break you down to build you up” bullshit.We integrate into your real life:
Your marriage.
Your kids.
Your work.
Your calendar.
Not hypothetical scenarios in a vacuum.
By the time people come to me, most are not beginners.
They are experienced, disappointed, half‑hopeful humans who can say:
“I’ve tried a lot…
and I’m still here.”
Those are my people.
A practical check-in for you today
Instead of throwing out everything you’ve done before as a failure, try this:
1. Make a list of the “work” you’ve already done.
Therapy, coaching, retreats, courses, books that really impacted you.
Then ask, honestly:
What did I get from each of these?
(Even if it was small: a phrase, a reframe, a moment.)What layer was it mostly working on?
Mind (insight, mindset)?
Soul (emotions, connection)?
Body (nervous system, regulation)?
Environment (relationships, calendar, habits)?
You’ll probably notice a pattern:
Most of your work lived in the first two layers.
2. Ask yourself:
“If I didn’t use my past attempts as evidence that I’m broken…
What if I used them as evidence that I’m already on the path?”
And notice what that does in your body.
Even if it just loosens the knot 5%.
That’s an opening.
If you’re “helped out,” but not helped through
If you’re reading this with a lump in your throat thinking:
“This is me. I’ve tried so many things. I’m tired of starting over.”
I want you to hear this clearly:
You are not starting from scratch.
You’re starting from experience.
The Return Home is not “healing 101.”
It’s a 12‑month container designed for high‑functioning adults who:
Look fine from the outside.
Have already done a lot of work.
Still find themselves repeating the same cycles.
We use everything you’ve lived and already tried as raw material, not as proof of failure.
From there, we build:
A regulated baseline in your body.
A different relationship with your emotions.
A story that isn’t written by “I’m not enough.”
And practical ways to live this in your relationships and work.
If that lands as “oh shit, this is me,” here’s your next step.
Your next step: get a real mirror, not another generic answer
Before anyone ever joins The Return Home, I have them fill out a detailed assessment.
Not a fluffy quiz.
A serious look at:
Your nervous system patterns
Your survival strategies
Your relationships and roles
The work you’ve already done
When you complete it, I sit down and create a personalized written overview (with the help of AI) of what I see:
The core patterns under the surface
How they’re likely impacting you right now
Where I’d focus first if we were working together
Clients have told me this overview alone has been worth well over $500 in clarity.
“I have to say Wow, this is way more than what I expected. I really appreciate the time and effort you put into putting this together, i’m speechless.”
Right now, I’m offering it for free.
If you want that level of reflection on your life, go here:
Fill it out honestly. Don’t perform for me. Don’t perform for yourself.
If I don’t think The Return Home is the right next step for you, I’ll tell you that directly in the overview.
If I do think you’re a fit, I’ll also tell you exactly why, and what working together would look like.
No pressure. No convincing. Just truth.
You’ve already done work that “didn’t work.”
Let’s not waste that.
Let’s use it as our foundation forward.