We often expect healing to follow a straight path: pain → recovery → peace. But real healing looks less like a line and more like a spiral. Emotions, experiences, and core wounds will keep coming back around. Not because we’ve failed, but because this is how growth works. When we feel, reflect, and learn each time, we start to notice we show up differently for these recurring moments. That is progress.
What Is the Healing Spiral?
The healing spiral is a powerful metaphor for non-linear growth and emotional healing journey. Instead of steadily moving forward, we have loops where similar themes, emotions, and core wounds revisited arise.
Each time we circle around, it’s not regression, it’s responding from a more healed place, with more awareness, more tools, more inner strength.
https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/the-spiral-path-of-change-0402124?utm
Why Recurrence Doesn’t Mean Stagnation
Feeling old wounds again does not mean you have failed; engaging with them is part of the emotional healing process.
Reflection turns pain into insight: What have you learned, how do you show up differently now?
This kind of manifesting inner growth shows in small shifts: responding with compassion, setting healthier boundaries, choosing acceptance.
Seasons and Phases: Accepting Easier & Harder Cycles
Just like in nature, life has seasons: growth, dormancy, storm, bloom. We’ll have times that feel easier, and times that feel very hard.
Growth often feels like we hit more bad days, but that’s often a sign we’re moving faster up the spiral. Because we’ve done enough inner work, recurring patterns surface sooner, more intensely, so we can integrate them more rapidly.
https://www.psychmechanics.com/healing-is-not-linear/?utm
Looking Back Down and Celebrating Progress
Reflect on where you were one spiral ago: what was overwhelming then may feel manageable or even reassuring now. This is evidence of resilience in healing.
Celebrate the ways you have changed—not just what you’ve overcome, but how you respond differently now. These shifts are proof of core wound healing and growth in your emotional healing journey.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/owning-pink/201008/whats-your-core-wound?utm
The Healing Spiral & Manifestation of Growth
The healing spiral aligns with how manifestation, growth, self-development work: what we want to manifest tends to require revisiting internal blocks, old wounds, beliefs. Each revisit offers a chance to upgrade.
Understanding this spiral helps us embrace the difficult parts: they aren’t detours, they’re essential steps in the deeper transformation.
How to Navigate Your Healing Spiral
Allow the feelings: don’t suppress what comes up.
Reflect: journaling, therapy, talking with trusted friends. What’s different this time? What can you learn?
Celebrate how you show up: mark the ways in which you reacted differently than before.
Expect cycles: knowing they’ll come can reduce shame & frustration when things feel hard.
Cultivate resilience: self-compassion, rest, healthy boundaries; tools to support you in both the stormy and sunny seasons.
Conclusion
Healing is not linear. It’s a spiral: full of loops, losses, insights, growth. Each time you revisit a core wound, each time you feel what you felt before but respond with a bit more wisdom, you’re moving up. Expect easier phases and hard ones. Don’t judge the bad days, they often hold the seeds of your next up-level. There really is magic in the darkness.
Ready to turn your healing spiral into your strength?
If you’d like support exploring your emotions, reflecting on your growth, and stepping more powerfully into your journey, I’d love to help.
Book a free Discovery Call with me—no pressure, just clarity.
Email me at thrive@coachingbyanneka.co.uk to get started. Let’s discover what your next level could look like, together.https://coachingbyanneka.co.uk/coaching/
