Dr. Blake Suzelis, Ph.D., Mindbody Medicine
For most of my life, I believed healing was something you fought for. You researched. You optimized. You pushed. You did everything you could to fix what was wrong. And if you were really committed, you endured because healing, at least in the way I understood it, required effort, discipline, and often a quiet kind of suffering.
But recently, something shifted. Not intellectually. Not philosophically. Experientially. And it changed everything.
There’s a fear that many people don’t talk about when it comes to healing, especially when it involves medical treatment, therapy, or long-term support. It’s the fear of entrapment. The fear that once you begin, you won’t be able to stop. That you’ll become dependent. That your life will revolve around managing, maintaining, or surviving.
I didn’t fully realize how much this fear was shaping my relationship to healing until I came face-to-face with it. For nearly five years, the idea of treatment made me physically nauseous. Not because I didn’t believe in it. Not because I was in denial. But because somewhere in me, healing had become synonymous with losing my freedom. And when healing feels like a trap, the nervous system resists, even when the path is supportive.
About a week before my oncologist told me it was time to begin treatment, my body already knew. There was no panic. No resistance. No inner argument. Just a quiet, grounded awareness: it’s time.
That moment alone was different than anything I had experienced before. But what came next was even more profound. Because instead of feeling like I was stepping onto a train I would never get off of, something inside me shifted. I didn’t feel trapped. I felt… partnered.
This is the reframe that changed everything for me: Healing is not something we are subjected to. It is something we are in relationship with.
When healing is seen as something happening to us, we brace. We resist. We try to control the outcome. But when healing becomes something we are with, something we can listen to, respond to, and even collaborate with, an entirely different experience emerges.
The same treatment. The same body. The same circumstances. But a completely different relationship. And relationship changes everything.
One of the most confusing parts of the healing journey is how unpredictable it can feel. You can do everything “right” and still feel stuck. You can take a step forward and then feel like you’ve taken two steps back. You can experience moments of clarity followed by waves of doubt or fear.
From a traditional perspective, this inconsistency can feel like failure. But what if it’s not? What if healing isn’t linear because it’s not mechanical? What if it unfolds or develops in phases?
Through both my research and lived experience, I’ve come to understand healing as a three-phase process. Not rigid or fixed, but patterned. Predictable in its unpredictability.
Phase One: Safety and Regulation
This is where healing begins, not with action, but with safety. The nervous system must feel safe enough to come out of survival mode. Without this, no amount of strategy, treatment, or mindset work will fully land.
This is the phase where we:
- Begin calming the emotional brain
- Create stability in the body
- Shift out of chronic fight, flight, or freeze
For many, this phase is overlooked. But it’s foundational. Because a dysregulated system cannot receive healing, it can only defend against perceived threat.
Phase Two: Meaning and Possibility
Once safety is established, something remarkable happens. The mind opens. This is where we begin to question old narratives, explore new perspectives, and reconnect with possibility.
Science is beginning to catch up to what many have intuitively known:
- Our beliefs influence our biology
- Our perceptions shape our physiology
- Our inner world is not separate from our physical experience
Fields like psychoneuroimmunology and epigenetics point to the dynamic relationship between mind, body, and environment. But beyond the science, this phase feels like: “Maybe things can be different.” “Maybe I’m not broken.” “Maybe there’s more available to me than I thought.” And that maybe is powerful.
Phase Three: Embodiment and Wholeness
This is where healing becomes lived. Not something you’re working toward, but something you are being.
In this phase:
- You are no longer trying to fix yourself
- You are no longer at war with your experience
- You begin to trust your body, your process, and life itself
This doesn’t mean everything is perfect. It means you are in relationship with what is—without resistance, without abandonment. And from this place, something profound emerges: Wholeness.
Not because everything has been resolved. But because nothing within you is being rejected anymore.
Looking back, I can see that my resistance to treatment wasn’t actually about treatment. It was about control. I believed that if I opened the door, I would lose autonomy. That I would be swept into something I couldn’t navigate on my own terms.
But what I discovered is this: Trust is not the absence of structure. It is the ability to be in relationship with it.
Treatment didn’t take my freedom. My relationship to it gave me a new kind of freedom, one rooted not in avoidance, but in partnership.
If you’re on your own healing journey, whether physical, emotional, or something harder to define, I want to offer you a different question.
Not: “What do I need to do to fix this?”
But: “What would it look like to be in relationship with this?”
What would it feel like to:
- Listen instead of force
- Partner instead of resist
- Trust instead of control
Not as a bypass. Not as a belief system. But as a lived experience.
There’s a phrase that has been with me lately: “The Sun is rising.” Not as a metaphor for something far away. But as something already happening. A quiet shift. A new way of relating to life, to healing, to ourselves.
Healing doesn’t have to feel like a fight. It doesn’t have to feel like a trap. It can feel like a relationship. And in that relationship, there is space. There is choice. There is freedom.
You are not broken. You are not behind. And you are not trapped.
You are in a relationship with life. And that relationship can change.
