Have you ever found yourself on a journey to healing, consciously wanting relief and transformation, yet feeling as if something keeps holding you back? This is more common than many people realize.
Despite our best intentions, there can be hidden, subconscious barriers that resist change—even when it’s change for the better. These “resistances” often stem from deep-seated beliefs, fears, or hidden benefits in remaining where we are, even in discomfort.
Hypnosis offers a powerful, safe, and effective way to work through these mental blocks, helping you access and release what’s holding you back. In this post, we’ll explore why we may be subconsciously revisiting healing, the most common subconscious barriers people experience, and how hypnosis can help you break through them—so you can embrace your journey to wellness with an open heart and mind.
What does it mean to Subconsciously Resist Healing?
Resistance to healing is resistance to change, after all, you must change in order to grow and heal. So why would we have resistance to change – especially when it’s positive change?
The short answer is that at a subconscious level we are trying to protect ourselves.
Our subconscious, the part of the mind responsible for instincts and automatic behaviors, sometimes creates barriers to protect us from what it perceives as threats, like the unknown or unfamiliar.
This subconscious part of us will create barriers to change (even positive change) if it perceives it as dangerous or threatening. These barriers may show up as limiting or negative thought patters, emotional setbacks or triggers, or even physical barriers such as pain or fatigue.
These subconscious protection mechanisms attempt to keep us safe, despite actually making our lives more difficult or keeping us stuck in negative states or patterns. This subconscious protection is built right into your DNA. It’s associated with your primal instincts – often referred to as the “reptilian brain” and is the first part of the brain to develop.
Keeping you safe – from real danger or perceived danger – is what’s kept you alive, and what keeps all animals alive. It is our instinct to fight off or flee from danger.
Even though we may consciously desire to heal – either physically from illness or pain, or emotionally from trauma or limiting beliefs – our subconscious protection mechanisms may prevent it because it senses danger.
It’s easy to romanticize healing, but it’s not all rainbows and butterflies. Often healing means facing our most painful aspects and confronting our biggest fears. Of course, it’s all worth it in the end, but the short-term can be quite uncomfortable.
But that’s not all. Besides the pain or discomfort of the healing itself, there can be subconscious reasons why healing feels like a threat.
3 Common Reasons Why We Resist Healing
There are a few common reasons why we may resist healing. A person could have one or several reasons why healing feels threatening. Let’s break it down:
1. Fear of the Unknown
The first reason why we may resist healing is simply because we fear the unknown. This could be the unknown of what life will look like after you’ve healed, or the unknows of the actual healing itself.
I witness this a lot in my clients, and have felt this first hand as I healed my trauma. I put off healing for over a decade because the fear of what that would mean was terrifying. Would I have to relive the nightmare of my trauma? Would I have to unveil some deep dark part of myself that I wasn’t aware of? Could I handle it? I honestly didn’t think so.
The fear of the unknowns kept me stuck in cycles of anger, fear, and shame for a long time. But perhaps healing for you means life would change. The unknowns of how life might be different would be very scary.
For example, if you want to heal patterns of self-sacrifice and people pleasing so that you can become more confident and create healthy boundaries, perhaps, at a subconscious level you know that there’s certain people who might not like this change.
Perhaps you know that there are people who you may need to create distance with, or relationships that you would outgrow if you were to heal this self-sacrificing pattern.
Even though it would mean your life would be better overall, the fear of the unknowns could keep you stuck in these negative patterns and situations.
2. Fear of Losing One’s Identity
This is the fear that you might somehow lose yourself in the process of healing because that wound has become such a part of your identity that, despite you being better of without it, you wouldn’t even know who you are without it.
To speak on my personal experience, I’ve witnessed this as I’ve slowly healed my anxious tendencies. This hum of constant anxiety had such long-term effects on my personality that healing it meant letting go of aspects of myself that I had clung to, and was extremely difficult.
One simple example is that this high-strung energy always kept me ‘doing’ and rarely resting. I’d been this way my whole life, and so as I healed this anxiety, I began to slow down in simple ways because the fear that pushed me to be a rushed, panicked, stress-out basket case was being alleviated.
For a while I felt completely lost, and even battled with the idea that I’d become lazy because I was allowing myself to slow down. As I continued to heal, I realized that I still am the focused, diligent person I always was – I hadn’t lost that. I’d simply let go of the frantic energy, and in some ways could be even more productive because I was able to rest, prioritize and think clearly.
Recently in working with a client, I witness her realization that a huge part of her physical healing (she was suffering from pain and a lack of mobility after an injury) was due to the fact that she identified as someone that didn’t need help; someone that was strong and would power through any challenge. She unconsciously saw anything else – like being vulnerable – as weak.
This was due to a childhood where vulnerability was punished. She didn’t have a strong, protective parent to lean on, so unconsciously, she had to become that protection herself. Being ‘tough’ or ‘stronger’ was a coping mechanism that helped her survive her childhood.
Unconsciously, she was so fearful of losing this “tough girl” identity that she was holding tension in her body, causing pain and mobility issues. Unconsciously she believed that surrendering – in any form, emotionally, or physically – meant she wasn’t that strong, resilient woman she always identified as.
For her, overcoming this barrier meant that she had to understand that surrender and vulnerability aren’t dangerous, and they don’t make her weak. She will always be that strong, resilient woman – even stronger – if she allows herself to be vulnerable.
3. Beliefs of Unworthiness
This barrier to healing stems from shame. It’s the belief that you’re not ‘good enough’ or ‘worthy of’ healing. In some cases when physical healing is desired, one might believe that their too broken to heal. Or that they’re not ‘special’ like others that have healed.
It’s a lack of self-belief, and a deep feeling of unworthiness that created a resistance to healing. The antidote to this obstacle is to reframe your perception of yourself. For some, they’ve had a lifetime of feeling unworthy, due to a lack of unconditional love in childhood, or from their own feelings of shame from experiences.
If we believe unconsciously that we don’t deserve to heal, we wont. We need to believe that we are deserving of what we desire for us to allow ourselves to have it. If you don’t feel worthy of healing, you might create psychological barriers such as thoughts like ‘this would never work for me”, emotional barriers, such as feeling triggered by others journey of recovery or healing, or even physical barriers such as procrastination, a lack of motivation, fatigue, etc.
Believing you’re worthy of healing requires you to gain a new perspective of yourself. I often challenge my clients’ beliefs which typically leads us to their childhood, or an event in their life that caused them to see themselves as worthless.
When we reframe their perception of themselves, they realize that they are as worthy as anyone else, and are reminded of the power that they have within them to change their life.
How Hypnosis can Help You Overcome Resistance to Healing
Hypnosis helps to get to the root of these unconscious barriers so that you can accelerate your healing process. When you go into hypnosis, you are entering a trance state, which means you can bypass the critical and mental filters of the mind (the conscious mind) and bring these unconscious fears and beliefs to light.
A few tools that are used in a Hypnosis session to identify and resolve the resistance and barriers to healing are:
Regression Therapy
Regression Therapy allows us to uncover the origin of the fear or belief that is holding you back. Like I mentioned in a few examples with my clients, once we regressed to the root-cause of their fear or belief, it took us to a time in their life where that fear or belief was created.
This allows us the opportunity to resolve the fear or belief at its core. By reframing the beliefs formed, and releasing the emotions that have been stored subconsciously, you are able to resolve this barrier and progress with your healing.
Positive Suggestion
While in a trance state you are much more susceptible to forming new, beneficial thought patterns and beliefs. With the simple act of suggestion, you can rewire old belief and patterns that are keeping you stuck in emotional turmoil or physical dis-ease.
Positive suggestion can come in the form of direct suggestion, indirect suggestion, metaphors, or even storytelling. These techniques allow the mind to reframe old beliefs and accept healing.
Imagery and Visualization
Studies have shown the incredible link between visualization and accelerated healing. Not only is it possible to accelerate physical healing with visualization and mental imagery, but also increase self-worth, resiliency, and other desired qualities by visualizing yourself as displaying those attributes.
Mental Imagery and visualization have been used for centuries across many cultures, and has been proven over and over that the mind plays a role in physical healing and wellbeing.
Conclusion
Healing is more than just an intention—it’s a journey that asks us to dive into the depths of who we are, bringing light to the hidden blocks that keep us from the life we want. Those old fears, beliefs, and identities aren’t there to sabotage us; they’re just echoes of our mind trying to protect us.
By using the transformative power of hypnosis, we can go straight to the source, unearthing these barriers and releasing them. Embracing true healing means stepping into a life where we are not held back but lifted up, ready to grow, thrive, and experience all the possibilities that healing makes room for. You deserve to feel whole and empowered, free from the chains of past resistances.
If you feel held back in your healing journey and want to explore the subconscious resistance with a more personalized approach, you can work with me directly.
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