The Wisdom of the Spiral: Why Healing Isn’t Linear

I’ve been thinking about how healing actually works, and one thing I keep coming back to is that healing isn’t linear. It would be nice to move through something once and never have to encounter it again. But healing rarely unfolds that way.

Instead, we find ourselves revisiting familiar territory—old anxieties, griefs, relationship patterns, and places of pain. And when that happens, it’s easy to wonder:

“Why am I back here again?”

But what if we’re not actually back where we started?

The situation may look familiar, but you are not the same person you were before.

Every day, we are shaped by new experiences, new awareness, and new perspectives. We return to these familiar places with a greater capacity than we had before.

One of the images that has been coming to me lately is the spiral.

I don’t experience healing as a static process, but as an organic movement. As we move through life, the spiral naturally expands. What once felt tight and constricting begins to open. There is more space between our triggers and our responses, more room for reflection, more freedom to choose, and more life experience to draw from.

That’s why I don’t see setbacks as evidence that healing isn’t happening.

Often, they’re signs that healing is reaching a deeper layer. Something that wasn’t previously available to be felt, understood, or worked through is now coming into view.

To me, the goal of healing isn’t to never struggle again.

It’s to create more space, more flexibility, and more freedom in how we relate to our struggles.

And if we zoom out far enough, we may even begin to look back at old wounds differently—not with shame or frustration, but with the recognition that they helped shape us.

The very places that once felt like limitations can begin to reveal themselves as part of our evolution. The patterns we have circled around for years may have also been cultivating depth, compassion, resilience, and wisdom.

Over time, we become less constricted by our struggles. We understand them more clearly. We have more choice in how we respond.

That’s a very different experience than being trapped inside them.

Perhaps that is what the spiral offers us: the ability to look back across the decades and see moments of pain and constraint not simply as suffering, but as the seeds of something that continued to grow.

Not evidence of failure.

Evidence of becoming.