When Healing in Community Isn’t the Answer
There was a time in my mid-20s when I felt particularly lost. The life I was living didn’t fully feel like one I had chosen, but rather one I had fallen into by following what was expected. I felt restless and confused about how I had ended up where I was, increasingly aware of how disconnected I’d been from my interior life.
I started getting curious about my thought patterns and past choices, and the underlying beliefs driving them. I began asking deeper questions about who I was and what I actually wanted. During this time, I considered finding a therapist or other healing practitioner to help me sort through it all. But as I sat with that option over a few weeks, something within me resisted. I realized I wanted to give myself the chance to know my own mind before I allowed someone else to interpret my experience for me.
What the Wellness World Gets Half Right
When it comes to healing work there’s a phrase often touted as fact: Healing happens in community.
With it comes the unspoken assumption that true healing requires other people: a guide, a container, a group of like-minded peers with the same healing intentions and desires.
And community spaces can be incredibly nourishing. Many of us have experienced growth facilitated by skilled practitioners who helped us make meaning where we couldn’t before, who held space as we descended somewhere we didn’t want to go, who helped us examine our pain in a gentler light. Having another person acknowledge and empathize with what we’re going through is healing in itself, as care and acceptance are inherently restorative.
As a somatic healing practitioner who guides women to work with their nervous systems, I understand how powerful it is to sit in the presence of a regulated practitioner. Our bodies register others’ nervous system states beyond our conscious awareness, signaling whether we are safe enough to open and share. Working with someone in a 1:1 or group setting, particularly in a trauma-sensitive space where you feel empowered to show up in your full vulnerability, can propel you forward in ways that are difficult to access alone.
Community also meets our basic needs for belonging and connection. Group work offers the felt sense of being in it together, of learning from women who have already navigated what you’re currently moving through.
What We Lose When We Always look Outward
As women we’ve been conditioned to look outside ourselves for answers rather than internalizing that we are the ultimate authority of our own lives. In health, wellness, and spiritual spaces, consumerist-based rhetoric further confuses us into believing we don’t know what’s true for us, that we simply need to find the right teacher or guide who holds the key to our healing.
There is also a gendered assumption that women need community at all times. That we are meant to always be with one another, to cooperate and witness and hold space and heal together. The shadow side of this is the slow relinquishing of sovereignty over our own ability to do deep work for ourselves.
When we perpetually outsource our healing, our decision making, and our discernment, we diminish our connection to ourselves. We forget what our own knowing looks like, independent of someone else’s filter. We begin to believe we are reliant on others for change, that we have little agency in our own lives, and we rob ourselves of the chance to know who we are on a deeper level. There is a real danger in always deferring to the consensus of the community, believing the group always knows what’s best for us.
If we are always seeking out a guide, we never afford ourselves the chance to be self-led. We are forever following and responding rather than leading and initiating and charting. We can place the responsibility for our own transformation on the group so we don’t have to be accountable to ourselves.
Painting community as the only valid path to healing negates so much that needs to be done to strengthen our sense of self, diminishes the vital interior work that teaches us we are whole on our own.
The Foundation Only You Can Lay
Solo healing isn’t inferior to community healing. It’s a much needed, sometimes neglected, part of personal growth and transformation that serves as the foundation upon which everything else is built. It is so much more than the absence of support; it’s a deliberate gift of intentional presence with yourself. Solitude is its own kind of canvas, an opportunity to learn who we are at our core.
When I began my inward journey, I did so primarily through writing. Journaling helped me make sense of my thoughts, to more clearly discern my patterns, to contemplate and revisit the questions that wouldn’t leave me alone. And through this process, I began to know and understand myself more intimately than I had before.
This solo journeying deepened something that was previously missing: I could hear my own voice. Amid all the confusion, I started to distinguish between what was coming from my intuition and what was simply fear masquerading as something rational, what was coming from within me and what was conditioning from outside influence. That inner knowing began to guide my decisions, moving me toward paths that felt more aligned than anything I would have found by following what had worked for others.
I also noticed how much clearer I felt in my values. Where what I believed and how I wanted to behave diverged from the mainstream. Until then, this knowledge wasn’t readily available to me; rather it was something that needed excavation to be brought to light. And that excavation was an inherently solo pursuit.
There is so much richness to be found in this kind of work. This is where we develop internal coherence. This is where we learn to hear our own voice without needing someone to surface it for us. Where we practice self-leadership and learn to architect our own healing at a pace that meets our individual needs.
The emphasis on community often downplays the need to become whole, sovereign women unto ourselves, who know who we are and where we stand without the unconscious influence of others. There’s much to be gained by sitting in the uncertainty of not knowing what comes next, what choice to make or what path to take and waiting until the answer reveals itself without reaching for something external. This is how we build deeper self-trust over time, the capacity to self-source wisdom, a felt sense of our own authority.
This is the work meant for you.
The Cyclical Nature of Healing
There are seasons for community and seasons for solitude. A natural ebb and flow of inward focus and external orientation, of inner and outer connection. The work is not one-sided and there is no fixed ratio for when we should prioritize one over the other. At times community is where we need to be. Group spaces that align with where we want to go, the felt experience of being witnessed and understood. Other times call for an inward gaze, for the deep solo work that stretches and remakes us, with community woven in more lightly as needed.
There is no linear path, no one-size-fits-all approach to healing and transformation. Most of us need both, and our needs will fluctuate throughout our lives. And sometimes the community we desire simply isn’t available. That doesn’t mean the healing work stops. We can always turn inward. We can nourish and regulate and love and accept ourselves in the ways we often assume only others can offer. We can do this for ourselves. We can be our own witness, give ourselves grace, be present through the storms and joys of life.
What the dominant wellness narrative rarely teaches is how to architect this for ourselves. How to discern when we need a guide and when we need to guide ourselves. When to seek out community and when to sit with our own experience. That discernment is a skill, one that deepens through practice. And it begins with trusting that you are capable of knowing the difference. Knowing when to stretch your capacity and knowing when you are out of your depths.
We are the architects of our paths, the main characters of our lives, the writers of our own stories. We’re the ones holding the pen.
You don’t need permission to trust your own process or choose how you heal. Community will be there when you need it. But solo practice is just as valid.
When I look back on that tumultuous time in my twenties, I am so profoundly grateful I didn’t immediately reach for something outside myself. That time became my training ground, where I first began to hear my inner voice, sit with my internal storms, move and unearth at my own pace. To recognize when I had the capacity to go deeper and when I needed to pause. It was where I learned to be my own guide, to take charge of my own journey.
That possibility is available to you too. It always has been.
