There is a story behind every healer.

There is also a curse that every healer carries.

The healer is not born as one. We are forged in the fire of traumas and the cruelest part is that the very skill that kept us alive in the traumas become the chains that bind us, maybe for the rest of our lives.

We learn to prioritize everyone else’s needs because ours are often ignored.

We learn to be invisible while simultaneously indispensable.

We became the people everyone needs but nobody truly knows.

This is the healer’s curse.

To be surrounded by people yet fundamentally alone.

To give endlessly yet never receive.

To be seen as strong when we are barely holding together.

These patterns don’t just affect our relationships, they shape our entire identity. The identity of being the person who could handle anything, who never broke, who was everyone’s safe container. But in private, we are collapsing. Despite all the knowledge in psychology and healing, we usually could not fix our own emptiness.

On the surface of our halo in helping professions that we are drawn to as career, these seem like beautiful expressions of our compassionate nature. Yet the harsh reality that all healers are subconsciously wired deep inside is that these career choices were not about authentic calling, they were about continuing the only role we had ever known.

“If I am not saving someone, who am I?“

If I am not needed, do I have value?“

If I stop carrying everyone else’s pain, will anyone care about mine?”

These questions haunted us. Our entire nervous system was calibrated to find peace in chaos, to find purpose in fixing broken people, to feel most alive when we are needed desperately. Because if we are not rescuing someone, if we are not essential to someone’s survival, do we have a reason to exist?

We spend decades being everyone’s rock, everyone’s solution, everyone’s safe harbour. We sacrifice dreams, relationships, health. All while telling ourselves it was noble.

Then one day, something breaks. Maybe it is a health crisis that forces us to slow down, maybe it is a betrayal from someone we had given everything to. Maybe it is just the accumulated weight of thirty or forty years of self abandonment finally crushing us. And in that breaking, a question emerges.

“What about me?”

“When do I get to be cared for?”

“When do I get to fall apart and have someone catch me?”

The truth is what looks like selfless love is actually unconscious fear. Underneath all that giving is a terrified soul still trying to earn love. Still trying to prevent abandonment. Still believing that our worth is conditional on how useful we can be. The gruesome part is we probably do not even recognize it as imbalance anymore. Because imbalance is our baseline.

Until we are able to acknowledge that what we are doing is driven not by authentic desire but by unconscious compulsion and willing to do the shadow work to see that not all our good qualities are as pure as we thought and some are even survival mechanisms, until we see them clearly, we will be controlled by our very own subconscious.

This is the Healer’s Curse.

This is the stark truth of being a healer, an empath or anyone working in the helping profession. And my empathy goes to myself and all those broken souls out there who may not even realize what is going on in them.

After years or even decades of living for everyone else, something might snap, which is good. At the end of the day, this is how we stop being half a person and appearing always helpful, saintly and sacrificing.

It is about becoming whole. And wholeness is not about being perfect. It is about being real. It is about letting ourselves be seen in all our complexities, not just in our capacity to serve.

We weren’t born to be just the healer, just the caretaker, just the one who holds everyone else together while falling apart inside.

We were born to be whole, complex, beautifully imperfect and entirely ourselves.

This journey is not about fixing ourselves because we are not broken. It is about remembering who we were before the world taught us that our worth depended on our usefulness.

Welcome home to ourselves.

Book Appointment

Further Reading:

You Do Not Want Love, Actually

Tolerance is Strength

Trauma is your Expansion

Strength of Patience

Reincarnation

Trust

Net Worth

If You are Having a Hard Time Now

Find Your Purpose