Worse Before Better

Why healing from trauma can feel harder before it feels easier, and why Jesus is right there in the process

Nobody told us it would feel like this

We hear it everywhere now. Do the work. Go on your healing journey. Deal with your trauma. And it is good advice. I give it, and I believe in it with my whole heart.

But here is what we are often not told: healing can feel worse before it feels better. I wish someone had warned me before I had started my healing journey.

You start counselling, or coaching, or join a healing group or course. You begin to look at things you packed away years ago. You expect to feel better and lighter. Instead you feel heavier. You cry more. You are more tired. Small things feel big. Your body aches in new ways. And then the little voice says, "This isn’t working. I was better off before. At least I was functioning."

That is the moment so many people step away. Not because healing didn't work, but because nobody explained that this part was coming.

If that is where you are, please hear this: you are not failing, and you are not going backwards. What you are feeling is a normal and well understood part of recovery. Psychiatrist Judith Herman, whose work shaped much of modern trauma care, describes recovery in stages: safety and stabilisation, then remembering and grieving, then reconnecting with life. She says it as it is that the middle stage is often the hardest, and that healing rarely moves in a straight line. Circling back is not failure. It is how healing works.

So let’s look at why it feels this way. When we understand it, we are far less likely to give up on it.

How we got through: parts and the buffer

When something happens that is too much to take in, especially when we are young, the mind protects us by keeping it at a distance. This is called dissociation. At the mild end it is everyday "zoning out". Further along it can look like numbness, feeling far away from your own life, losing time, or living in your head and not in your body.

With trauma, there is often fragmentation. Different parts of us take on different jobs. Some parts function: they go to work, raise the children, serve at church and keep life going. Other parts hold the pain: the fear, shame, grief and memories we could not carry at the time.

Researchers Onno van der Hart, Ellert Nijenhuis and Kathy Steele call this structural dissociation. They describe an "apparently normal part" that gets on with daily life, and "emotional parts" that stay stuck in what happened. Diane Hawkins, who has worked with survivors of severe abuse for decades through Restoration in Christ Ministries, describes a buffer between the two: a layer of denial that keeps the functioning parts from having to feel what the hurting parts feel. That buffer is how we get through life.

Richard Schwartz, who developed Internal Family Systems (IFS), describes it in a similar way. We have "managers" that keep life under control, "firefighters" that rush in to numb pain when it breaks through, and "exiles", the young hurting parts that get pushed out of sight. He insists there are no bad parts. Every part is trying to help.

This is a God-given way of surviving what should never have happened. It is mercy built into our design. It worked to protect us for a long time.

When healing starts, the walls come down

Healing means going to the places that were kept apart. It means gently approaching the parts that hold the pain, and lowering the buffer.

Of course you feel more. You are not getting worse; you are finally feeling what was always there.

IFS even has a name for what can happen next: "backlash". As we get close to a hurting part, the protective parts can react. They get nervous. They might shut you down, exhaust you, or pull you back to old habits. They have been on duty for years and are not yet sure it is safe to step back. This is why good trauma work is slow and gentle, and why it works with the protective parts rather than forcing through them.

David prays:

“Behold, You desire truth in the inward parts, And in the hidden part You will make me to know wisdom.”  (Psalm 51:6, NKJV)

God wants truth in the inward parts. He goes into the hidden places. That is exactly where trauma healing goes, and He goes there not to shame us, but to heal.

Why you feel like you have less capacity

This is the part almost nobody talks about.

As healing continues, the parts begin to come together. This is integration. Psychiatrist Daniel Siegel describes integration as linking different parts into a whole that works together, and he sees it as the heart of wellbeing.

That is great news. But here is the catch. Before, several parts shared the load. One part went to work while another held the pain. One part smiled at church while another carried the grief. Now you are learning to be one whole person, present in your own life, without dissociation doing the heavy lifting. You have to do everything you did before, but with all of you there.

At first, that can feel like your capacity has dropped. It is like someone who has always used crutches learning to walk on their own legs. The muscles have to grow, and while they grow it feels slow and tiring.

Siegel and therapist Pat Ogden talk about the "window of tolerance", the zone where we can feel things and still think clearly. Trauma narrows that window, and dissociation helped us cope by switching off. As we heal, the window widens, but early on we are learning to live inside a small window without the switch-off button. That takes a lot of energy.

So if you think, "I was stronger before," consider this: you were not stronger. You were more divided. The strength growing in you now is whole strength.

“Teach me Your way, O LORD; I will walk in Your truth; Unite my heart to fear Your name.”  (Psalm 86:11, NKJV)

"Unite my heart" is integration language. And I love how God paced Israel’s entry into the Promised Land:

“And the LORD your God will drive out those nations before you little by little; you will be unable to destroy them at once, lest the beasts of the field become too numerous for you.”  (Deuteronomy 7:22, NKJV)

Little by little. Not because God lacked power, but because they needed the capacity to hold what He was giving them. I believe He paces our healing in the same kind way.

When the body starts to let go

Many of us have lived disconnected from our bodies. We pushed through and ignored the signals. Part of healing is coming home to the body and letting it rest.

Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score, that we by now should have heard of as I mention it often,  shows how trauma is held in the body as tension, alertness, pain and exhaustion. When the body finally feels safe enough to rest, it often begins to release what it has been holding. That can look like sudden tears, trembling, deep tiredness, aches, getting sick, or waves of emotion with no clear story attached. Peter Levine, who developed Somatic Experiencing, describes these as the body completing stress responses that got stuck.

Doctors sometimes call it the "let-down effect": the way many of us get sick as soon as we go on holiday. While we are under pressure, stress hormones keep us going. When the pressure drops, the body catches up.

Polyvagal theory, developed by Stephen Porges and made easy to understand by Deb Dana, adds one more helpful piece. Our nervous system moves between feeling safe and connected, fight or flight, and shutdown (that numb, far-away state). Deb Dana describes these as a ladder. When you climb out of shutdown, you usually pass through fight or flight on the way to feeling safe. So as the numbness lifts, you may first feel more anxious or restless. That is not going backwards. That is climbing.

“He makes me to lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside the still waters. He restores my soul.”  (Psalm 23:2-3, NKJV)

Rest comes before restoration. And sometimes, when we finally lie down, the first thing we feel is how tired we really were. In my upcoming book, Restore: Returning to Kingdom Design, I talk about settling the nervous system before tackling deep inner healing. The body needs to know it is safe before it will let go.

The chiropractor moment

Have you ever had a chiropractic adjustment and felt worse the next day? This happened to me. You ache in places you didn’t ache before, and you think it made things worse. But it didn’t. I discussed this with my chiropractor at the time and she very knowinly smile and said that it is part of the process of relalignment. Your body had adapted to being out of line. Now everything is moving back to where it should be, and the muscles are settling into the new position. That pain is the pain of realignment.

I see healing like this. For years we were held together in a way that worked, but was out of alignment with how God designed us to live. As He brings us back into alignment, everything has to settle. It can hurt. But it is the pain of coming right, not of getting worse.

Even Jesus healed in stages at times:

“So He took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the town. And when He had spit on his eyes and put His hands on him, He asked him if he saw anything. And he looked up and said, “I see men like trees, walking.” Then He put His hands on his eyes again and made him look up. And he was restored and saw everyone clearly.”  (Mark 8:23-25, NKJV)

There was a blurry moment in between. Not blind, not clear. Many of us live there for a while. But Jesus took him by the hand at the start, and He did not leave him halfway. He touched him again.

This in-between place is also where we are tempted to turn back. When the wilderness got hard, Israel asked, "Would it not be better for us to return to Egypt?" (Numbers 14:3). Egypt was slavery, but it was familiar. "I was better off before" is that same voice. Egypt was never better. It was only familiar.

"Shouldn’t we just trust Jesus?"

When I shared on the healing process in my Take Up Your Space manual, there were those where the response often was, "This is too complicated. It shouldn’t be so complicated. We just need to trust Jesus."

I agree with that one hundred percent. We need to trust Jesus. He is our Healer, and none of this works without Him. But I also believe something happens in the process of dealing with unhealed trauma, and that the process is one of the ways Jesus heals us. Trusting Jesus and walking through a process are not opposites. Very often, trusting Jesus is what gives us the courage to walk through it.

The Word of God shows us this in several ways.

God wants deep healing, not surface healing. Through Jeremiah He rebukes those who "healed the hurt of My people slightly, Saying, ‘Peace, peace!’ When there is no peace" (Jeremiah 6:14). A plaster over a deep wound is not peace.

Jesus invites our participation. At the pool of Bethesda He asked a man who had been ill for thirty-eight years, "Do you want to be made well?" (John 5:6). Paul puts both sides together: "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure" (Philippians 2:12-13). We show up and do the hard work; God does the real healing in us.

Jesus often involves others. He raised Lazarus, something only He could do. Then He said to the people standing by, "Loose him, and let him go" (John 11:44). Lazarus was alive but still bound in graveclothes, and Jesus invited others to help unwrap him. That is what good counselling, coaching and a supportive community can be.

God cares for the whole person. Paul prays that our "whole spirit, soul, and body" would be kept by the God of peace (1 Thessalonians 5:23). Trauma touches every part of us, so healing does too.

Sometimes God heals in a moment, and we praise Him for it because with Him all things are possible. Sometimes He heals little by little, holding our hand the whole way. Both are His healing. Both are Jesus.

If you are in the hard middle right now

Name it. When it feels worse, tell yourself: "This is the realignment. This is my body letting go. This is a part of me being heard for the first time."

Slow down. If you are flooded or not coping, that is a sign to come back to safety and stabilisation, not to push harder. Little by little.

Lower your expectations for a season. A drop in capacity is not laziness. Your system is reorganising. Rest more and do less where you can.

Be kind to your parts. The parts that want to quit are trying to protect you. Thank them, reassure them, and invite Jesus to meet them where they are at.

Let your body rest and release. Sleep, gentle movement, time outside, slow breathing, tears. Your body is not falling apart. It is putting itself back together.

Don’t do it alone. Walk this road with a safe, trauma-informed counsellor, coach or group. If you experience a lot of dissociation, lose time, or feel unsafe, this is especially important. Getting help is part of the healing God provides.

Keep bringing it to Jesus, not as a way to skip the process, but because He is the One who walks through it with you.

“When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; And through the rivers, they shall not overflow you.”  (Isaiah 43:2, NKJV)

Not "if", but "when". And in every "when", He says: I will be with you.

He will finish what He started

Worse before better is real. But it is not the end of the story. If you are feeling more, it may be because you are finally safe enough to feel. If your capacity has dropped, it may be because you are learning to live as one whole person. If your body is tired and aching, it may be because it is finally letting go. And if everything feels blurry, remember that Jesus does not leave us halfway.

“Being confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ.”  (Philippians 1:6, NKJV)

He began it. He will finish it. And He is with you in every step in between.

Be strengthened today in the power and might of His strength!