12/03/2026
“You’re too sensitive.” “Your ego needs to dissolve.” “Your boundaries are just your trauma speaking.” “You’re too much.”
If you’ve spent time in spiritual spaces, healing spaces, in a relationship with someone who called themselves a healer, there’s a good chance some version of these words has been said to you.
They take the most alive, most honest, most embodied part of you and reframe it as the problem. Your feelings become obstacles rather than the path itself.
I have fibromyalgia. I was already doing deep somatic work. Already learning to come home to my body after years of chronic pain.
Someone I was close to handed me a book and told me to rise above it. To transcend. That if I was awake enough, I could dissolve my chronic pain.
Dissociation dressed up as enlightenment. My pain got worse.
Because the emotional suffering I was carrying from this relationship was feeding it.
This is spiritual bypassing. And it is patriarchy in a different costume. The language changes, ego, pain body, transcendence, presence, but the instruction stays the same. Feel less. Be less. Make yourself easier to be around. Directed at women in pain, women with depression. It is harmful.
I think about why Celtic folklore matters so much to me and to the women I work with. The goddesses hold the full spectrum. Sovereignty, rage, grief, sensuality, destruction, wildness. Not split into good and bad, pure and fallen.
The qualities we are told to transcend, the intensity, the feeling, the embodied messy aliveness, those are divine qualities.
Our healing is not above the mess. It is in the mess. In the anger that knows something is wrong. In the grief that loved something real. In the body that has been telling the truth all along.
Your feelings are not the obstacle.
They are the way in.
