The Poison of Arrogance in Healing
There is a point in the healing journey where the greatest threat is not fear, nor denial, nor even shame—but arrogance. A cold, confident armor, forged in the fire of past survival, yet brittle in the face of truth. It whispers the illusion that we have arrived, that we have done the work, that we are beyond the wounds. But healing is not a destination. It is a lifelong, unflinching gaze into the marrow of our own becoming.
Arrogance seduces us into believing that to have healed once is to be whole forever. That a single reckoning, a single rupture, a single awakening is enough to sever the roots of all that lingers within us. But true healing does not flatter us. It does not soothe us with the comfort of finality. It is a lifelong commitment to reflection, interrogation, and surrender.
Can you sit in the quiet, without grasping for distraction? Without the rush of accomplishment, the high of recognition, the comfort of knowing you are better than before? Can you meet your own shadow without justification, without softening the edges of your harm, your patterns, your inherited grief?
There are wounds that do not belong solely to you. Wounds passed through the bloodline, left unexamined by those who came before because they had neither the space nor the strength to face them. And yet, they live in you, shaping your reactions, your fears, the way you love, the way you protect yourself. Arrogance tells you these wounds are not yours to worry about. That they are relics, ghosts of another time. But healing asks you otherwise:
Can you look into the eyes of your own pain—not just the wounds you received, but the wounds you carry, the ones still breathing through you?
Not to shame yourself. Not to break yourself open in martyrdom. But to be in honest relationship with what is.
Healing is a practice of courage, but not the kind that seeks applause. It is the quiet courage to sit with discomfort, to refuse the easy release, to resist the comfort of being right, to soften instead of defend.
To heal is not to say “I am healed.” To heal is to say: “I am willing to keep looking.”
