Not Everything is a Wound, Sometimes it’s Just a Crappy Tuesday
Suzz Sandalwood | A therapist’s perspective on how therapy got hijacked by aesthetics, algorithms, and hashtags
Written by Suzz Sandalwood | Seeking Veritas Columnist | | Sankarsingh-Gonsalves Productions
“We’ve created a culture where being a decent, slightly messy, self-aware adult isn’t enough.”
Buzzwords, branding and burn out
Somewhere between trying to heal my attachment style and remembering to ground myself before checking emails, it became clear. It’s starting to feel like unpaid overtime.
Don’t get me wrong, there is value in “doing the work,” but I have come to a place where I am concerned that the idea of what that means is lost in the jargon of buzzwords, branding, and burnout disguised as self-awareness. Thanks to social media, everyone is optimizing, regulating and integrating, until healing no longer feels like a return to yourself. We’ve created a culture where being a decent, slightly messy, self-aware adult isn’t enough. Now you have to be certified in your own transformation. You can’t just make progress. You need a 10-slide carousel and a wellness vocabulary to prove it.
I support personal growth and trying to be a version of yourself you are content with. There are life experiences that require intervention, support, new strategies and skills to cope. Trauma is a real thing. Grief is a real thing but lately though, the invitation to personal growth on social media looks more like emotional hustle culture and somewhere in that shuffle, the human part, the tender, contradictory, deeply average human part gets lost. We should take this seriously.
#triggered and #trending
I don’t want to be the therapist that tries to convince you that your worth is dependant on your ability to decode your triggers like a spreadsheet or turn every hard feeling into a growth opportunity. I don’t want to be part of a system that implies your pain only matters if it comes with a lesson plan and a morning routine. Healing doesn’t need a hashtag and being human isn’t a therapeutic PR.
Some clients are now asking why they still feel awful even though they’ve been doing “the work” for weeks or months. They’re anxious about not evolving fast enough. Panicked that their pain isn’t turning into purpose quickly enough to keep up. Somewhere along the way, self-improvement stopped being about relief and became another metric of what it means to be a successful human.
“The whole self-improvement movement has become so all-consuming that people are now afraid of their own normal reactions.”
There’s no room to just be anymore. You can’t just be sad. You can’t be uncertain. It must be unresolved trauma. You can’t be annoyed. It’s probably your nervous system being dysregulated again.
The whole self-improvement movement has become so all-consuming that people are now afraid of their own normal reactions. They’re afraid that any moment of struggle means they’ve regressed or they are becoming mentally ill. They are wondering if they’re not in a state of constant evolution if they’re somehow doing life wrong. You can’t just sit with discomfort anymore, you have to analyze it, narrate it, repurpose it into content, and label it a breakthrough.
Healing is not available on canva
But growth actually doesn’t work that way. Healing is not a subscription model and your worth is not something you unlock by reaching a higher state of emotional performance. Sometimes healing looks like silence. It can look messy or like survival. Or sitting on your kitchen floor at 2:00 a.m. thinking about your will to live. Sometimes it’s just not answering that text. Sometimes it’s going to bed angry because you’re too exhausted to communicate well. Sometimes it’s sitting in your therapy session and admitting you don’t want to be a grief success story; and hoping you have a therapist that says that’s okay.
We have turned discomfort into pathology. Now, ambivalence is a red flag. Boredom is a crisis and the solution is always the same: fix yourself more. This is unrealistic for actual people trying to exist without turning their personality into a personal development curriculum. There’s an ecosystem now profiting off your belief that who you are isn’t quite right. It sells soothing solutions, rituals, routines, rebrands. It asks you to spend money on remembering who you are, as if that identity is available for purchase and express delivery.
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Not everything needs a label. Not every feeling is a condition.”
Fluent in wounds, starving for connection
We’ve started assigning moral value to emotional vocabulary. “She’s self-aware” is the new “she’s a good person.” But self-awareness without accountability just becomes ego with a user manual and accountability without rest becomes punishment. The loop is exhausting. People start to feel like they’re never doing enough, like their inner work is never ending.
The danger in making emotional discomfort synonymous with dysfunction is that people start to doubt their own capacity to just feel things. We’ve created a belief system where having a hard moment sounds like a symptom, and being overwhelmed gets translated into a diagnosis. Suddenly, a crappy Tuesday means your childhood is knocking.
As I said, this isn’t to say therapy isn’t useful. It is; hello have we met? It’s powerful when it meets real pain with real care. But sometimes what you feel might not mean you are emotionally blocked. It might just mean you’re just done talking to humans for the day. Sometimes your window of tolerance hasn’t closed , you’re just over it and sometimes you don’t need somatic resourcing, you just need a grilled cheese and some Baskin Robbins icecream. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Not everything needs a label.
Yes, do the work. But also, try not to panic every time you feel something unpleasant. It’s just not always regression. Sometimes it is having a nervous system and living in 2025. Therapy isn’t supposed to gaslight you into thinking your frustration is a disorder. It’s supposed to help you carry it without turning your personality into a pathology. Not every moment is a season and not everything needs to be healed before you go to Costco.
CAPTCHA: select all squares that aren’t self-help culture
Yes, I’m a real therapist. No, I don’t get paid extra to say things like “embodied container.” Many therapists are fatigued by the commodification of the relentless self-branding that now surrounds our field. We entered this work to hold space, not to build a personal brand or sound bite our expertise through pastel-colored trauma infographics. It’s a constant tightrope between visibility and integrity, and it’s burning a lot of good people out.
I want to believe that somewhere beneath the algorithm and the content, there’s still room to just be a decent human trying to help other humans.
Let’s not lose that.
"Know all the theories, master all the techniques, but as you touch a human soul, be just another human soul”-Carl Jung
About the Author: Suzz Sandalwood is an Advanced Certified Clinical Trauma and Addiction Specialist and a Certified Grief Counsellor and is a former writer for Psych Central. She has extensive professional and lived experience in first responder, addiction, and grief communities | Connect with the author: https://suzzsandalwood.com
Fabulous! Good for you it’s very brave to go against the status quo. There are so many rich ideas in this piece. The idea that mental health and mental illness are synonymous, they are not. The idea that grieving for too long is pathological. The idea that there is an ideal way to express every emotion. The idea that if you don’t express it in this ideal way, there’s something wrong with you. I’m tired of it all. It’s not authentic humanness. I have had the benefit of knowledgeable, experienced, well-educated therapists and I cannot put a value on that, it’s priceless. I’m very careful about who I allow into my most sacred spaces. There’s definitely no room there for the Idiocracy of social media. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be many ways of finding information anymore aside from social media. It’s becoming well known that there’s very little truth out there anymore.