The Ache of Awareness: When Healing Brings Dissonance
I recently sat across from a client as she wept, “I don’t know why my body keeps doing this, why it can’t stop responding as if it’s going to die, I’m just so tired of feeling like I’m going to die.”
I felt my body shift forward. Although it didn’t feel like progress to her, I could feel we we’re reaching a pinnacle point in her healing journey, and approaching a universal truth.
There is a distinct moment in therapy where dissonance is born. The moment when the wisdom we’ve worked so hard to cultivate comes face to face with a very old pattern — and loses. And in this moment, we make contact with the space between what we are doing, and what we know is good for us, the life we long for and the one our nervous system is still wired to live. And in this space of dissonance, there is a critical choice for us to make:
perceive this dissonance as failure, and lean into anger, blame, and self-hatred
perceive this dissonance as progress, and lean into compassion, understanding, and self-trust
I’m here to say that this dissonance, though tender and often excruciating, is not a sign of failure. It IS a sign of progress.
Before we reach this point in healing, we’re often too inside our patterns to notice them. Our people-pleasing, our withdrawal, our hypervigilance, our shoulders’ tightening to protect the heart — they feel like instincts, not choices. They are survival strategies, after all. And for a long time, they worked.
But therapy has this inconvenient habit of waking us up. We start to feel the difference between a “yes” and a “fawn.” We begin to notice the tightness in our chest when we stay silent to keep the peace. We come into contact with the exhaustion underneath the inability to rest. We are aware of how much our shoulders overcompensate. We catch ourselves mid-pattern, mid-response — suddenly aware that we’re about to override our own truth again, suddenly aware that our bodies, our nervous systems, and our attachment systems are stuck.
And in that moment- the dissonance is born. And it does not feel like a victory. It feels like failure. Because now we know. And knowing makes the repetition, the stuck-ness, feel heavier and more shameful.
It’s the ache of watching yourself repeat something you now understand. The ache of realizing how long you’ve been carrying this pattern. The ache of longing to choose differently — but finding, in the moment, that your body isn’t ready yet.
It’s the ache of weaponizing our awareness- “what’s wrong with me?”
And this is exactly where the critical choicepoint emerges.
Shame or Compassion
In that moment, we have two options.
We can lean into shame. Into anger. Into the familiar story of brokenness.
Or — we can lean into compassion. Into curiosity. Into honor and trust in the body’s intelligence and timing- in our own process, that in becoming the observer, we are already healing.
The Compassionate Observer
This part of us, the one that sees, is the compassionate observer. The part that can sit with our triggered self and say, “I see you. You’re doing the thing again. And I get it. You’re scared. You’re trying to stay safe.”
This is the part that doesn’t yell or shame, but gently holds the tension between where we are and where we’re going.
The Dissonance Is Not Failure — It’s a Threshold
This dissonance is not evidence that you’re failing.
It’s a threshold. A passageway. A liminal space.
It’s what happens when you catch a glimpse of liberation, but your body is still afraid to loosen its grip on what it’s always known.
And if you can meet this place with tenderness, something powerful happens.
You stop making yourself wrong for needing time.
You begin to trust the pace of your nervous system.
From this place, every repetition becomes an opportunity for attunement.
And as a perinatal and infant mental health specialist, something I know is this:
there is no amount of trauma that cannot be healed from attunement from a securely attached caregiver.
And that doesn’t just apply to parents and babies. It applies to the process of reparenting yourself that happens in therapy.
You are the caregiver. Attunement is the intervention. And you— are healing, not failing.
