You Cannot Heal in the Same State You Survived In

The Cycle of Trauma Dynamics

Most people don’t realize that the pressure they feel to “heal fast” is part of the same pressure and trauma dynamics that created their wounds in the first place. Urgency can feel like progress, like momentum — and it can also feel like threat. In reality, it is trauma repeating itself, creating unsafe internal conditions, and it is reinforced and perpetuated by unsafe external systems that are made of the same trauma dynamics. The social body itself is currently in a state of survival and we are all steeped in it.

The nervous system that learned to survive by rushing, pushing, pressuring, disconnecting, and overriding pain will try to bring that same strategy into the therapy space. And if we’re not careful, therapists and even entire systems can collude with it. We’re promised quick fixes, instant gratification, and “new” therapies that will finally make everything better. It’s compelling — and it’s also misleading.

Because here’s the truth: urgency doesn’t heal trauma. It reenacts it. And the systems that benefit from your pain are counting on you to keep rushing.

The Longing to Feel Alive Again

For many people seeking therapy or wellness practices, urgency shows up not just as panic, but as longing. After living with numbness, shutdown, or disconnection, they desperately want to feel alive again. To feel whole. And who could blame them? It is after all, our birthright. We were meant to be connected. Our physiological architecture is the manifestation of this promise waiting to be kept.

This longing often gets hijacked and exploited by marketing that promises: quick fixes, instant relief, and techniques delivered by an “expert” who will do the work for you. The promise feels thrilling because it suggests you don’t need to change anything about your life — you can keep doing what you’re doing and just get a different result.

But this is an illusion. It’s like expecting weight-loss surgery to transform your health without changing eating or movement habits. Or yearning to “go back to normal” when the truth is that what you thought was “normal” was already shaped by trauma, stress, and oppressive systems that thrive on keeping you in pain.

A Codependent System

The sense of urgency doesn’t live in a vacuum. The society we live in depends on it.

• The system needs you anxious, depressed, and dysregulated to keep itself alive.

• You’ve been conditioned to need the system to feel valuable, productive, or worthy.

It’s a codependent relationship: you feed the system with your labor, obedience, and consumption, and the system rewards you with conditional belonging and the illusion of worth.

The Nervous System and the Urgency Trap

On a physiological level, urgency often comes from being stuck in a sympathetic fight-or-flight state. It’s the body’s attempt to fight against, push away, or flee from something intolerable. That urgent drive can feel like momentum — a promise that if you just work hard enough, you can finally get free.

But this too is a trap. You cannot heal from the same state that was required for survival. Urgency collapses space. It narrows vision. It demands speed over depth.

Healing demands the opposite:

• Slowing down.

• Creating space instead of collapsing it.

• Being with what is, instead of doing to it.

Reenactment in Therapy

Trauma always happens in a hierarchical system: an oppressor and an oppressed, an abuser and a victim, one holding power over the other. These dynamics don’t simply vanish — they show up in therapy too.

• Clients may project onto the therapist as the all-knowing expert: “Tell me what to do, fix me, make me better.” They hand over agency because trusting themselves once felt unsafe.

• Therapists may internalize pressure to perform, to have all the answers, to prove their competence. They risk colluding with the client’s urgency and external locus of control rather than resisting it.

If this dynamic is unexamined, the therapy space becomes another reenactment of trauma dynamics such as power dynamics and a sense of urgency — mirroring the very systems (family, religion, education, politics, capitalism) that created the wound in the first place. That is not therapy. That is reenactment. It reinforces the trauma, the survival strategies, and the shame-based identifications that once helped you survive. This is why it is SO important for therapists to do their own work. Without it, we run the risk of unconsciously acting out our own wounds on the people who come to us for healing. It becomes the blind leading the blind.

One way a reenactment of survival dynamics can take shape is when a client approaches therapy with an external locus of control — assuming the therapist is the expert who will “fix” them or tell them how to change other people or situations. In this stance, healing is expected to come from the therapist doing something to them, rather than from the collaborative discovery of what arises within them. The therapist is cast as the active agent and the client as the passive recipient, a dynamic that reinforces disconnection from the client’s own capacity to heal and perpetuates the very survival strategies that once kept them safe but now keep them stuck. Another way a reenactment happens is when the client projects an expectation or assumption onto the therapist that they will behave or react in the same way others have related with them. They each take on their unconscious roles, continuing to play out the same pattern, always with the same disappointing, painful, but familiar result.

At the same time, therapists themselves may internalize pressure to perform, to have all the answers, or to deliver quick change; to be a “good” therapist. A rewarding object, not even another human with their own feelings and needs. When this happens, they risk colluding with the very systems and strategies that caused them both harm, reenacting the same power imbalance the client has already endured.

An astute therapist will not only notice this pattern when it appears, they will also notice and separate their own countertransference reactions to it. This allows them to use this pattern in the therapy session, working directly with the survival strategy, the physiology, and the once split-off primary emotions that arise with it, leading to emotional completion, integrating all the disconnected parts, and restructuring top down, bottom up, and inside out, their entire sense of self.

Meaningful therapy is different. It gently confronts survival strategies, brings blind spots into awareness, and holds space for shame-based identifications to soften. It helps the client reclaim agency and integrate the emotions that arise when defenses relax. It refuses urgency and power dynamics, because neither can create the conditions for safety — and without safety, there can be no true healing.

Coercive Control and the Role of Urgency

Coercive control is one of the clearest examples of how urgency is weaponized in relational trauma. It’s not always about physical violence — it’s about domination through surveillance, restriction, manipulation, and fear. The person living under coercive control learns that their safety depends on constant vigilance and immediate compliance.

Urgency is baked into the relationship:

• “Answer me right now or you’ll be punished.”

• “Do this immediately or else.”

• “If you pause, resist, question, deviate from the norm/tradition, or reflect, you’re in danger.”

Over time, the nervous system becomes wired for urgency and external validation and control as a survival strategy. This is why many survivors of coercive control arrive in therapy demanding quick fixes, instant calm, or someone else to take over the responsibility of healing.

And just as in larger systems — family, religion, education, politics, capitalism — coercive control thrives on hierarchy and urgency. The oppressor benefits from keeping the victim reactive, small, and disconnected from their own knowing.

Therapy must resist reenacting these dynamics. True healing cannot happen in a reenactment of coercive control, with the therapist positioned as the “expert” who dictates change. Instead, healing requires a safe relationship where agency, time, and curiosity replace pressure, urgency, and domination.

The Seduction of Somatic Therapies

When a potential therapy client first hears about somatic therapy — and is told that the “old way” of therapy was all wrong and this new way will finally fix them, it’s incredibly compelling. Especially when somatic therapy promises that you will not have to go through the telling of your trauma story, simply talking about it over and over again.

But this message is also misleading. It becomes yet another way to override pain and rush toward a state of “calm,” “relaxed,” or “peaceful”, which gets marketed as “regulation.” Instead of connecting more deeply to themselves, people can end up using these practices or techniques to disconnect even further. It reinforces a familiar survival dynamic: the belief that healing will come from something being done to them by an external expert, rather than through their own inner process. Clients may long to be the passive recipient of change while the therapist or practitioner acts as the active agent. On the surface this feels relieving — a way to finally and quickly bypass pain and rush toward an imagined state of “calm,” “relaxed,” or “peaceful.” Yet in reality, it risks becoming another way of disconnecting from the self, yes another spiritual bypass. Or it just becomes another relaxation practice or cathartic practice that never leads to lasting change. It becomes no different than your typical yoga class. It has an important function but will not heal a lifetime of complex or developmental trauma. That requires top-down, bottom-up and inside-out relational healing. It requires a titrated (slow), undoing and re-doing over time and in relationship. I’m sorry to tell you, but there is no quick fix to complex or development trauma.

Relaxation was never the purpose of truly therapeutic somatic work. Somatic psychotherapy, at its best, is not about techniques done to you or quick fixes imposed on you. It’s an invitation:

• to slow down, (not speed up)

• to notice sensations and patterns,

• to ask what else is here,

• to feel what wanted to happen but never got to,

• to discover what arises when we stop rushing and begin to notice.

This is the heart of somatic healing — not rushing to override discomfort, not outsourcing agency to another-- but creating space, reclaiming it by cultivating curiosity, presence, and embodied awareness.

How Larger Systems Exploit Urgency and Pain

This reenactment dynamic is not confined to therapy. It is a mirror of how broader systems of power exploit urgency, pain, and vulnerability to maintain control.

⚖️ Family Systems

Families organized around secrecy, abuse, or dysfunction often rely on urgency, power dynamics, and coercive control: “Don’t make us look bad,” “Get over it,” “Do what I say, now.” Power is held by parents or caregivers, while children learn to override their needs.

💒 Religious Systems

Authoritarian or fundamentalist religions thrive on urgency, coercive control, and power dynamics: repent now, obey now, submit now. These systems frame guilt and shame as spiritual virtues, while reinforcing the hierarchy of leader → follower.

📚 Educational Systems

Schools reward obedience, speed, and compliance over depth or critical thought. Children learn to override their bodies: hold it until the bell, sit still, produce results fast. Urgency and disconnection becomes a lifelong survival pattern.

⚖️ Judicial and Carceral Systems

Courts and prisons thrive on punishment and compliance. Trauma responses like freeze or dissociation are punished as defiance, an intentional choice or moral failing. “Do this now or face consequences” becomes institutionalized.

🏛️ Policy and Bureaucratic Systems

Public policy prizes efficiency over humanity. Test scores, quick outcomes, job placements — all reinforce urgency and reduce people to numbers.

👑 Authoritarian and Fascist Systems

Urgency, coercive control, and power dynamics suppresses dissent: “Obey now, don’t question.” Trauma survivors who’ve internalized urgency are more vulnerable to authoritarian control.

💸 Capitalist Systems

Capitalism thrives on urgency and disconnection. Productivity and speed are glorified, rest is shamed, and overextension is rewarded. Trauma survivors conditioned to equate worth with doing more and buying more become ideal workers and consumers.

👨‍👩‍👦 Patriarchal Systems

Patriarchy exploits urgency through gendered roles: women must multitask, men must perform, no one should show vulnerability. Slowing down, re-connecting, and questioning the status quo could destabilize the hierarchy.

⚕️ Medical-Industrial Complex

The healthcare system profits from quick fixes — pills, surgeries, brief interventions. The focus becomes on symptoms of the sick instead of prevention and wellness.

 Long-term relational healing is undervalued because it cannot be commodified as easily.

📰 Media and Social Media

Media ecosystems thrive on urgency: breaking news, outrage, comparison, algorithms, marketing through instant gratification without even leaving the house. Likes, dislikes, comments. Calm, regulated humans are less profitable than anxious, hypervigilant ones.

🌎 White Supremacy and Colonial Systems

Colonialism and white supremacy weaponize urgency by keeping entire populations in survival mode through resource deprivation, disconnection, and fear. A dysregulated population cannot resist or organize effectively.

The Through-Line: Who Benefits From Your Pain?

The thread that connects all these systems is simple: they benefit when you are in a state of protection over connection; pain, urgency, disconnection, distrust of self and others.

When you stay dysregulated:

• You work harder for less.

• You obey authority without question.

• You consume more to soothe yourself.

• You distrust your own agency and defer to external control.

• You don’t listen to your body, emotions, intuition or gut instincts.

This is why healing cannot happen in a survival state marked by urgency. Slowing down, reclaiming agency, and refusing to collude with urgency is not just therapeutic — it is profoundly political by resisting and refusing to continue the same patterns keeping you stuck.

What Healing Really Requires

Healing is not an act of willpower. You cannot force it, push it, or schedule it. Healing is not urgent.

Instead, healing is:

• A devotion to oneself. Choosing presence, curiosity, and care over collapse and speed.

• A process of remembering. Reconnecting with parts of yourself that had to go into hiding.

• Creative and curious. Approaching the body and psyche with openness, not a script or someone else’s interpretation.

• Slow and unfurling. Like a flower opening toward light, healing stretches little by little, savoring each expansion.

Healing does not arise from urgency. It arises from safety — and safety requires space, time, and relationship.

Conclusion

Urgency, hierarchies, power dynamics, coercive control, and the seduction of quick one-size-fits-all somatic fixes are all part of the same cycle of trauma dynamics. They repeat the survival strategies and power imbalances that once kept people alive but now keep them stuck. When clients approach therapy expecting the therapist to be the active agent who “does the work” to them, or when therapists internalize pressure to perform and deliver quick change, both risk reenacting the very dynamics that created the wound.

The same is true of systems that promise healing through urgency, shortcuts, or authority — whether in families, religions, schools, politics, or consumer culture. Each thrives on urgency and externalized control. Each benefits from keeping people reactive, dependent, and disconnected from their own agency. They want you to continue to “need” whatever object, service, or belief they are “selling”.

Real healing refuses to collude with these dynamics. It does not replicate urgency, hierarchy, or externalized control. Instead, it creates safety — the one condition that trauma never allowed. Safety makes room for slowing down, for noticing, for curiosity. It helps clients reclaim agency, feel what was once impossible to feel, and discover the aliveness that emerges not through being “fixed,” but through being present. Being present WITH the pain, the joy, the grief, not bypassing or regulating it away once again, turning against yourself and exiling yourself back to the shadows.

To heal, we must step out of the state we survived in. That is the paradox, and the path: survival demanded urgency and control, but healing unfolds only through space, safety, and relationship.

The therapist’s role is not to collude with urgency, but to resist it — to help clients slow down, reclaim their agency, and learn that they no longer need to reenact survival patterns. In doing so, therapy becomes more than symptom management. It becomes an act of resistance against the systems that profit from pain, and an act of devotion to the aliveness that unfolds only when we slow down and make space for it, and give it all the time it needs.

Written by Fay O’Neill, LCSW
Embodied. Therapy and Healing Arts — Committed to trauma-informed care, systemic awareness, and consumer protection.