The Day I Realized Most Helpers Need the Most Help

There’s a memory I keep returning to whenever someone asks what the realest lesson I’ve learned in the wellness world might be.

It was not during a mountaintop retreat or a polished conference stage. It was at a busted-up community center: plastic folding chairs, flickering fluorescent lights, and a buffet table covered with vegan snacks that tasted like regret.

I’d been invited to a healer’s mastermind. If you’ve never attended one, imagine a cross between a group therapy session and an MLM recruitment drive, with extra patchouli.

Everyone went around the circle sharing their medicine. The Reiki master. The trauma-release coach. The ancestral channel who, I swear, once tried to invoice me in Bitcoin for karmic cleansing.

But here is the thing: nobody was talking about their actual life. Just the highlight reel. My practice is expanding. My clients are having breakthroughs. I’ve never felt so aligned.

Then it got to Lila, not her real name, but close enough. She smiled, glassy-eyed, and launched into her story about holding space for others, transforming pain, and all that polished language. But something was off. I had noticed the twitch in her jaw when the group laughed. The way she kept checking her phone, waiting for something or someone to message her back.

Afterward, I caught her outside, chain-smoking a clove cigarette.

“You good?” I asked.

She exhaled, stared at the ground, and said, “I spend all day fixing other people. Nobody ever asks how I’m doing.”

And just like that, the mask dropped.

She told me she was on the edge. Burnt out. Lonely. Worst of all, addicted to her own suffering. Her clients’ problems were a welcome distraction from the silence in her own apartment.

I did not say anything wise. I just listened.

And it hit me: most of the people who call themselves healers are running from their own wounds. Helping others is not always just a calling. For a lot of people, it is a hiding place. A place to stay busy, so they never have to face their own emptiness.

We stood there in the cold for a while. She asked, “How do you do it? How do you stay okay?”

I laughed, probably too loud.

“Who said I’m okay? I just stopped pretending helping other people would save me from myself.”

That is the realest thing I’ve got for you.

Sometimes the hardest truth is not about your clients. It is about the secret addiction to being needed, because it is easier to mop up someone else’s tears than admit you haven’t cried for yourself in years.

I went back inside, sat down, and realized the only real healing happening in that room was the kind nobody wanted to admit: the desperate hope that someone else’s crisis would be enough to drown out your own.

So here is the takeaway.

If you spend all your energy fixing, saving, guiding, or holding space for others, but your own life is stuck in limbo, pause. Sit with your own mess. Do not make healing your escape route.

You are not here to save the world from pain. You are here to face your own, and maybe, if you are lucky, help someone else do the same. But never instead of yourself.

And if you are reading this thinking that hits a little too close to home, good. Me too. Let’s quit pretending.