And why that’s actually a sign you’re doing it right
A lot of people come to therapy hoping to feel better, calmer, lighter, more free. But what often catches folks off guard is that, for a while, they actually feel worse. Not because therapy isn’t working, but because it is.
It’s one of the hardest truths to swallow about healing: things often get messier before they start to make sense. And that can feel frustrating, scary, and defeating. If you’ve ever found yourself thinking, “Wasn’t this supposed to help me? Why do I feel even more overwhelmed?” The good news is, you’re not alone.
To help make sense of this, I want to share a metaphor I often use with my clients. It involves a coat closet. Yes — a coat closet. Stay with me.
The Coat Closet We All Avoid
Most of us have a coat closet in our home that we’d rather ignore. It’s that overstuffed, disorganized mess tucked behind a door we barely open. It’s holding coats we no longer wear, shoes that don’t fit, tangled umbrellas, maybe a box of who-knows-what.
Every time we walk by it, there’s a flash of awareness: Ugh, I need to deal with that. But then we immediately tell ourselves, Not today. We don’t want to deal with the chaos inside, so we keep the door shut. Over and over again.
This is what it’s like to live with unprocessed trauma. We know it’s there. We feel the weight of it. Maybe we sense it’s affecting our relationships, our sleep, our ability to concentrate. But we also know that opening the door might unleash a mess we don’t feel equipped to face. So we walk past it for weeks, months, years, sometimes decades.
The Day You Decide to Open the Door
Then one day, maybe in therapy, or during a crisis, or simply after getting tired of carrying it all, you decide it’s time. You open the closet. Maybe at first, you feel motivated. Energized even. This is the day you’re finally going to get your life in order.
But within moments, you realize: oh no. What have I done?
The floor of your hallway is covered. Everything that was hidden behind that door is now in plain view. You’ve got a mountain of mismatched, confusing, emotional material staring back at you. You might even panic and think, Why did I start this? I was doing fine before.
(You weren’t doing fine — you were doing your best to cope. But it’s okay to grieve the loss of avoidance. It was serving a purpose for a while.)
This is what trauma processing can feel like in the early stages. When we begin to tell our story, sometimes for the first time ever, it can feel disorienting and raw. We remember things we thought we forgot. We start noticing patterns we hadn’t realized were affecting us. We connect dots that make us gasp. We feel sadness, anger, shame, confusion. Sometimes we feel all of those all at once.
You’re Not Backtracking — You’re Organizing
At this point in the process, many people worry that they’re getting worse. But here’s the truth: You are not regressing. You are reorganizing.
You are pulling out every coat, every box, every buried piece of yourself and looking at it with new eyes. You’re finally letting yourself feel what you didn’t get to feel at the time it happened. You’re figuring out what still fits — and what you’ve outgrown. You’re deciding what needs to be lovingly let go of.
And yes, it’s exhausting. It’s often emotional. Sometimes it can feel like too much. But that doesn’t mean you’re failing. It means you’re in the middle.
What It Looks Like in Real Life
This middle phase of healing might look like:
- Feeling more anxious or irritable before you feel more grounded
- Crying more than usual, even if you “don’t know why”
- Questioning long-standing relationships or patterns
- Feeling exhausted from therapy instead of energized
- Revisiting past memories that come up unexpectedly
- Wishing you could “go back to not knowing”
Again, none of this means therapy is making things worse. It means you’re doing the very brave work of turning toward what was once too painful to look at. You’re opening that closet not to punish yourself, but to make space for clarity, healing, and peace.
Eventually, You Put Things Back with Intention
Here’s the good news: this part doesn’t last forever.
Eventually, as the pieces start to settle, you begin to notice more clarity. You’re better able to name what you’ve been through. You can recognize what belongs to you and what never did. You can start to place things in a system that makes sense for your life now, not the past life you were merely surviving in.
The coats that still serve you go back in the closet, hung neatly and with intention. The outdated stuff gets discarded. And maybe you even label a few boxes so that, if those memories or feelings come up again, you know exactly where to find them and how to care for them without unraveling.
Why It’s Worth It
There’s no denying that healing is hard. And it’s absolutely valid to feel frustrated, overwhelmed, or even regretful when you’re knee-deep in the mess. But I promise you this: on the other side of that mess is space. Not just physical space, but emotional space. Capacity. Breathing room.
When we finally face what’s in the closet, we gain freedom. We stop bracing ourselves every time we walk past it. We no longer live in fear of the door flying open. We know what’s inside. We’ve made peace with it. And that peace is earned through courage, consistency, and compassion.
A Note from Your Therapist
If you’re currently in that messy middle, please don’t rush yourself. Healing doesn’t happen in one session, one journal entry, or even one year. It’s a spiral, not a straight line. Some days you’ll feel proud. Other days you’ll want to give up. All of that is normal. All of that belongs.
You don’t have to clean out the whole closet in one day. And you don’t have to do it alone.
Take what you need. Let go of what you don’t. You are not broken, you are rebuilding.