Healing Hurts

How relief keeps us comfortable, and cures leave us changed

People don’t want to be cured. They want relief. Because a cure is painful. This observation, deceptively simple, gets at the heart of one of the most misunderstood dynamics in human psychology, cultural narratives, and even politics. Relief is easy to romanticise. It comes like a soft fog, numbing sharp edges, inviting temporary surrender. But a cure — true transformation — requires tearing apart old wounds, interrogating long-held identities, and dismantling illusions that have, paradoxically, become comforting. Cures demand an inner revolution, and humans, contrary to heroic myths, are far more conservative in the management of their own suffering than they like to admit.

To seek relief is to maintain the scaffolding of our suffering while rearranging the furniture. We swap one coping mechanism for another. We reframe. We rebrand. We normalise. In a society saturated with wellness mantras and digital dopamine hits, we mistake momentary stillness for healing, and momentary pleasure for progress. Relief, in this context, becomes not just a preference but a currency. It’s more marketable than a cure. Cures are difficult to sell because they often start with dismantling everything that made us feel functional. They require time, discipline, solitude, and a level of self-confrontation most people instinctively flee.

“Fidelia and Speranza” (1776) by Benjamin West — inspired by Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queen”, this painting personifies Faith and Hope guiding the Red Cross Knight towards spiritual redemption. It resonates with my essay’s exploration of the arduous journey toward true healing and the virtues required to undertake it.

The addiction to relief explains why many therapy sessions end with a feeling of being “heard” but not necessarily changed. It’s why we flock to influencers who affirm our pain instead of challenging our complicity in it. It’s why even the most brilliant minds will intellectualise their trauma, write books about it, teach seminars on it — without ever truly touching the raw nerve that would initiate an irreversible change. Because to be cured is to give up not just the pain, but the story built around it. And stories, even the tragic ones, are precious. They make us legible to ourselves and to others. Who are we without our suffering?

A profound existential loneliness is embedded in being cured. When you outgrow your pain, you often outgrow the communities that shared it. There’s camaraderie in suffering, a dark warmth in mutual affliction. Relief allows you to remain in that club. A cure exiles you. This is why some people relapse after genuine healing, it is not the illness they miss, but the belonging that came with it. To heal is to walk into new terrain, often alone, often unsure. And most people would rather feel bad with company than feel well in isolation.

We might think of this psychologically, but it also applies politically. Entire ideologies are built not on the promise of true structural change (which would require massive upheaval and discomfort) but on palliative measures. The state becomes a therapist offering relief: subsidies instead of justice, reforms instead of revolutions, slogans instead of restructuring. Because people don’t want to be cured of their systemic dependencies either. They want someone to blame, someone to save them, someone to soothe the surface while the rot underneath remains undisturbed.

Relief, then, is seductive. It is the siren song of the status quo. It whispers, “You’re fine. You’re doing your best. Just breathe”. It markets itself as self-love, self-care, self-compassion. And in the right dose, yes, these are necessary. But they are not sufficient. You can do yoga, drink green juice, and meditate for hours and still be haunted by unexamined beliefs, unresolved traumas, and unconscious loyalties to your own pain. You can be calm and still completely untransformed. The modern self-help movement thrives on this paradox: it offers endless ways to feel better without ever becoming different.

Cures are not palatable because they strip us of excuses. Once you have truly seen the root of your dysfunction — once you’ve named it, grieved it, faced it — you can no longer pretend it’s someone else’s fault. You can’t hide behind victimhood or busyness or inherited narratives. Cures demand responsibility. They bring clarity, and clarity is a violent thing. It unravels. It deconstructs. It forces the question: “Now that you know, what will you do?” And most people are terrified of that question, because it reveals the one truth relief allows them to avoid: their freedom.

Not to mention the profound moral drama at play. Relief casts us as the noble struggler: brave, enduring, sympathetic. But cured people? They’re unsettling. They disrupt the moral hierarchy of pain. They are harder to relate to. They have nothing to prove, and that, in a world addicted to performative suffering, is dangerous. The cured are unbothered, often quiet, uninterested in applause. They make you wonder if your pain is still necessary or just habitual. They don’t flaunt their wellness. They live it. And that makes them threatening.

Let’s not forget: curing something also implies a kind of death. The death of a self that was organised around a particular need, belief, or identity. And death, even of an outdated self, is no small ask. It brings grief. It brings terror. It brings the unbearable question of who you are now. Relief keeps the old self alive, just sedated. Cures kill it. And while we all say we want to evolve, evolution involves the shedding of skins…. and some people would rather suffocate inside their old ones than deal with the rawness of what comes next.

Of course, none of this is to say that relief is wrong. Sometimes, relief is life-saving. Sometimes, it’s the necessary prelude to a deeper work. But it becomes toxic when it pretends to be transformation. When it becomes a lifestyle instead of a layover. When it prevents you from asking: what am I avoiding? Whose approval am I still chasing? What parts of myself do I refuse to confront? And perhaps most importantly: what might I become if I stopped trying to feel better and started trying to be well?

In the end, this is the human paradox: we crave change without cost, transformation without pain, healing without death. But the truth is, to be cured is to walk through fire, not to be handed a blanket. And the ones who do — who risk the burn, who face the rupture, who grieve their old selves and build new ones from ash — are rare. But they are real. And when you meet one, you know it. They are not louder. They are not prouder. They are simply…… FREE.

To the ones who no longer perform their pain, to the rare, the raw, the free, in clarity, even when it burns,

T.

“Saint Sebastian Tended by Saint Irene” (1625) by Hendrick ter Brugghen — depicting the aftermath of martyrdom, this painting focuses on healing and compassion. Saint Irene’s tender care of the wounded Sebastian reflects my essay’s theme of confronting pain to achieve genuine recovery, rather than seeking mere comfort.