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Why Your "Healing" Makes the Pain Worse

Channel: HealthyGamerGG
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44HVIiR4oO4

Dr K explores "the deep hurt" - a profound ache that some people carry no matter how good life gets, that psychiatric healing does not remove and that often grows more intense as you get better. He offers several speculative explanations and frames it as an open question for the audience.

Key points

What the deep hurt is

  • A persistent, deep ache that remains even when life is objectively good (he describes his own: loved, financially stable, kids, good health). It sits beneath the levels psychiatry usually treats.
  • Three features: (1) it lives deep within - he estimates 70-80% of people live mentally between "the ground floor and the fifth floor" (surface thoughts/emotions that heal with normal interventions), while 20-30% have something much deeper that surface work never reaches; (2) it has "oomph" - density and intensity; it can feel oddly good, adding depth to life (these people often love sad music and feel intense compassion); (3) it does not heal - if anything it gets more profound as the rest of life improves.

It is distinct from mental illness

  • Mental illness operates at physiologic (adrenaline/cortisol, low panic threshold in PTSD), emotional (hyperactive negative-emotion regions in depression), and cognitive levels (rigid beliefs: "I'm a loser, it's hopeless"). These respond to treatment.
  • The deep hurt synergizes with mental illness - messed-up physiology, emotions, environment, or cognitions amplify its oomph and make life far worse - but it is separate. He recounts a patient with borderline personality disorder (an unstable sense of self, core emptiness) who, with evidence-based treatment plus yoga/tai chi, got much better; the emptiness turned into a deep suffering, and her grandfather told her "I've had that my whole life, that doesn't get better, that's just the way life is."
  • Patients with bipolar disorder who make art often resent mood stabilizers not for controlling mania/depression (they like that) but because the medication cuts them off from this part of themselves that, while negatively valenced, gives life depth and flavor.

Possible explanations (a "differential diagnosis")

  • Unformulated experience (Donald Stern, psychoanalytic): unlike Freud's view that trauma is laid down as a formed wound, Stern holds the unconscious contains potential, not-yet-shaped "psychic substance" - perception emerges from vagueness to clarity. The deep hurt may be an unformulated ball of clay that takes shape through living. Dr K is unsure this fits, since it grows as you heal.
  • Primitive trauma: injuries keep the resolution of the mind at the age they occurred - a 2-year-old's wound is primitive and formless (no concept of "ugly"), a teenager's is more defined ("I'm ugly/pathetic"). He doubts this too, since trauma can heal yet the deep hurt remains.
  • Epigenetics: psychological damage can be passed down by turning genes on/off rather than altering code - he cites that descendants of Holocaust survivors can show PTSD symptoms. Perhaps a grandmother's loss of a child transmitted that experience.
  • Karma / reincarnation: he shares his subjective experience (also told on Steven Bartlett's podcast) that in meditation he felt he had lost a child or been a mother in a past life, carrying that grief now. He flags his Hindu-spirituality bias openly, notes he was an atheist growing up, and presents this only as one item on his list - "it sure as hell doesn't seem to have come from this one."

The wound of compassion (bodhicitta)

  • He cites an 8th-century Buddhist text (the Bodhicaryavatara / mind of a Buddha). Beginner meditation pursues tranquility (releasing anger, sadness, ego); but past inner peace, a "wound of compassion" opens - a profound suffering rooted in identifying others' pain as one's own.
  • He reads passages on seeing no real distinction between self and others in wanting happiness and fleeing suffering, and on radical self-sacrifice for others' benefit. His point is less about whether the ethic is right than about the immense compassion the author must have felt - and he notes his own compassion has grown sharply as he has stabilized.
  • His recurring observation: leaning into the deep hurt adds oomph in the outside world - for his patients it becomes a beautiful song or artwork; for him it is making videos like this, trying to reach billions of suffering people even when it costs him and even when he cannot fully explain what the deep hurt is. He explicitly admits this is not understood scientifically and asks the audience to share their experience to help figure it out.

Reception

  • One of the most resonant videos on the channel; the comment section became a collective attempt to name the thing, with many saying they had never felt so seen ("please never delete this video, it's proof that I'm not insane"). A pinned-tier sentiment: "I think it's sadness for the amount of suffering in the world that we suppress in order to function."
  • Commenters supplied their own vocabulary and frameworks: the German Weltschmerz ("world pain") and Schwermut, the concept of sonder, "soul sickness," "existential melancholy/angst," and Dabrowski's emotional overexcitability in gifted people. Several connected it to high sensitivity plus high empathy and intelligence.
  • A large cluster located its origin in childhood emotional neglect and lack of attunement (citing "Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents" and "existential loneliness"), or in modern society's lack of community and disconnection from nature, meaning, and the spiritual.
  • Others framed it existentially: consciousness and awareness of mortality, the gap between what we can imagine and what reality allows, powerlessness before the world's pain, and the loneliness of being ultimately alone in one's experience. Many reported it grows louder, not quieter, as they heal - directly echoing Dr K.
  • Notable lived-experience comments: people with formally diagnosed childhood PTSD or treatment-resistant depression saying years of work built a successful life yet the deep hurt remained ("it's not psychiatric, it's existential"); and warm reception of his openness about a past-life experience "without shame or embarrassment." One commenter said the hurt eased only once they started living in a (healthy) "selfish" way and reducing their own suffering first.