Not Every Ache Is a Wound or a Sin
- nathanaelschlecht2
- May 29
- 3 min read
Some people come in carrying the quiet conviction that if they could just find the right answer, the internal tension would stop.
The restlessness would resolve, the low hum of dissatisfaction would lift, and the pull toward the thing they know isn’t good for them would finally go quiet. They’ve usually tried a lot of mental health hacks by the time they arrive. Therapy is often just the latest one. And underneath the trying is an assumption that lives below that water line they’ve never articulated it out loud: a person who is doing life right wouldn’t feel this tension at all.
So, when the tension doesn’t stop, they may reach for an explanation. It must be a wound somewhere, something that happened, something to heal. Or, it must be a failure somewhere, something they’re doing wrong, something that needs to be fixed. One of those two, a received wound to process or a problem that needs to be fixed. Everything that’s hard has to be one of them.
But some of it doesn’t fit either box.
Not every ache is a wound. Not every pull toward the wrong thing is a sin you can name and turn from. Some of it is just the reality of being a person in the imperfect state of mortality. The wanting of two things that can’t both be had. Reaching for what you know won’t satisfy and reaching again anyway. The way a good thing in front of you can feel thin while something you can’t quite name feels truer…. the emptiness underneath. None of that is a diagnosis or a moral failure you forgot to repent of. It’s closer to the condition of the world you were born into than anything you did or anything that was done to you.
There’s a particular kind of suffering that comes not from the tension itself but from the belief that the tension shouldn’t be there. This person isn’t only restless, they may be ashamed of being restless, or frightened by it, reading ordinary inner division as evidence that something has gone badly wrong with them specifically. The condition is common to everyone, and the shame about the condition is the part that isolates.
A lot of energy gets spent trying to fix what was never able to be fixed by our own effort, only because life was never going to run smooth in the first place.
The old language for this didn’t pathologize it and didn’t moralize it. It just named it…. A world that was not what it was meant to be, and people in it carrying that same disorientation in themselves. Not as an individual verdict on any one person, but as the shared condition everyone is living in. There is something almost merciful in the naming. If this is simply the ground everyone is standing on, then the restlessness isn’t proof that you, in particular, are failing at being a person.
That doesn’t make the tension disappear. Naming it that way was never meant to.
What it does is an attempt to take the second weight off, the shame stacked on top of the ache, the private suspicion that everyone else got the smooth version and you got the broken one.
Some things are meant to be healed. Some things are meant to be turned from. And some things are just carried, by everyone, the whole way through, and the carrying may become slightly lighter once you stop mistaking the weight for a sign that you’re the only one who has it.
Some of what people bring to therapy isn’t a wound to heal or a habit to break. It’s the ordinary friction of being human, made heavier by the belief that it shouldn’t be there. Sorting out which is which is slow, honest work, and it’s the kind of work I do.
I write longer essays on trauma, healing, and the slower parts of faith on my Substack, The Regulated Mind
Nando Schlecht, LAC is a licensed trauma therapist in Tucson, Arizona, offering longer-term, depth-oriented therapy for adults working with complex trauma, dissociation, and the patterns the body holds. His practice integrates Deep Brain Reorienting, Brainspotting, Ego State Therapy, and Internal Family Systems, with faith-informed care available by request.
Learn more at nandotherapy.com or schedule a consultation.
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