Permission To Be Dangerous

The Colonization of Healing

What does healing lead to?

Most people, if asked, would describe something like this: a calmer state, a more regulated nervous system, the release of difficult feelings, the end of old patterns, a greater capacity for understanding — including understanding of those who hurt you. Anger softens into grief. Resentment lets go. Vengeance dissolves. The person becomes more harmonious, more pleasant to be around, less disturbing to the people in their life.

This vision of healing is everywhere — in our therapeutic frameworks, our spiritual traditions, our wellness culture. And it’s presented not as a theory but as a truth: the natural direction healing moves, the destination it aims for.

Don’t buy it. Not because calm and regulation don’t matter — they do — but because when this vision is presumed to be the only way healing looks, it breeds disempowerment and shame. And it keeps us from seeing how political this vision actually is.

A truism, not a truth

There is a common belief — I encounter it constantly — that beneath anger, resentment, and vengeance lies grief, and that when healing happens, those difficult energies transform into something softer, something easier for the culture to receive.

Sometimes this happens. And sometimes something else entirely happens. I have seen the opposite: people who come with long-term grief or low-level depression and end up becoming more fiery, intense, and conflictual. A person who has adjusted to a calm and easy life wakes up to a powerful eroticism and desire for passion. A person who has found equilibrium in their daily patterns begins staying up in the middle of the night furiously creating, seemingly obsessed with new ways of thinking and feeling.

Putting it simply: the belief that difficult emotions naturally move toward release and resolution is a truism — something that sounds true, that many people affirm, but that does not hold up as a universal claim.

It’s appealing. It’s seductive. The question is why — and for whom.

Who Benefits from This Vision?

The dominant culture would rather your healing lead to a more harmonious, less disturbing, less challenging person. That’s in its interest — the interest of the status quo.

Now picture the other kind of healed person: someone whose anger has not dissolved but amplified — into power, ferocity, determination, activism, the capacity to name what is wrong and fight for what is right. That person disturbs the status quo, creates friction in families, upends the harmony of communities that operate on suppression and oppression.

The dominant culture has a strong preference for the first kind of healed person over the second. A person who has processed their difficult emotions into calm and understanding is assimilated, accommodated. Less threatening. More manageable.

When a vision of psychological healing funnels people in that direction — when the very definition of being healed means being less fierce, less disturbing, less resistant — that vision is a form of colonization: the internalization of values that serve those in power at the expense of those who are not.

What Trauma Actually Freezes

One outcome of trauma is called freezing — a form of survival where the body shuts down. But what is actually frozen? What would happen if we were defrosted? Some assume the great pain of being victimized will arise, but that’s only one of many possibilities.

When a person is overwhelmed, when they cannot fight back, when their resistance meets a force they cannot match — part of what gets locked in the trauma is the capacity to resist and fight in the first place. The powerlessness is not only an experience of the past. It becomes a present reality: I cannot fight. I cannot resist, set boundaries. I do not have that in me.

A woman came to me saying she needed help because of her early trauma. She kept freezing, she said. She wanted to get out of it.

Instead of helping her out of the freeze, I helped her into it. What’s it like to freeze, I asked. Can you show me with your body?

Her hands moved in front of her, clenched, pulling toward her solar plexus. Her body began curving inward, concave, as if she might curl around those fists entirely.

Go ahead, I said. Let yourself freeze even more.

That’s when I noticed the shaking — subtle at first, in her hands and forearms. Let the shaking happen, I said. Let it be free.

The shaking grew. Her arms began to flail, fists striking widely at the air.

Can you make a face that goes with that? She gritted her teeth. Snarled. Pure fury.

I said to that furious, flailing one: what can you do that your normal self can’t do?

She said: I don’t freeze.

This is not a problem managed. This is healing. What trauma froze was not only pain — it was power. And what unfroze was not grief, not calm. It was the fighter who had been locked inside the freeze.

Some of what we call healing is less like the resolution of a wound and more like a birth. The anguish, the fury — these are not symptoms of pathology. They are the beginning of something new arriving.

The Room That Douses the Fire

A woman came to me furious at her husband. I could feel it in her eyes, in the taut muscles of her body, in the way her words carried heat.

What would you say to him from this place? I asked.

She softened. Tears began flowing.

I asked: what’s moving you so deeply?

She answered: I always cry. I don’t want to cry anymore.

Go ahead, I said. Stop crying. Believe yourself.

She stopped. Looked at me.

I’m fucking pissed.

Something important had been about to disappear — and the room, in its compassion, would have helped it disappear. The tears are real. But the care had been one-sided: it would have failed to care for the fury alongside the tears. When compassion rushes to meet the softer thing, it douses the fire. It’s an insidious form of patronization.

This is what happens when compassion operates without a compass — when it cannot distinguish between a person who needs soothing and a person who needs permission to be dangerous.

Women’s anger has been policed for way too long. Not only from the outside — by a culture that calls angry women hysterical, aggressive, unfeminine — but from the inside, by exactly this move. The proliferation of courses on women’s anger in recent years is a response to this policing. But underneath the need for those courses is a dominant cultural orientation that has treated the absence of women’s anger as a healed state.

The Sociopolitical Policing

This policing lands hardest on the communities that have historically been most threatening to those in power.

The policing of Black anger in America is not subtle. It has been applied to figures across the full range of public life — from activists called violent for demanding rights, to political figures whose dignity is reread as militancy. Michelle Obama, whose grace and intelligence are undeniable, faced exactly this: any expression of her power, any moment of directness or fire, was framed as aggressive, militant, threatening, and something requiring explanation or apology.

What this policing produces — over generations, internalized into the body and the psyche — is a narrowing of what is permitted. Certain energies get shamed, pathologized, suppressed. The person polices themselves before the culture has to.

And then a therapeutic framework arrives that tells them: we can help you release those difficult feelings, soften that edge, move toward understanding. What looks like healing completes the colonization.

A Different Vision

There is a place for calm, for harmony, for grief. Understanding others is not always capitulation. But healing must not be envisioned in any single direction. We must not assume the destination is always a more regulated, more understanding, more harmonious person. For many people — especially those whose anger, resistance, and power have been suppressed — healing looks like radicalization. It looks like the emergence of something fierce and uncompromising. It looks like a person grounded in their own truth, less manipulable, more dangerous.

That person is not stuck. They are not unhealed. They are becoming themselves.

The life project of becoming oneself — what Jung called individuation, what others have called radicalization, what I call the Unshaming Way — does not end in assimilation. It ends in the full arrival of who a person actually is. Walk away from any vision of healing that hollows people out. The world does not need more manageable people. It needs the fully arrived ones — the leaders, the artists, the fighters, the ones who don’t freeze.

David Bedrick, J.D., Dipl. PW, is the founder of the UnShaming Way — a depth-psychology approach built on one conviction: your symptoms, struggles, and survival strategies carry intelligence, not pathology. He is the author of five books, including The Unshaming Way (North Atlantic Books), endorsed by Gabor Maté, MD. He has trained hundreds of clinicians and taught thousands of individuals for forty years. Before psychology, he practiced law; before law, he survived the home that taught him everything the books later confirmed.