The 3 Phases of Healing and How to Create Lasting Change
Written by Sonya Black, Coach and Psychotherapist
Sonya Black is an accredited Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapist, Coach (trauma-informed), and trained family mediator with 20+ years’ experience. She helps people in life's challenges, moving from crisis and complexity to clarity and action, using evidence-based psychology and practical tools so clients can live the life they want to live.
You promised yourself it would be different this time. Then a familiar situation brings the same rush of anxiety, the same urge to withdraw, another yes when you needed to say no, or another relationship challenge. Why do these patterns persist, even when you understand them? Across anxiety, depression, stress, and trauma, there can be processes that keep us stuck. Understanding and working with them opens the possibility of deep healing and lasting change, so that you can live the life you want.
What does healing involve?
Psychological healing involves working with the effects of painful experiences and changing the responses that continue to cause distress or limit your life. This can include how you remember an event, what you believe about yourself, and the ways you protect yourself in relationships. The experience remains part of your history, while its emotional impact and influence on your choices can change.
For some people, healing includes treatment for a recognised mental health condition. For others, it means addressing recurring patterns, rebuilding self-trust, or reconnecting with parts of life they have lost touch with. The work begins with understanding what is happening for you.
Why patterns persist
You may understand why you react the way you do. You have read the books, talked things through, and tried to make changes. Yet a brief message can still leave you feeling rejected. You say yes when you need to say no. Your mind keeps replaying a conversation, or your body remains on alert long after a difficult situation has ended.
Afterward, you wonder why you are still struggling. You know what you want to do differently. Why does it feel so hard?
In more than twenty years as a psychotherapist, I have worked with people whose experiences are very different, yet who recognise these same struggles. Some arrive with anxiety or depression. Others are navigating trauma, relationship breakdown, or a growing sense that the way they are living is no longer sustainable. In my article on the hidden psychology of divorce, I explore how a major life transition can affect emotional responses and decision-making.
Making sense of what is happening can bring enormous relief. Deeper healing also involves working with the experiences, beliefs, and responses that continue to shape the present, then practising a different way of living.
This is the thinking behind Transcend and its three phases of healing: Understand & Stabilise, Update & Heal, and Reclaim & Live.
We cannot change what has happened. We can heal from its impact and develop greater freedom to choose what happens next.
Different difficulties can share familiar patterns
Psychological difficulties rarely fit neatly into separate boxes. Anxiety, depression, trauma-related difficulties, and sustained stress can overlap, both in what we experience and in the patterns that keep us struggling. You might recognise worry, disrupted sleep, tension, withdrawal, or a harsh inner voice across several of these experiences. Stress itself is not necessarily a disorder, but it can interact with mental health difficulties.
Avoidance offers one example. With anxiety, you might avoid situations you fear. Following trauma, you might avoid reminders of what happened. With depression, withdrawing from activities and people can reduce opportunities for connection or enjoyment, making low mood harder to shift. The reasons differ, while parts of the cycle overlap.
A transdiagnostic approach looks across diagnostic boundaries at processes that can contribute to different difficulties. These might include avoidance, repetitive worry or rumination, harsh self-criticism, and difficulty tolerating uncertainty or painful emotions. Research into approaches such as the Unified Protocol supports addressing shared processes across several anxiety disorders.
A person makes sense in the context of their life and experiences. Shared processes do not mean that every difficulty has the same cause or needs identical treatment. A diagnosis can guide treatment. An individual understanding, or formulation, helps explain how a particular person's experiences, circumstances, and responses fit together. This gives us several possible points at which to create change.
We explore four interconnected areas: thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, and behaviour. A thought can trigger fear, fear can bring physical changes, and those sensations can influence what we do next. Our response then affects what we learn from the experience.
Consider someone who worries that other people will reject them. They agree to requests they cannot comfortably manage. Saying yes brings immediate relief, but over time, they become exhausted and resentful. They also lose opportunities to discover that some relationships can withstand an honest no.
Understanding the pattern helps us identify where change can begin.
Understanding the whole person
Our patterns develop within the lives we have lived. A biopsychosocial approach considers how biological, psychological, and social factors interact. Physical health, sleep, and bodily responses can influence how we feel. Our experiences, beliefs, and ways of coping shape how we interpret and respond to situations. Relationships, work, financial pressures, and the support available to us also matter.
These influences work together. Sustained pressure at work might disrupt sleep, leaving us more vulnerable to anxiety and self-criticism. Withdrawing from others may then reduce the connection and support that could help us recover.
This is why healing involves understanding the whole person and their circumstances. Within Transcend, we consider what needs attention internally, what may need to change around us, and where additional support could help. Lasting change becomes more possible when the work reflects the reality of someone's life. Relationships can influence our difficulties, support recovery, and become an important place where change is experienced and practised.
How coping patterns develop
Our ways of coping often have a history. Keeping quiet may have helped someone manage criticism. Constantly anticipating problems may have provided some predictability in an unpredictable home. Achievement may have become closely linked with approval and self-worth.
These responses can persist after circumstances change. Recognising their history can soften shame, while examining what maintains them now helps us move forward. Difficult relationship decisions can bring these patterns into focus, a theme I explore in Should I Stay or Should I Go?
Current circumstances matter too. An excessive workload, an unsafe relationship, or financial pressure needs practical attention. Healing includes recognising what needs to change around us, alongside the work within us.
How lasting change develops
One way to understand change is to think about an old system and a new system. This is a metaphor for learned patterns of thinking, feeling, and responding.
The old system contains familiar predictions and responses: keep everyone happy, expect rejection, stay on guard, withdraw before you are hurt. Some developed during painful experiences, while others have become established through repetition. Even when they cost us, familiar responses can feel compelling and safe within our understanding of safety.
A new system develops through therapeutic work and experiences that support different meanings and responses. We identify what happens, examine the beliefs and predictions involved, and practise alternatives. Support and repetition help us carry new learning into different situations.
For example, you might notice an urge to apologise whenever you disagree. You explore what you fear will happen, express a manageable difference of opinion in a supportive relationship, and reflect on the response. Over time, several such experiences can help you learn that disagreement and connection can coexist. Where depression has led to withdrawal, a planned, manageable activity can provide an opportunity for engagement before motivation has fully returned.
Lasting change involves working with what drives a pattern and making different responses available in everyday life. The three phases give this work direction.
Phase 1: Understand and stabilise
The aim is to increase your ability to remain present with difficult feelings and respond with greater choice. You do not need to become perfectly calm to do meaningful work. We begin by making sense of your experiences and developing ways to support yourself emotionally and physically.
Together, we build an individual understanding, or formulation, of how your experiences, beliefs, emotions, bodily responses, and behaviour connect. This helps us recognise what triggers distress, what keeps a pattern going, and where change can begin. Understanding yourself in this way can soften self-blame and make your responses feel less confusing.
Emotional regulation is central to this phase. We learn to recognise difficult emotions, understand what they may be communicating, and find ways to manage their intensity. The aim is to become more able to experience feelings without becoming overwhelmed by them or needing to escape them immediately.
This includes working with the nervous system. When you have spent a long time feeling threatened or under pressure, you may find it difficult to settle, even when there is an opportunity to rest. Grounding, gentle breathwork, and somatic practices that bring attention to bodily sensations and movement can help you explore what supports steadiness. Practices are adapted to your responses, as focusing inward does not feel helpful for everyone.
We also develop the compassionate self, a supportive way of relating to yourself when things are difficult. This involves noticing what you need and responding with care and wisdom. You might practise a more reassuring inner voice, use compassionate imagery, or ask, “What would help me through this moment?”
Self-care becomes part of the foundation. Sleep, nourishment, movement, rest, and connection matter, alongside boundaries and practical support. We explore what nourishes you, what depletes you, and what is realistic within your circumstances.
These practices support the conditions for healing and help you build capacity for the work ahead. You do not need to feel perfectly calm before meaningful change can begin. Where danger or adversity is ongoing, practical safety and external support also need attention.
A question to reflect on: What am I feeling, what do I need, and how could I respond to myself with greater care?
Phase 2: Update and heal
“I’ve always been anxious.” “I’ve never felt good enough.” “My mental health has always been like this.” I often hear these words from clients. When a way of thinking or feeling has been present for years, it can become difficult to imagine anything different. A negative view of yourself can feel like a fact about who you are.
In this phase, we work with the beliefs, memories, emotional meanings, and responses that keep those experiences alive. Longstanding difficulties deserve careful attention, and their familiarity does not mean they are beyond change.
This is the deeper updating work at the heart of Transcend. Understanding how a pattern developed gives us a starting point. We then use appropriate evidence-based techniques to help change the meanings and responses attached to it.
You may understand intellectually that you are worthy of care, yet still feel undeserving when someone offers it. You may know that an experience was not your fault while continuing to carry shame. Updating involves working with that gap between what you know and what you feel.
Depending on your needs and the setting, this work may include examining core beliefs, imagery, behaviour experiments, compassion-focused techniques, or trauma-focused interventions such as eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR). We might revisit the meaning of an experience, test a feared prediction, or practise receiving support without immediately dismissing it.
The aim is deep, lasting change in how you experience yourself and respond to life. A belief such as “I am not good enough” may begin to lose its authority. A memory may carry less distress. You may become more able to trust your judgement, express a need, or remain connected when you feel vulnerable.
Using our old-system and new-system metaphor, we are helping established patterns update in the light of what you know and experience now. New learning is strengthened through practice and carried into everyday situations.
This work can take time, and progress may be uneven. A familiar feeling returning does not automatically mean that nothing has changed. We look at its intensity, how long it lasts, what you believe about it, and the choices now available to you.
We cannot change what happened. We can work towards changing the meaning it holds, the distress it evokes, and the influence it has over your life.
A question to reflect on: What have I come to accept as a truth about myself, and what might become possible if that belief could change?
Phase 3: Reclaim and live
As patterns change, space opens for questions that may have been difficult to consider: What do I need? What matters to me? What kind of life do I want to create?
This phase brings healing into relationships, identity, and everyday decisions. It may involve rediscovering interests, expressing needs, developing boundaries, or learning to stay connected through manageable disagreement. Sometimes it includes repairing relationships affected by a difficult period, with the recognition that repair requires participation from those involved.
For someone who has spent years trying to avoid disapproval, expressing a different opinion can represent substantial change. For someone whose life has narrowed around fear, returning to a valued activity can be an important step.
Interpersonal growth can be part of healing too. You may become more able to express a need, listen without immediately defending yourself, tolerate a difference of opinion, or recognise when a relationship is harmful. As you understand your own responses, you can take responsibility for your behaviour without taking responsibility for everyone else's feelings. Healthier connection also depends on the other person's willingness and behaviour.
These experiences help consolidate new learning. Repeated practice gives a different response the opportunity to become more familiar and sustainable.
Reclaiming your life also means recognising the limits of your control. You can choose how you respond and where you seek support, while acknowledging real constraints and allowing room for grief.
Personal development has a place within this work. You can explore the person you want to become, develop strengths, and make more deliberate choices about your life, alongside addressing distress. Healing and growth can support one another.
Following trauma, some people describe post-traumatic growth, positive changes that emerge through working with the impact of profoundly challenging experiences. This can include deeper relationships, a changed sense of personal strength, or new possibilities for the future. Growth can coexist with distress. It does not mean the experience was beneficial or that everyone must find a positive outcome.
A question to reflect on: What small action would move me towards the life I want to live?
Healing is not always linear
Phased approaches have an established history in trauma recovery, including Judith Herman's work on safety, working through traumatic experiences, and reconnection. Transcend brings established psychological principles into a framework for understanding patterns, healing, and creating change.
The phases overlap and can be revisited. You can begin reclaiming parts of your life while still healing. You may need more support during a period of change. Treatment research also shows that a separate preparatory stabilisation phase is not necessary for everyone before trauma-focused work. Individual assessment guides what is appropriate.
Time and healing do not always move together in a straight line. Time may bring distance and opportunities to recover, while some difficulties continue to need active attention. A stressful week, an anniversary, or a new relationship can bring a familiar response back into view.
In our old-system and new-system metaphor, the familiar response may still arise while the newer response is becoming established. Its return does not automatically erase the work you have done. You might recognise it sooner, spend less time caught in it, ask for support, or repair a conversation more readily. A sustained deterioration deserves attention and a review of the support or treatment you need.
Healing, recovery, and growth are possible. Progress can include significant relief from symptoms, a less distressing memory, greater self-trust, or more freedom in relationships. The aim is change that reaches beyond a moment of insight and becomes part of how you live.
Explore the Transcend programme
Transcend offers a guided space for healing and personal development, grounded in evidence-based psychological approaches. This is a blended programme combining professionally facilitated live sessions with prepared and prerecorded learning between meetings. Participants have time to reflect privately and practise, then bring their learning and questions into the live work.
The material continues to evolve alongside delivery, allowing the experience to respond to participants' needs. Shared learning can help us recognise that we are not alone. Personal disclosure is a choice, and participants do not share graphic details of their experiences. Individual trauma processing requires an appropriate clinical setting and assessment.
Information is valuable. Knowing how to apply it to your own life, with opportunities to practise and support when you become stuck, is often where meaningful change develops.
Your past may explain where you are. It does not have to decide where you go next.
Explore Transcend and join the programme waitlist to learn more about the developing group experience and the support available.
Read more from Sonya Black
Sonya Black, Coach and Psychotherapist
Sonya Black is an accredited Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapist, Coach (trauma-informed) and trained family mediator with more than 20 years’ experience. She specialises in high-stakes life trainsitions including relationship breakdown and divorce, alongside trauma, anxiety, depression, and helping clients understand the complexity of what is happening in their mind and body so they can respond with clarity instead of overwhelm. As the founder of CBT in Partnership, Sonya combines evidence-based CBT, EMDR and Mindfulness with powerful coaching techniques to translate insight into action, supporting people to rebuild confidence, strengthen relationships, and move towards a life they want to live that feels aligned and fulfilling.
