The Healing Practice No One Gave You Permission For
- 4d
- 9 min read
Updated: 4d
Dr. Katie Simons, PharmD, BCPS, CCHT, is a clinical pharmacist, transpersonal hypnotherapist, psychedelic medicine facilitator, and coach specializing in nervous system regulation, personal transformation, and holistic healing. She is the founder of The Holistic Apothec, a resource for coaching and education on healing through altered states of consciousness.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from doing too much of the wrong thing for too long. It’s the exhaustion of living in careful compliance with the rules, expectations, unspoken agreements about who you are supposed to be and how much space you are allowed to take up. It’s the fatigue of a nervous system that has been on its best behavior for decades and is politely losing its mind.
Most therapeutic frameworks will tell you the answer is more awareness. More journaling. More understanding of your attachment style, nervous system, and childhood wounds. They are not wrong, awareness matters. But awareness alone will resolve this pain point. At some point, healing stops being an insight and turns into a choice. Specifically, the choice to stop following rules that were never written with your well-being in mind.
I call this choice intentional defiance. I would argue it is one of the most underrated healing practices available to us.
What intentional defiance actually means
Before you worry too much, intentional defiance does not mean breaking the speed limit because you are late to work or lying to your spouse because the truth is uncomfortable. Sorry, folks, this is not an excuse for poor behavior. On the contrary, it requires aligning with your values and morals prior to taking any action.
Intentional defiance is the practice of prioritizing your own values and well-being in how you choose to live, even when, or especially when, that requires breaking social norms, family expectations, internal “shoulds,” or, dare I say it, the law. It is the deliberate, conscious choice to break the rules that do not serve your good or align with your values. By doing so, your choices become a vehicle of freedom.
Most of the rules I am talking about are not the ones in a legal code. They are the subtler ones, the internalized agreements most of us have been following since childhood without ever consciously signing the contract. Rules like your needs come last, and self-sacrifice is admirable. Rest must be earned. Conflict is dangerous. Being difficult is worse than being diminished. Say yes. Be likable. Make it easy for everyone else.
These rules were not handed to us as rules. They arrived as love, as safety, as the implicit terms of belonging, which is exactly what makes them so hard to see, and so costly to keep following once you do.
The training we did not sign up for
Most of us do not consciously choose how we show up in the world. We were trained early in life, before we had a cognitive filter or a sense of self. As children, we learned quickly what it meant to be good, agreeable, polite, emotionally regulated in a way that made those around us comfortable. Approval was rarely unconditional. It was contingent on performance, compliance, and how reliably we could suppress the parts of ourselves that were inconvenient to others.
In adulthood, the training simply upgrades its wardrobe. We show up regardless of how we feel. We avoid conflict to keep the peace. We rest only after we have sufficiently justified it. We say “yes” when we mean “no” so fluently that we eventually stop noticing the gap between the two. We become high-functioning, reliable, productive, and somewhere amid all that competent self-abandonment, we wonder why we feel so disconnected from ourselves.
It is not a mystery. When chronic self-abandonment becomes the baseline, anxiety, burnout, and depression are not signs that something inside us is broken. They are the nervous system sending a very clear, very persistent message, this arrangement is not working. Something has to change. Intentional defiance paves the way to finally listen.
Why the system is not neutral
Here is something worth saying plainly, most of the systems we live in were not designed for our wholeness. They were designed for productivity and function. Healthcare often manages symptoms more efficiently than it resolves root causes. Workplaces reward output, not nervous system regulation. Rest is glorified in theory and often penalized in practice. We are told to take care of ourselves, as long as it does not disrupt productivity or make anyone uncomfortable.
This is not a conspiracy. It is just the architecture of a culture that runs, in part, on human overextension. It means that choosing your own wellbeing over your output will sometimes feel, and be perceived, as an act of defiance, simply because it is inconvenient to the system.
Healing asks you to listen inward instead of outward. To rest when your body says rest, not when the calendar permits it. To set a limit when something feels wrong, even when setting it is the harder short-term choice. To trust your own perception in systems that spent years teaching you not to.
The guilt that often arises is a sense of selfishness. But this is not selfishness. It is sovereignty. Sovereignty, in a culture built on your compliance, will occasionally look like rebellion. Wear it well.
What intentional defiance looks like on a Tuesday
Intentional defiance rarely arrives as a dramatic, glamorous gesture. More often, it looks almost embarrassingly ordinary. You stay home when you are sick instead of pushing through. You say no without a three-paragraph explanation for why. You do not respond immediately. You stop carrying emotions that were never yours to hold. You stop asking permission to take care of yourself first. You follow the thing you are actually drawn to instead of the thing you think you should do.
At first, these moments do not feel like freedom. They feel uncomfortable and suspect, like you might be getting away with something you are not supposed to. That discomfort is a signal of rewiring old, subconscious brain code. Because you are not just changing behavior. You are interrupting conditioning that your nervous system built for survival. Guilt will show up on schedule. Shame will have opinions. The fear of disappointing someone will arrive right on time, carrying its little clipboard of reasons to reconsider.
This is why so many people know exactly what they need and still cannot seem to do it consistently. It is not a mindset problem. It is a safety problem. If your nervous system learned that safety came from compliance, then choosing yourself will register as a threat, even when it is the most coherent thing you have ever done. The body has to accumulate evidence that the world does not end when you say “no.” That recalibration takes time, repetition, and a willingness to be temporarily uncomfortable in service of something truer.
There are therapeutic modalities that make this rewiring process easier by accessing the brain’s innate neuroplasticity, including hypnotherapy and neurolinguistic programming. Not all internal change has to be a grind, just like life does not have to be a grind. Reach out if engaging with these modalities suits you.
Defiance without integrity is just chaos
Before we go any further, I would like to re-emphasize a point touched on earlier. Intentional defiance without a foundation of integrity is not a healing practice. It is just an excuse to do whatever you feel like and call it sovereignty. This distinction matters.
Living in integrity does not necessarily mean moral perfection or rigid rule-following. It means being in alignment, living in such a way that your actions, values, and honest sense of what is true and right line up. It means knowing what you actually stand for, not just what you are reacting against. It is the difference between a compass and a mood.
This is the step most people want to skip, because identifying your core values requires a quality of honest self-examination that can be genuinely difficult. It asks you to look past the values you were handed by your family, religion, or culture and find the ones that are actually yours, the ones that remain when you strip away the performance of being good and ask what you would choose if no one were watching and nothing were at stake except your own integrity.
Without this foundation, intentional defiance turns into bypassing, a justification for impulsivity, for avoiding accountability, for dressing up emotional reactivity in the language of healing. Acting however suits you in the heat of a moment is not intentional defiance, it is just acting a fool.
When your values are clear, intentional defiance becomes precise. You are not breaking rules at random. You are breaking specific rules that conflict with specific things you know to be true about who you are and how you want to live. Your values become the North Star. That North Star is what makes this a healing practice rather than a free pass.
The most obvious example of intentional defiance we are not talking about
If you want a clear illustration of how threatening genuine healing is to systems built on managed suffering, look no further than the current conversation around psychedelics.
We have substantial and growing evidence supporting the therapeutic potential of substances like psilocybin and MDMA for depression, trauma, addiction, and end-of-life distress. We also have a legal framework that, in many places, still classifies them alongside heroin. The tension reflects exactly what these medicines threaten, the authority of external systems over your internal experience.
What psychedelics tend to do, at their core, is remind people of something fundamental, your healing does not live outside of you. They create conditions for you to see yourself more clearly, to feel what has been suppressed, to access parts of your psyche that have been buried under decades of careful performance. Psychedelics have a particular talent for dissolving the stories we built around our own smallness and showing us, often with uncomfortable directness, what is actually true.
That is a destabilizing proposition for any system that benefits from you outsourcing your authority, which may explain why the medicines most associated with radical self-trust and direct spiritual experience are the ones we were told, for decades, to be most afraid of. Suppressing access to your own consciousness is, it turns out, a very old strategy.
Engaging with these medicines within a thoughtful, intentional container is perhaps one of the most literal acts of intentional defiance available to us. It is the choice to access your own inner landscape on your own terms, outside of the systems that decided they should be the gatekeepers of your healing.
From compliant to sovereign
The most radical thing you can do in a culture built on your compliance and complacency is decide that you are no longer available for it.
At the heart of intentional defiance is an identity shift that is simple to describe and genuinely hard to make. The compliant identity, the one most of us built for survival, is constructed on the belief that your worth is contingent on your usefulness, agreeableness, and willingness to prioritize others over yourself. It is exhausting, extremely well-practiced, and very good at disguising itself as virtue.
Sovereignty is something different. It is rooted in self-trust, discernment, and the willingness to follow what is true for you, even when it may cost you something. Although it is self-centric, it is not the absence of care for others. To the contrary, it is realizing that we can only give from a place of fullness.
The sovereign life is not a life without difficulty, but it is a life you actually chose. One that fits you, was built by you, and reflects what you genuinely value rather than what you were handed and told to be grateful for. It is a life of meaning and purpose. Intentional defiance is a vehicle that gets you there, one small, deliberate choice to be loyal to yourself at a time.
How to heal through breaking the rules
Start with one honest question, "What would choosing my wellness and values look like today?"
Sit with it. Envision it clearly. Then ask the follow-up, "What is standing in my way, and what am I afraid will happen if I actually choose myself here?"
Then, and this is the part that requires actual courage, choose it anyway. Intentionally. Not in reaction to someone else, but in alignment with yourself. Say “no” to the thing you do not want to do. Rest without justifying it. Speak the honest thing instead of the comfortable one. Follow the pull of what is true for you, even when you cannot fully explain it yet.
Notice what happens internally. Notice that the world does not end. Notice that the discomfort was survivable. Notice who shows their true colors in a relationship. Notice, slowly, that you are accumulating a different kind of evidence about what is actually safe. Notice how your body responds to you when you honor yourself first. Then do it again.
The point of all of it
Healing is not a return to some pristine pre-trauma baseline that never actually existed. It is an expansion into capacity, authenticity, and into the life you are willing to claim as your own. It is the ongoing, imperfect, occasionally inconvenient practice of choosing yourself in a culture that would prefer you did not.
Real healing has edges. It asks things of you. It challenges what you are willing to tolerate and what you are willing to settle for, which can make things temporarily complicated before it makes them genuinely better.
The result, on the other side of all that disruption, is freedom. The freedom to feel honestly. The freedom to forge a meaningful life rather than inherit someone else’s idea of one. The freedom to know your authentic self.
Intentional defiance is how you find your way back. That is not rebellion. That is the whole point.
Read more from Katie Simons
Katie Simons, PharmD, BCPS, CCHT, Transpersonal Hypnotherapist and Coach
Dr. Katie Simons, PharmD, BCPS, CCHT, is the founder of The Holistic Apothec, a platform for coaching, education, and healing transformation through altered states of consciousness. A clinical pharmacist turned transpersonal hypnotherapist, psychedelic medicine facilitator, and coach, she blends neuroscience, somatic practices, trance techniques, and spiritual wisdom to guide clients in creating lasting change. Drawing on a decade in academic medicine and years in holistic healing, Katie’s programs focus on nervous system regulation, trauma recovery, overcoming limiting beliefs, and medication tapering. Her work bridges science and mysticism, offering a grounded, accessible path to deep healing, authentic living, and personal freedom.
