Why Self-Improvement Doesn’t Work, Unless You’re Willing to Face the Reality of Yourself
- Brainz Magazine
- Jun 25
- 6 min read
Updated: Jun 27
Jonathan combines energetic, shamanic, and somatic practices to facilitate deep transformation for the mind and body. Following a long career in advertising and digital production, he now supports clients internationally, across a wide range of physical and mental health imbalances, guiding them toward systemic wholeness.
We’re living in an age of obsession with self-improvement. The wellness industry is overflowing with tools, programs, systems, and spiritual frameworks that promise to help you become better. Calmer. Healthier. More successful. More aligned. More healed.
The wellness trap
But so much of what’s being offered isn’t healing at all. It’s an elaborate way of reinforcing the idea that something inside you is wrong. That if you just work hard enough at fixing yourself, you’ll finally become acceptable. To yourself. To others. To the world.
Over time, the pursuit of self-improvement becomes another form of self-rejection. And it’s impossible to heal what you’re still rejecting, deep within yourself.
Self-rejection as a survival strategy
I grew up gay in a world that didn’t have space for that truth. Not openly. Not safely. So I turned on myself, not in one dramatic moment, but in a thousand tiny ones. I learned how to fragment, to stay silent, to hide who I was. I internalised the message that who and what I was, at a core level, was wrong.
Years later, I tried to heal. I pursued lots of different types of therapy. I followed the steps. But underneath it all, I was still trying to get away from the part of me I couldn’t yet face. The part I subconsciously believed was the problem.
This is what I finally saw in myself. And what I see again and again in my clients. People who want to feel whole, but are still acting from the belief that something in them must be overcome, eliminated or reprogrammed.
How the industry capitalises on our wounds
The wellness industry has professionalised this mindset. It gives us frameworks and language and protocols, but it often avoids the one thing that matters: actually turning toward what’s right here, inside us.
It promotes solutions that look like healing but are actually just more refined forms of avoidance. It teaches us to manage symptoms, master routines, and stay positive. But it rarely invites us to include the parts we’re still trying to get away from.
You can’t trick the psyche
When we use methods or teachings to override our pain, to get rid of discomfort, or to bypass shame, we’re not healing. We’re managing. We’re staying in control. We’re spiritualising avoidance.
But the psyche knows. It deals in logic and reason, and it knows when it’s being bypassed. It knows when it’s being tricked. And eventually, it will make noise. Through the body. Through the mind. Anxiety, fatigue, inflammation, and dissatisfaction. Through collapse or disconnection. What hasn’t been met will keep returning. What’s being rejected magnetises back towards the self and expresses.
Healing begins the moment you stop trying to become someone else and begin learning how to be who you already are.
The dance of delusion
It’s almost comical when you see the reality of this situation. The mind telling you to improve yourself, to get better, to become more. All whilst quietly refusing to accept who and what you already are.
I call this the dance of delusion. A kind of performance that says, “If I just change enough, then I’ll finally be worthy of love, acceptance or belonging.”
But you can’t transform what you’re still trying to escape. You can’t build wholeness on a foundation of self-rejection.
And yet, we do it all the time. We meditate, journal, track habits, optimise sleep, refine our diets, and we call it healing. But what we’re often doing is avoiding this core fragmentation within the self.
The dance becomes more and more intricate, but the movement stays the same: avoid what’s real, reach for something shinier.
What real healing looked like for me
For me, this realisation came through a connection with someone I believed might become a significant partner. Without knowing it, I drew this person towards me through the rejected part of myself. The energetic message was clear. “Please reject me, because I still don’t fully accept who and what I am.”
It sounds strange, but this is how it works, not just for me, but for anyone stuck in relational dynamics that keep repeating. The ones we know aren’t right for us, but we return to them anyway. This isn’t about logic or decision-making. It’s not coming from the conscious mind. It comes from somewhere way deeper.
From the parts of us we’ve buried. From what the shadow still believes we deserve.
In a potent healing session with one of my teachers, I finally saw the truth of what was still playing out for me. I remember saying at the end, “It feels like you’ve punctured my reality with a huge knitting needle, and now the truth is rushing towards me for the first time.”
It didn’t take the pain away. I still needed to work through that. But it changed everything. Because it changed my posture towards this fragmented place. I stopped trying to fix the part of me I had spent years rejecting. I began to include it. To sit with it. To listen to it. To stay in a relationship with it.
Healing isn’t about becoming someone new. It’s about slowly learning how to be in connection with who you already are.
So how do we work with acceptance?
When something once hidden becomes conscious, it can be worked with. This is the shift. From avoidance into presence. From unconscious patterns into choice. From rejection into inclusion.
This is the process I’ve walked myself through. And it’s what I now do with others. With clients who are caught in the cycle of self-improvement. Exhausted from trying to perform their way into worth. Who feel trapped in the dance of delusion with the rejected self.
Self-improvement sits on top of acceptance
Once you’ve made this kind of contact with yourself. The parts you used to avoid. The pain you tried to outrun. Something changes. The system settles. The psyche stops bracing. And from that place, self-improvement can actually start to support you.
Whether it’s nutrition, strength work, sleep, breathwork or cold water therapy, these things begin to land differently. You’re not doing them to fix what’s broken. You’re doing them to care for what’s there.
They stop being strategies for avoidance. They become tools for resourcing. The energy behind this action changes everything.
This is the work I offer
Not self-improvement. Not optimisation. Not performance.
I offer healing. Deep. Grounded. Real. I help people reconnect with themselves. With the parts they’ve abandoned. The grief they’ve buried. The emotions they’ve judged. The patterns they’ve tried to override.
If you’re tired of fixing and ready to begin including what’s been pushed aside, perhaps it’s time to explore what healing actually looks like.
Learn more or book a session
You can find more about my work on my website. I offer one-to-one sessions that focus on energetic and systemic healing. This isn’t coaching. It isn’t performance-based. It’s a slower, deeper process. A return to a relationship with the parts of yourself you’ve been avoiding, rejecting, or simply surviving.
I work with people who are ready to stop outsourcing their worth and begin listening to what’s true inside them. People who want to come back into their bodies, into their emotions, into an honest connection with themselves.
If that’s where you are, I’d love to hear from you. You can book a free intro session or reach out to start a conversation.
Read more from Jonathan Shanks
Jonathan Shanks, Healer, Facilitator, Energy Worker
Jonathan blends traditional energetic and shamanic practices with modern somatic therapies. After a long and successful career in advertising and digital production, Jonathan redirected his life’s purpose to study Nutrition, Yoga, Trauma Releasing Exercises (TRE), Family / Systemic Constellations, and indigenous healing traditions. His practice spans from London to Johannesburg and he specialises in working with complex trauma, nervous system regulation, facilitating the integration of hidden or subconscious aspects of the self, and teaching acceptance as the pathway towards true healing and authentic self-expression.
