Healing is not a return to who you were before, but a becoming of who you are now. — Gabor Maté
—What lingers after this line?
One-minute reflection
Why might this line matter today, not tomorrow?
A New Definition of Recovery
Gabor Maté reframes healing as forward movement rather than restoration. Instead of treating recovery as a rewind to a pre-injury, pre-trauma, or pre-illness “original,” he suggests that healing creates someone new—someone shaped by what happened and by how they chose to meet it. This shift matters because the fantasy of “getting back to normal” can quietly turn healing into a test you can never pass. Seen this way, progress isn’t measured by resemblance to the past but by the increasing fit between your life and your present reality. From that starting point, healing becomes less about erasing wounds and more about integrating them into a fuller self.
Why Returning Can Feel Impossible
The desire to return is understandable: it promises certainty and a familiar identity. However, Maté’s line points to a hard truth—experience changes the nervous system, relationships, priorities, and self-perception, often in ways that can’t be undone. Even joyful events transform us; suffering simply makes the transformation more obvious. As a result, chasing the old self can intensify shame when life doesn’t match the “before” snapshot. Transitioning away from that chase can be liberating: if you stop demanding that you be who you were, you can start listening to who you’ve become—and what that person needs now.
Trauma, Adaptation, and the Self
Maté’s broader work often emphasizes that many symptoms are adaptations—ways the mind and body learned to survive in difficult conditions. In that frame, healing isn’t a moral cleanup operation; it’s a renegotiation with survival strategies that once made sense. For example, emotional numbing may have protected someone in chaos, yet later blocks intimacy and joy. Therefore, becoming “who you are now” involves appreciating those adaptations without being ruled by them. The aim is not to delete the coping mechanisms but to update them—keeping their wisdom while loosening their grip when they no longer serve your present life.
Grief as a Gateway to Becoming
If healing is becoming, then grief often sits at the threshold. Letting go of the earlier self—healthier, more naive, more carefree—can feel like a genuine loss, and losses deserve mourning. People sometimes discover that what stalls them isn’t lack of effort but lack of permission to grieve what will not return. Once grief is allowed, energy frees up for new commitments and meanings. In that way, grief doesn’t contradict healing; it escorts it. You stop arguing with time and start cooperating with it, which is precisely how a “now” self begins to take shape.
Identity After Hardship
Becoming implies authorship: you are not only what happened to you, but also what you practice next. This can be as concrete as learning boundaries after years of people-pleasing, or as intimate as recognizing that your worth isn’t tied to productivity after burnout. The narrative changes from “I need to be like I was” to “I need to live like I mean it.” Importantly, this doesn’t romanticize pain. Rather, it acknowledges that meaning can be built without claiming the suffering was necessary. The point is agency: the present self can choose different patterns even while carrying an unchanged history.
What Healing Looks Like in Practice
In everyday terms, Maté’s idea shows up when someone notices they’re less reactive, more honest, or more able to ask for help—not because they’ve become the old version again, but because they’ve grown new capacities. A small anecdote captures it: a person in therapy realizes they no longer dread family gatherings; not because the family changed, but because they can leave, speak up, or self-soothe—skills their “before” self never had. From there, healing becomes a collection of present-tense choices: tending the body, naming feelings, building safer relationships, and aligning life with values. Over time, those choices form a new identity—one that doesn’t return, but arrives.