Gentle Healing vs. Radical Healing: Knowing When It’s Time to Switch Paths

Gentle healing calms pain, but radical healing transforms it. Learn the difference, and how to know when it’s time to move from gentle to radical healing.

The Two Faces of Healing

If you’ve been on a healing journey for a while, you’ve probably noticed there are two very different ways people approach it:

• Gentle Healing – the soothing, mainstream practices everyone from your favorite influencer to your yoga teacher swears by.

• Radical Healing – the raw, disruptive, messy work that nobody really talks about because it doesn’t look pretty on Instagram.

Both have their place. Both can change your life. But they’re not the same medicine.

What Is Gentle Healing?

Gentle healing is what most of us are introduced to first. It’s soft, socially acceptable, and accessible. Think:

• Prayer and meditation

• Yoga, breathwork, and journaling

• Nature walks and grounding rituals

• Talk therapy and self-reflection

These practices are beautiful. They give calm, clarity, and peace. They help regulate your nervous system, and they’re often the very first doorway into personal growth.

But here’s the truth nobody likes to admit: gentle healing can become the paracetamol of the soul.

It soothes. It manages. It makes the pain bearable. But it doesn’t always dig deep enough to cut the root of the wound.

That’s why you’ll find people (maybe even yourself) journaling for decades, attending therapy since the beginning of time, praying, breathing, meditating—and still circling the same unhealed patterns.

What Is Radical Healing?

Radical healing is the shadow side of healing that rarely gets talked about. Why? Because it’s not “pretty.” It’s not marketable. And it can’t be done from a cozy yoga mat with candles lit.

Radical healing is:

• Primal, raw, and sometimes terrifying.

• Anger, rage, and grief that demand to be felt and expressed fully.

• Crying so hard your body shakes. Screaming into a pillow until your throat burns.

• Facing your deepest wounds without filters, without bypassing, without making it sound poetic.

It’s messy. It’s disruptive. It feels like breaking apart before you can put yourself back together.

If gentle healing is a meditation playlist, radical healing is a witch on a leash, screaming until her arms bleed just to be free. That’s how it feels: animalistic, dangerous, and alive.

How to Know When It’s Time for Gentle Healing vs. Radical Healing

• You’re in survival mode → Gentle Healing. When your nervous system is fried, when life feels overwhelming, and when you need stability, gentle practices help anchor you. They give you enough ground to breathe, to function, to keep walking.

• You’ve been circling the same wound for years → Radical Healing. If you’ve journaled, prayed, meditated, and therapized for decades and still feel the same cycles repeating, it might be time to face the wound in a deeper, rawer way.

• You’re afraid of your own rage or grief → Radical Healing. The emotions you’ve been suppressing? They’re not going anywhere until they’re expressed. Radical healing forces you to confront what you’ve avoided.

• You want peace, not transformation → Gentle Healing. Sometimes you don’t need to go to the battlefield. Sometimes a walk in nature really is enough. Not every season calls for war.

My Own Journey Through Gentle and Radical Healing

I lived in gentle healing for years. Decades, even. I prayed, journaled, meditated, went to therapy, lit candles, and whispered affirmations until my throat was dry.

It helped. It calmed. But the wound was still there—open, raw, repeating itself in every relationship, every self-betrayal, every cycle of abandonment.

Eventually, I reached a point where gentle wasn’t enough. I was tired. Betrayal, disrespect, and heartbreak cracked me open until the beast inside of me woke up.

That’s when radical healing came in. It was ugly. It was painful. It was primal. But it was also the first time I felt real transformation.

The Truth About Healing

Healing is not about erasing pain. Healing is when the wound finally becomes a scar—something that no longer bleeds every time you touch it.

Gentle healing helps you care for the wound. Radical healing helps you close it.

Both are necessary. Both are powerful. The wisdom is knowing which season of healing you’re in.

Final Word

If you’re wondering whether you need gentle healing or radical healing right now, ask yourself:

• Am I calming the pain? Or am I finally ready to kill it?

Your body knows the answer. Trust it.

Over to You: Have you been circling gentle healing for years? Or are you in the fire of radical healing right now? Share your journey in the comments—I’d love to hear from you.

Happy disruptive healing.

Liefs,

Eny (Engracia)