What Progress Actually Looks Like

Issue #1 of Rooted  |  Vive Healing Collective   |  June 1, 2026

A weekly letter for those who give everything — and are learning their needs matter too.

Lisett Figueroa, LPC, NCC, PMH-C |  Vive Counseling & Wellness  |  Yuma, Arizona

Rooted: Embracing a moment of reflection this week.

THIS WEEK

Something I wrote a few weeks ago seemed to stop people mid-scroll — the idea that you've been holding it together for everyone, and maybe nobody has asked how you're actually doing lately. This thought was the beginning of a longer conversation about healing, and What Progress Actually Looks Like is where that conversation continues. This is because what I couldn't fit in a caption is this: healing doesn't look the way we think it's supposed to and that gap between expectation and reality may be one of the loneliest parts of the whole process.

FROM LIZ

A note this week

I want to start with something I often say about progress, because it keeps being true: the fact that you feel like you're going backward doesn't mean you are. It might actually mean the opposite.

I've watched people do hard, real work — and then have a terrible week, slip into an old pattern, cry in their car over something they thought they'd resolved — and look at me and say, 'What's wrong with me?' and every time, my honest answer is some version of: nothing. You're healing. You're human. This is what it looks like.

We've been sold a story about healing that looks like a straight upward line. You do the work, you feel better, you move forward. (Wouldn't that be REALLY nice!)  While there is real forward movement — I've watched it happen, I know it's possible — healing rarely moves in a straight line. It spirals. It doubles back. It takes you somewhere you thought you'd already been, and makes you go through it again, at a deeper level.

I tend to think of healing less like a straight path and more like an emotionally charged roller coaster ride. Just because you’re being flipped upside down on the roller coaster doesn’t mean you’ve lost your progress—the ride is still moving forward.

THIS WEEK'S THEME

Healing Is Not a Destination. It's a Direction.

When most people start doing the work of healing — whether in therapy, through self-reflection, or in recovery of any kind — they carry an unconscious assumption: that there is a finish line. A point at which the anxiety is gone, the pattern is broken, the wound is closed. A day when you will finally feel like a healed person.

That finish line is real in a sense — things do get better, and sometimes profoundly so. But healing doesn't end there, and the absence of that ending is not a failure. It's the nature of this process.

Healing is non-linear. It moves in spirals rather than straight lines, circling back to the same core themes — fear of abandonment, difficulty receiving care, the habit of shrinking — but from a different altitude each time. The content looks familiar. Your capacity to meet it has grown. That's not regression. That's depth.

General Psychoeducational Note:

Non-linear healing is well-supported by what we know about the brain. Neuroplasticity — the brain's ability to rewire — is real, but it is slow, and it doesn't overwrite old patterns; it builds new ones alongside them. Old neural pathways remain. New, healthier pathways are constructed through repetition and are gradually strengthened until they become more automatic. A difficult week doesn't erase months of work. It activates the older, faster road. Your job is to keep building the new one.

What it costs us to believe healing is linear is enormous. Every dip feels like a collapse. Every return to an old struggle feels like proof that the work isn't working. We become exhausted by the expectation of our own steady improvement — and that exhaustion is not a symptom of brokenness. It's a symptom of a model that was never true.

Healing reframed: it is not the absence of hard feelings or old patterns. It is the development of a different relationship with them. It is catching the pattern a little sooner. It is the moment of rupture in a relationship followed — for the first time — by repair. It is the grief you can finally let yourself feel because you are, at last, safe enough to feel it.

Progress in healing often looks like things getting harder before they get easier. It can look like grief surfacing that was never grieved. It can look like relationships shifting as you stop shrinking. It can look like a week that felt like rock bottom, which was actually the moment the foundation started being built.

Healing is the direction you keep choosing. On the good weeks and the terrible ones. Especially the terrible ones.

JOURNAL PROMPTS

Choose the one that feels most alive right now.

1. If you drew a map of your healing over the past year — not a straight line, but an honest map — what would the terrain look like? Where did you gain ground? Where did the road double back?

2. What have you told yourself it means when you struggle with something you thought you'd already worked through?

3. When you imagine what a 'healed version' of yourself looks like — what is she free from, and what is she free to do?

Your healing is not behind schedule. It is on exactly the kind of schedule that healing is on.

Keep going. Keep growing. Keep healing.

Want to learn more?

The Healing Collective — our paid newsletter, is now open — takes this week's theme further than this letter can. This week's paid issue includes a full deep-dive into the three things that look like regression but are actually signs of real progress, a self-regulation practice to save and return to all month, and extended journal prompts for Healing Collective members.

When you're ready: myvivecounseling.com/subscribe

$9/month. Everything this letter is, and the parts it couldn't hold.

Ready for more than a newsletter?

Vive Counseling & Wellness is accepting new clients. I work with people who keep showing up, holding it all together, while feeling exhausted beneath the surface.

Bilingual support available in English and Spanish. In-person in Yuma, Arizona + telehealth options throughout Arizona.

Book now → myvivecounseling.clientsecure.me |  928-581-6602 

With warmth,

Liz — Lisett Figueroa, LPC, NCC, PMH-C

Vive Healing Collective  |  Vive Counseling & Wellness PLLC

Disclaimer: Vive Healing Collective provides educational and informational content only and does not offer therapy or clinical services. To maintain clear therapeutic boundaries, individuals currently receiving psychotherapy services from Lisett Figueroa, LPC, NCC, PMH-C (“Liz”) are not eligible to participate in paid membership offers through Vive Healing Collective.

Free educational resources remain available to all.

Free or paid membership subscription do not establish a therapist-client relationship.

 928-581-6602  |  www.myvivecounseling.com  |  Yuma, Arizona

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