You don't want to manage your issue; you want to eliminate it entirely
- Hana Kabele Gala
- Apr 27
- 4 min read
Updated: May 8
Managing your pain isn’t the goal; completely disappearing that pain is. Coping with your suffering isn’t enough. You want a life where that problem or issue you carried around for decades no longer exists.
The other day, my client Eric* shared the origins of his harsh Inner Critic. He had a whole story about why he developed his negative self-talk. I appreciate the origin stories of our suffering just as the next person because they are, usually, true. You probably did develop hypervigilance because you lived with an unstable parent. I kept listening to Eric as he continued and further explained that these days, he finally has the tools to quiet that voice and deal with his merciless Inner Critic. Eric now has strategies to mitigate his inner tormentor.
As Eric spoke, it occurred to me that he truly believed that he reached the final stop on the race to peace of mind. That managing our problems (whether that’s negative self-talk, anger issues, or shame) is the end goal of working on ourselves, therapy, coaching, self-help books, and the like. It became clear that in Eric’s view:
Everybody has issues.
His problem was a harsh, relentless Inner Critic, but through grit, personal growth, and resilience, he learned to walk himself off the ledge, give himself grace, and quiet that voice.
He believed that with discipline and his practiced toolkit, he could deal with his issue. This was the final stage. Inner Critic handled. Inner Critic managed.
But that’s not the goal. The goal is to reach a stage where there’s no Inner Critic to deal with in the first place. The end of that race to peace of mind is a state where there is nothing to handle or manage.
The personal growth industry thrives on techniques, tools, and hard work to face inner demons—guilt, shame, regret, crushing responsibilities, or anything else. It’s important and effective, and, don’t get me wrong, it does work. You will be able to breathe through the challenging moments, you will be able to speak with your alter ego, and you will mitigate the problem.
But that’s still leaving us all stuck in our heads: using our brains to deal with demons that reside in our subconscious. The healing strategies that are focused on the subconscious, like hypnosis, psilocybin, or EMDR, go deeper. They change the root cause of the troubling issue because they change the deeply held belief lodged somewhere in our subconscious. And when we change the belief, we change the behavior.
So what is that desired state I keep referencing? What is that next level where we no longer have the problem, the end of the race to peace of mind?
Let’s use an analogy. For example, I don’t do road rage. I don’t really know what it feels like. People cut me off in traffic, and it barely registers. I think, “Huh, not a great move,” and I drive on. It’s unfathomable to me that some people get triggered, upset, or mad to the point of rage. For me, traffic—and any asshatery tied to it—just doesn’t upset me. There’s nothing.
As I told Eric, by the same token, some people have no Inner Critic. Yes, if you’ve lived with negative self-talk your whole life, it’s really hard to believe that there are millions of people out there who just make a mistake and move on. Who simply iterate if something doesn’t work out. If you’ve been accompanied by an Inner Critic since middle-school, it seems unfathomable that some people just don’t obsess over their words, actions, or appearance. That they don’t rehash what happened. They just keep moving forward, no Critic in sight. They drive on.
That’s the level you want to unlock. A place where the guilt you thought you’d bear forever disappears. Where the shame you carried for decades lifts off. Where the reactions you fell into for years are replaced by a new script.
Yes, you can do the hard, tedious work of taking deep breaths and using tools from your therapist or a book to stay calm when someone lingers at a 4-way stop or doesn’t grasp merging. You can spend your life at that level. It’s healthier, more productive, sure. But there’s another level you can unlock—a place where the jerk tailgating you or crawling in the left lane doesn’t even register beyond ‘huh, I guess that’s a choice’.
This peaceful state is possible. It happens when you dive into your subconscious and alter unhelpful beliefs you’ve held for too long—like the idea that traffic rules keep the world safe, and rule-breakers threaten everything, and it’s your job to protect the world with everything you got.
Because underneath that road rage is just fear. Fear that the world is scary and unsafe when others don’t play by the rules, fear that if you let go and don’t enforce the rules, terrifying chaos will take over. That person flying into the road rage knows chaos, deep in their bones, and it scares them. Their idiotic anger is a perfectly logical behavior of somebody for whom not sticking to the rules is equivalent to existential terror. When I work with such people and they access their subconscious in hypnosis, they realize that for the longest time, when somebody cut them off in traffic, it brought out the same emotions as when they were powerless kids in an unpredictable, chaotic world. But now it’s time to recognize that they are adults, capable of navigating challenges, in charge of their lives. Maybe it’s not on them to be the judge and jailor of the world. Once they make this connection, the ‘responsibility’ to police everybody on the road lifts. There’s a lot of compassion for their inner child and less need to stay in the hypervigilant mode. That’s what you’re after.
You want to take your healing to the next level. You don’t want to just manage reactions—you don’t want those reactions at all. Eric’s Inner Critic shouldn’t be managed. He should be released.
*Not the Client's real name but everything else is true.
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