Ep 241: Why You Keep Starting Over in Your Healing After Emotional AbuseEp 241: Why You Keep Starting Over in Your Healing After Emotional Abuse
The Emotional Abuse Recovery Podcast
Allison K. Dagney talks about why healing after emotional abuse can feel like repeatedly starting over and how boredom can sabotage consistency. She shares research, examples and practical questions to help survivors commit to what truly supports their recovery.
34:52•3 Nov 2026
Why Your Healing Feels Like Starting Over (And Why Boredom Might Be the Missing Piece)
Episode Overview
- Healing often stalls because people abandon helpful tools once the novelty fades, not because those tools have stopped working.
- Boredom is a brain signal seeking new stimulation, but it can wrongly convince you that effective practices are no longer valuable.
- Meaningful change is usually built through repetitive, ordinary actions, much like marathon training or practising an instrument.
- It’s important to distinguish between a method that is truly ineffective and one that has simply stopped feeling exciting.
- Choosing one helpful practice and committing to it consistently can turn healing behaviours into natural, automatic ways of living.
“One of the things that you might not be doing for your healing, that you absolutely should be doing, is staying with something long enough for it to become boring.”
How do people cope with the challenges of staying sober? Here, the focus shifts to a different kind of recovery: healing after emotional abuse and why that process can feel like starting from scratch over and over. Host Allison K. Dagney talks about a problem many survivors know too well: doing “all the right things” to heal, yet feeling stuck.
She points out that the issue might not be your tools, but your tendency to drop them as soon as the excitement fades. As she puts it, “Boredom doesn’t mean it’s not working,” and she backs this up with research on how the brain reacts to monotony and boredom. You’ll hear her compare healing to training for a marathon or practising the violin. There’s no daily fireworks, just repetitive effort that quietly adds up.
Allison shares her own experience of going to therapy for four and a half years with little change, contrasting that with sticking with methods that actually do help. She encourages women to ask a crucial question: is a method genuinely ineffective, or has it simply stopped feeling new? The episode also highlights the difference between coping and genuine healing.
Coping can offer short-term relief; healing aims for deep change so you’re not “working on your healing” forever but living differently by default. Allison invites survivors to pick one practice that has helped them in the past—journaling, yoga, mindset work—and commit to it long enough for it to become boring, then keep going. The tone is warm, honest and slightly humorous, making heavy topics feel a bit lighter while still treating them seriously.
If you’ve ever wondered why your healing seems stuck on repeat, this conversation might be the nudge to rethink how you’re showing up for your recovery. So what one thing could you recommit to today and finally let consistency do its work?
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