MASTERING THE FEAR OF HEALING
Dr. Krista Coombs, DrAc, IFMCP
July 11, 2025
In this week’s INSIGHTS for Healing by Design, let’s dig into the type of fear that might be holding you back from sticking to your health plans, tripping you up and falling short of your goals. This information could change everything for you if you embrace the concepts at your core and act on the new insights.
DO YOU REMEMBER THE STORY OF JONAH AND THE WHALE?
The story goes that Jonah, in trying to escape his life destiny, gets swallowed by a whale while caught in a storm on the ocean. He lived in the whale’s belly for a few days during which time he eventually repented for running away from his destiny and his life ultimately spared by the whale.
Thousands of years later, the famous psychologist, Abraham Maslow, drew upon this old story and wrote about the human tendency to run from our true potential:
“We fear our highest possibilities. We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments, under the most perfect conditions, under conditions of great courage. We enjoy and even thrill to the godlike possibilities we see in ourselves in such peak moments. And yet we simultaneously shiver with weakness, awe, and fear before these very same possibilities. So often, we run away from the responsibilities dictated, or rather suggested by nature, by fate, even sometimes by accident, just as Jonah tried in vain to run away from his fate.”
From this story, the Jonah Complex was coined which is the psychological phenomenon that describes the fear of our own light.
APPLYING THE JONAH COMPLEX TO HEALTH
Think about reasons you might start on a health strategy that a medical practitioner has laid out for you.
At first, you’re probably super motivated to work the plan. But, maybe in a week or two, you start “forgetting” your supplements, or stop prioritizing exercise, or begin staying up too late again to watch just one more show on Netflix, or start eating out too often again because you didn’t make time to batch prep meals, and so forth.
After decades working with patients and learning to understand myself too, I think this Jonah Complex boils down to TWO TYPES OF FEAR that interrupt any new adventurous project from shining more brightly - especially when it comes to working on our health!
TWO TYPES OF FEAR IMPACTING HEALTH
FEAR OF FAILURE: This type of fear is one every person is most familiar with and open about. It’s the fear of whatever you’re pursuing not working out, despite the effort put into it. When something you want to work out doesn’t, it can often lead to feeling embarrassed. The fear of that happening can interrupt progress or maybe even stop you from even starting something new. Your belief in the possibility of an action actually working out also plays a massive role in this type of fear. And those beliefs are heavily rooted in early life conditioning.
FEAR OF SUCCESS: This type of fear is also common but maybe not as familiar to or recognized by most people until they hear it explained. It’s a fear that if you reach your goal, you might not be able to maintain it, or not feel deserving of it, or not ready for it to work out. This fear is very destabilizing and often a tough one to admit.
In my medical practice I see a lot of “fear of success” especially in my female patients. And even in my past, it afflicted me way too often until I became conscious of the sabotage and did work to rewrite some of my conditioning. Now it bothers me far less often.
When it comes to dealing with complex health conditions – think, severe chronic pain, the many autoimmune conditions that cause major body system malfunctions, deep depression and more – it can feel very overwhelming working on wellness strategies, regardless of how useful they might be. This is often because by the time you are trying to engage in this level of self care with a practitioner, you’ve likely suffered for years and mental habits of thinking your diagnoses are inevitable have become well established.
Often, when someone has major health issues, their day-to-day lives have had to be adapted to suit the damaged body. That might look like quitting a job, decreasing work hours, leaving a partner, becoming dependent on another for finances and more.
❓ If this was you, and you didn’t like your job or career or partner, as just a few examples, do you think there’d be major motivation to do the work to help your body get back to the point where you’d be “expected” to get back into the workforce or participate with a partner more again and so on?
Sadly, for many, there is NO motivation because the expectation is that what they didn’t like from the past would be their future still. They haven’t optimized a dream of a better future.
Change can only happen in this scenario if you dig into exploring how to dream bigger for your life after recovery. If this isn’t happening, you will likely quit any treatment strategy before it leads to spectacular results. You will fear it succeeding and fear needing to change to live up to a healthy body’s new potential. This is “fear of success” in action when the underlying motivators are not addressed.
➡️ Sometimes you might not give your full energy to something because you're afraid of what will happen if it works out.
➡️ Maybe you’re afraid of seeing what you're truly capable of.
➡️ Maybe you’re afraid of realizing your full potential goes far beyond the limiting, conditioned stories you’ve been telling yourself on repeat since you were a kid.
➡️ Maybe you’re afraid of never being able to go back to the safety of those old familiar stories.
A success with your health might end up meaning big adjustments for you and your inner circle:
the new identity being healthy will require of you
the possible loneliness as you embark on the healing journey
the likely isolation as you start new habits because many around you just won’t understand the need for changing what you’re doing
maybe even jealousy from some loved ones or friends who subconsciously try to sabotage your new choices.
This new approach must require conscious new boundaries for success to happen and a rewrite of old conditioning.
But instead of doing this needed work so that you COULD actually succeed…
You might run in the opposite direction of your healthier destiny, just like Jonah, and end up turning your back on your own light; your own potential greatness.
Have you ever experienced this?
THE TRUTH 🎤
To fear your own light is to live in the dark.
Shine your light!
Don’t be a mushroom! 🍄
Embrace the fear and do the hard stuff over and over, including digging into old conditioned stories, so you don’t run from your light or cover up your light but instead reach for your highest possibilities! SHINING YOUR LIGHT.
3 WAYS TO ESCAPE THE JONAH COMPLEX
It’s human nature to fall into the Jonah Complex trap many times in our lives. But it’s also a human possibility to escape the trap.
According to writer Sahil Bloom, there are 3 ways to do this:
1. NAME YOUR ENEMY
This first action will change your life!
Most of your fears are not fully witnessed by you. They tend to live in the shadows because we are afraid to look directly at them. Because of this avoidance tendency, the fears seem like murky, unnamed enemies that sabotage you at every turn.
So, WHEN you notice yourself avoiding doing the work you KNOW you need to do to get the health benefits you say you desire, name and define your “enemy” and answer these 3 questions:
Are you afraid of failing at the task at hand, or are you masking your true fear of success?
What are you truly afraid of happening?
What can you do to address or break down these fears?
There’s a solution to every perceived problem, my friend.
Remember, clarity destroys fear.
2. BREAK DOWN THE TASK
When challenged with health issues, there are two ways to answer the alarm bells:
You can freeze, or
You can get to work!
You can make this part really simple by thinking this way.
Break down the fear into what it’s truly about. Then break down the healing strategy into doable steps (this will require some expert guidance up front if you want to reduce the chances of simple errors and sabotage rearing its head sooner than later).
Be like the main character in the movie, The Martian:
"At some point, everything is going to go south on you... and you're gonna say 'this is it, this is how I end.' Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That's all it is, you just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem. Then you solve the next one. And the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home."
Do you know your full potential?
Are you aware of what stops you from reaching that full potential or even getting close?
It’s going to take work to understand your hangups and your personal limiting stories, and it will require seeking assistance. And most of all it will require putting one foot in front of the other, intentionally, every single day, making thousands of decisions one at a time… It’s largely about commitment to supporting your body to heal like it knows how to do. But without understanding the problem and setting up a strategy, it’s really hard to make headway and let your light shine.
3. CENTRE YOURSELF ON SERVICE
This may feel a little offensive at first but take a moment to really understand this:
By nature, the fear of success is inherently a selfish fear.
If you are not even trying to reach your potential, where I KNOW and you KNOW that if you’re healthier, you’ve more possibilities to serve the world at a higher level, then you are withholding a crap ton of positivity from the world!
Why are you dreaming so small for yourself?
You’re fearing yourself, actually.
And once you dismantle what’s beneath that playing small and accepting mediocrity or even decrepitude, you can be a person of bigger service to yourself and others. Sounds pretty dreamy to me!
When your life truly is about what you can give to others – your family, friends, animals, society – your legacy – your WHY takes on new meaning beyond just making yourself healthy just for your benefit.
Back to psychologist, Abraham Maslow, who wrote:
“If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life. You will be evading your own capacities, your own possibilities.”
Please stop “living by default” and taking whatever shows up as “just the way it is”.
Instead, PLEASE start doing the work to support your YOUnique body - what I call HEALING BY DESIGN
I SAY THIS A THOUSAND TIMES A DAY (at least it feels like it )
be intentional about understanding WHY you are in the health space you find yourself currently
WHY you want something different
WHAT that difference looks like, and
WHAT you need to do differently to get the new results,
SO THAT you can be of more service to the world and feel amazing while you’re at it!
THIS is the philosophy I teach to my patients (who truly hear me) and to the amazingly powerful women in my private women’s group, The EASY YOUniversity!
I don’t want to just temporarily help women feel a little better and need more over and over for the same things. I want them to embrace their potential and Heal by Design with some expert guidance to get them to their light, their destiny, sooner.
Trade in the familiar for some discomfort for a while until you finally recognize you are actually now choosing to shine your own light and live healthfully as biology says you can.
Hugs,
Dr. Krista xx
DrAc, IFMCP
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