"There are so many ways to heal. Arrogance may have a place in technology, but not in healing. I need to get out of my own way if I am to heal"
About this Quote
Healing, Schaef insists, is not an engineering problem with a single right answer and a technician in charge. It is plural, messy, and stubbornly human: “so many ways” is a rebuke to the fantasy that one method, one diagnosis, one act of will can dominate the body and the psyche into compliance. The line lands because it draws a hard border between domains we like to blur. In technology, arrogance can masquerade as competence - confidence, mastery, speed. In healing, that same posture becomes violence: the self (or the healer) treats pain as an enemy to defeat rather than a signal to interpret.
The subtext is unmistakably recovery-language: the “I” who needs to heal is also the “I” who keeps seizing the steering wheel. “Get out of my own way” doesn’t mean disappearing; it means loosening the grip of ego, control, and the narrating mind that wants to win at wellness. Schaef’s choice of “arrogance” rather than “pride” sharpens the critique. Pride can be private; arrogance is relational. It implies dismissing other paths, other bodies, other kinds of help.
Contextually, Schaef wrote in a late-20th-century moment when self-help, addiction recovery, and holistic health were colliding with a medical culture increasingly enamored with expertise and optimization. Her sentence reads like a counter-spell to the era’s self-improvement hustle: healing isn’t a performance of mastery. It’s a practice of humility, consent, and surrender to complexity - the kind that can’t be hacked, only inhabited.
The subtext is unmistakably recovery-language: the “I” who needs to heal is also the “I” who keeps seizing the steering wheel. “Get out of my own way” doesn’t mean disappearing; it means loosening the grip of ego, control, and the narrating mind that wants to win at wellness. Schaef’s choice of “arrogance” rather than “pride” sharpens the critique. Pride can be private; arrogance is relational. It implies dismissing other paths, other bodies, other kinds of help.
Contextually, Schaef wrote in a late-20th-century moment when self-help, addiction recovery, and holistic health were colliding with a medical culture increasingly enamored with expertise and optimization. Her sentence reads like a counter-spell to the era’s self-improvement hustle: healing isn’t a performance of mastery. It’s a practice of humility, consent, and surrender to complexity - the kind that can’t be hacked, only inhabited.
Quote Details
| Topic | Humility |
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