Saturation and Unpacking
In emotional healing, a somewhat discouraging thing often occurs. When the outermost layers of limitation are dealt with, more 'stuff' comes up. One begins to worry about, or suffer from, what one never worried about before. This is called unpacking. Like a densely packed closet, there is unprocessed hurt that one has not really forgotten, but which has been dulled. So even with real change, subjectively suffering remains high for a time. It may even temporarily increase somewhat, from a numbed out purgatory to a true maximum. Also areas of life previously thought okay will be de-stabilized, and quite a bit of interpersonal friction will be revealed. As an individual becomes less shut down, the expectations and hopes from others may renew.
This is saturation. At a point (perhaps an early point) suffering reached a maximum, and though hurts were accumulating they could not be appreciated. Unpacking is not an endless process but it can be a long one. The criteria for whether one is on the right path is not necessarily whether one is feeling better (though that will eventually happen) but whether things are feeling more real.