What is Healing? A simplified look at a complex idea.

In my circle, we sometimes take for granted that the general public is going to understand what we’re talking about when we use certain terms, or when we use common language to describe something

complex. Recently, I was working on a client, and as we were talking at the end, she asked the question, what is healing. I think we have always had a word or phrase for this, but now we call it healing, and there wasn’t a direct explanation for how, when, or why this shift happened. I remember seeing all kinds of books, audio books, and seminars on “self help” and “self improvement”, but at some point people started to realize what we were trying to accomplish was much deeper than improvement. These areas of our lives where we were struggling didn’t happen randomly. We weren’t just magically born with these blocks, we weren’t born broken. Many times something happened, or we were taught something that wasn’t helpful. Oftentimes these self help methods highlighted behavioral changes, but didn’t address the underlying causes of the need for self help. Here’s an example: if a person is abandoned as a child, and they have a hard time with relationships. You can’t just tell them how to act in the relationship. You have to help them address that they learned at a young age that they couldn’t depend on the people who were supposed to take care of them, that they could only depend on themselves, or that everyone leaves. More deeply, this person has to learn that they deserved to be loved and cared for, and just because they weren’t doesn’t mean it was because they were unworthy of it, but rather that the people who were supposed to care for them were damaged in a way that blocked them from showing that love. If we took this a step further, we could say that the healing of this person could in fact break a generational curse that would ricochet throughout future generations, stopping a pattern of abandonment that may have existed for a very long time. The deeper we go, the more solid a foundation we have in which to build healthier beliefs and habits about ourselves and our lives.

I hope you’re starting to see what I mean by why we have to heal, and what we’re actually healing. Then we move on to the more practical question, how do we heal? Most commonly, we think of healing in regards to an injury or illness. When we were children, and we fell off of our bikes, we’d scrape our knees. Depending on how serious it was, we’d clean it up, over the weeks a scab would form to protect that injured area as we healed from the inside out. It’s a pretty cut and dry process (pun intended). The more

complex the injury, the longer and more complex the healing process will be. Now how does that process apply to emotional healing? It’s the same, but different. Let’s start with a simple example. Let’s say that you are in the first grade, and your friend says your shirt is ugly. Your feelings might be hurt, but you leave, and play with someone else, while you allow the sting of that comment to dissipate. Later, the little kid says that they were just jealous that you got to be the line leader this week, and they really like your shirt, and they’re sorry they said that. The kid probably had a talk with an adult, and realized that they shouldn’t take out their feelings on someone else. The child is forgiving, and the source of the wound is gone, so they are able to heal, and learn and grow together with their friend. What happens when the source of the injury becomes chronic? What if the source of the injury is a parent? It happens more than we think, in big and small ways, that parents will inflict emotional injury on their children. I have known people whose parents told them over and over again that they wished they had never had them, or that they needed to go on a diet (at eight years old), but I’ve also known people with lovely parents who told them exactly what to believe about everything, and were so dogmatic that the child grew up believing that they had to always refer to someone else to tell them the right belief system. The process of healing involves finding these elements and unraveling them. Then we have to replace them with something that will help us to grow. Is it easy? Nope! Not at all!

The deeper we go, the more solid a foundation we have in which to build healthier beliefs and habits about ourselves and our lives.

Here’s the deal. Healing is an ongoing process. At first it is daunting and overwhelming as we figure out where to start. We sometimes feel a lot of fear and anxiety, but once you deal with something, and you feel better about that part of your life, the journey becomes a little less scary. As you start to let go of some of the things that were holding you back, and find ways to nurture yourself, you gain an understanding that you can move through this, and get past it. You’ll feel triggered by someone, or get defensive, and it will be easier to stop and ask yourself why you’re reacting that way, where it’s coming from, and what it’s showing you. It helps to have support in the process to talk things out, and help you stay grounded. At times, we will slip back into an old pattern, and we have to find our way back.

So what is healing? At its core it is a type of self improvement, but looking deeper, it is the way in which we unravel unhealthy patterns that we have developed from unhealthy beliefs, and replace them with more positive beliefs so that we can be happy. It doesn’t matter where you are on your journey, we all have things we can work on within ourselves. People may appear to have the most centered lives, and I guarantee you that there are times when they are dealing with these things as well. No one is immune. I have been actively seeking this type of healing for quite a few years now, and sometimes I still end up slipping back into an old pattern, or have a visceral reaction that I’m not sure about. We are all human. Knowing that this is something even the most instagram perfect person deals with, can be very validating. I hope this helps. It is an oversimplified explanation, but it gives you somewhere to start.

Happy Healing,

Maria