4 Kinds of Healing.
By Pablo Das (HHC, SEP
In this series on 8 Ways to Establish Wellbeing in the New Year, I’ve written about the Importance of having a vision for your life and living deliberately. I then wrote about renunciation, consciously setting aside or limiting behaviors that are barriers to living the life you envision. Today I want to offer some thoughts on healing, which addresses a different set of barriers to a fulfilling life.
I have a simple framework for thinking about healing. Healing is the process of engaging the list of issues that hold you back (things you would like to be different as a result of the healing work) and do so in such a way that they are no longer barriers to living the life you’ve envisioned. Healing can mean just about anything because it depends on what the thing is that needs to be healed. A broken bone needs to be healed and so do poor boundaries, addiction issues and old grief. Clearly each of these “barriers” are very different and need to be approached using different modalities. Furthermore, what works for one person, might not work for another. There’s no one “right” way.
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I recently wrote a series of articles on healing, you can go back and read them, or go to the links in my profile, where I have videos and podcast episodes about how I think about healing. Today what I thought I’d do is highlight some common ways healing might occur.
Grief demands an audience.
Grief is what happens when we lose something or someone we really love. Whether to death or a break up, loss brings the natural process of grief. One of my favorite sayings related to grief is that “grief demands an audience”. It’s very important that we tell our story and have our grief witnessed. We need people. Grief is very personal and the process is very painful but we cannot heal alone. We must have friends, groups, therapists and others to hear our story. They don’t even need to do anything but be present. If you’re trying to help someone who’s grieving a loss just know your presence is everything. You don’t need to give advice or have answers. You just need to be the audience that grief demands.
Change your stories.
One of my favorite films is called “Lucky”, in it, a character grieves the loss of a pet Tortoise who “runs” away. He’d raised this Tortoise, called President Roosevelt, from the beginning of its life. In the beginning he’s struggling against the situation, blaming himself, and lamenting the loss. By the end of the movie, his story has flipped. He says he’s reflected on how much effort it must have taken for the Tortoise to plot the escape. He realizes the Tortoise “wasn’t leaving me” he says, “he was just goin off somewhere else to do something he thought was important”.
Our stories about the things that happen can either trap us or free us. It’s a good idea to ultimately choose the most freeing and generous versions of the stories. It may require mental and emotional wrestling and feeling deeply, but we must work with our stories about ourselves, the world, other people and the things that happen to us.
Do we frame ourselves as victims? Did we make choices that led to the outcomes? When I think back on difficult things, I try to find the places where I’m responsible for what happened. Not to blame myself, but to avoid feeling as though the world is just constantly doing unfair things TO me. No, I am also responsible.
From helplessness to empowerment.
When it comes to traumatic experiences, I’ve noticed that helplessness and lack of agency are often the result of overwhelming experiences. Something happened that was too much and too fast and we had no good self protective response. Our boundaries were transgressed against, we were hurt, disrespected, unseen and no one helped. The sense of helplessness and victimhood can seep into us and almost become an identity or a core story or sense of oneself in the world. Moving from helplessness and victimhood to something more like agency, self possession and empowerment is one of the core journeys of trauma healing. It’s helpful to have a professional walk you through the process of reframing.
New outcome, new experience.
In Somatic Experiencing, the trauma resolution system I work in, we re-negotiate big and overwhelming experiences by walking in a slow and thorough way back through an experience to take in the details and have the appropriate internal responses. Frequently, traumatic experiences happen so quickly, we can’t get caught up. In the process of renegotiation, we allow ourselves to slowly take in what happened. We stay rooted to our internal processes and feelings. We allow things to play out thoroughly and we pay attention to the conclusions we’ve drawn from them. In many cases we’ll even reimagine the outcomes of an experience in ways that feel empowered. In the end, what happens is this new version of the experience gets integrated into our systems and feels more real than the thing that actually happened. It’s a fascinating process and best facilitated by a helping professional.