What is Healing Anyway?

What is Healing Anyway?

We have a lot of misconceptions about healing. When we think about a relationship that needs healing, we think about relationships where both people put in the effort and there is an attempt to save the relationship. In the happily ever after, the two who were disconnected are locked arm in arm, walking into a picturesque sunset with the birds singing. But in reality, healing may not look like that at all, but it doesn’t mean that healing hasn’t happened.

When I think about the relationships people have come to talk to me about, I think of the single mom who is trying to support her child to have a positive relationship with his father. Their relationship is over, but there is a child who needs some support to have the best possible relationship with his other parent. Healing can happen there.

I think about the couple where reconciliation may or may not be possible, but where the healing work needs to happen for each person to either move on or move back together can and must happen. 

I think of the parents with a challenging child who are needing to do their own healing work so they can really be present with the child to help her do her own work. And when the parents do their healing work, everything begins to shift.

I think of clients who worked to heal their relationship with their mother or their mother-in-law, with extended family members, or with other friendships. 

I think of the mother with a young child who came to see me after her husband suddenly died in an accident and there was much healing work that still needed to be done in their relationship and in the way he suddenly departed from her life. 

The majority of my work has been in families with couples, with parents and children, even with babies and their parents. The younger the child when the healing happens, in general, the easier the process seems to be. There are fewer layers, fewer entrenched patterns to change, and fewer hurts to repair. But healing is always possible.

It looks different in every family, in every situation. 

So what is healing?


According to the Cambridge Dictionary,

healing

noun [ U ]

 UK  /ˈhiː.lɪŋ/  US  /ˈhiː.lɪŋ/

the process of becoming well again, especially after a cut or other injury, or of making someone well again : 

This herb has been used in healing for centuries.

Wounds should be covered with a gauze dressing while healing occurs.

the process in which a bad situation or painful emotion ends or improves

Healing only begins when the hurt is shared with someone.

We have seen much progress, but the healing process is going to take years.


There’s so much in our culture that points to the idea of a wound when healing is referenced. We think about a scab that crusts over, but it’s still painful to touch for a while until eventually you can’t see the place where the hurt happened anymore. With emotional wounding and healing, we don’t see the wounded place in the same way we would if someone had a broken leg. It isn’t always easily visible on the outside, but there may be a big gaping wound on the inside.

Healing is doing the work to release the emotional pain, to understand and integrate the story of what happened, the story in your brain, your body, and your nervous system, so that it makes sense. It is making peace with yourself and with others who may have harmed you so that you’re not carrying that with you. It is recognizing your part, your responsibility, in the situation or relationship with honesty and clarity, not guilt and shame, and seeing what you did in a new light. And it is reaching a place where you can see the story of someone else accurately and with compassion for the journey they’re on and your role in it, whatever that may be. Healing sometimes means being honest when a relationship isn’t working and there need to be boundaries. For a parent and young child, those boundaries might be not allowing them to hit you. For an older child, it might mean boundaries around unsafe behaviors and how we talk about things when there’s an upset or a disagreement. For your father-in-law who keeps yelling at your kids, there needs to be a boundary around how often he sees your family and under what circumstances, including the understanding that you will need to leave if he begins to yell. 

And then healing is dealing with the emotional pain, with the story of what happened, and slowing down to really integrate the story- connecting with your thoughts, feelings, and how it feels in your body. And seeing what you did right. Seeing your resilience in the face of it all. Seeing your strengths and wisdom. Seeing how you connected with yourself or someone else to heal, even if it is in the present moment. We’re resilient, but we need support sometimes to see just how resilient and amazing we actually are so we can include that in the story of what happened. It’s way easier for someone else outside of yourself to see, which is yet another reason we need each other.

To sum up, healing is actually something that happens within YOU. When you do your own healing work, you create the space for healing to happen outside of you in your other relationships. The paradox is that you cannot do the work to make someone else do their work. You have to do it for you. The other person has a choice about whether or not or to what degree they choose to participate in the healing, especially teens and adults. Young children just need the space and sometimes an extra layer of support and they’ll come along, but you’re leading the way like the pied piper. 

At the end of the story, it’s how you feel when you tell the story of what happened. How does the story end? Do you still feel regret? Heaviness? Desire to go back and change something? Or do you feel peace? Lightness? Acceptance? Do you see your strengths and your resilience in the story? The healing process is about YOU and your journey. We can’t do healing work for someone else, but we can do our own work and change the space between us.

When you can think about the person, the situation, the difficulty and know that we’ve done what we can do, that we’ve explored what happened and released what belonged to you, integrated the story and your thoughts, feelings, and how it feels in your body, you’ve done the healing you need to do. 

We’re going to spend the next 6 months exploring the idea of healing and what it looks like in different situations and families. Thank you for being here and for being a part of this course!

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