Is healing hard?
I recently heard the author Glennon Doyle comment on how she had this belief that as she got older and did her inner work, she would be evermore liberated and happy. Instead, she claims she is now “closer to her childhood wounds”. She asks the person she is interviewing: “is this normal? and also WTF?”
To me, that sounds exactly like healing. Our psychic injuries from childhood often revolve around not being seen, heard, received, or considered, all forms of abandonment.
When Glennon claims she is now “closer” to those wounds, those difficult feelings, she is deep in the healing process simply by inhabiting her adult, resourced self who can be present to the emotional consequences of past trauma. She is reversing the abandonment.
As I listened, it made me think that in her exclamation WTF was possibly the idea that this healing process feels bad, or is difficult.
I am not sure healing feels bad. Yes, it can be incredibly painful to touch unresolved emotional trauma. However, anyone who has sat in a twelve-step meeting knows the underlying peace and serenity that accompanies truth, no matter how painful that truth may be.
What the healing process is, though, is deeply inconvenient. Not for our true self, who delights at truth and brings peace, but for all the parts of ourselves that have adapted to our culture. All the ways we have found refuge and safety in midst of the crazy environments we found ourselves in.
It is very inconvenient for the status quo for us to express anger, need the total collapse and deep rest required by grief or experience the confusion and fog of trauma resolving. These processes prohibit us from conforming elegantly to our cultural roles.
Healing often means we are not productive, not pleasing, and not willing to do whatever it takes to keep the societal system working smoothly.
Healing is paradoxical, non-linear, hard to quantify, unpredictable, and open-ended. Not exactly values we cherish in western culture.
Healing means we challenge all the ways we have learned to “get on with it”, especially challenging when those ways have been rewarded by a culture obsessed with status and productivity.
When we get in touch with our pain, we get in touch with the truth. When we are in touch with the truth we have access to all the incredible healing resources that are also true about us. We start to build true productivity: a balance of functioning in a culture that has many gifts without abandoning our own. We get happier, we get more pleasant and more fun. We expand.
A paradox of healing is the more well we become, the more we are aware of all the places we are unwell. And while the pain can be terrifying, the ways we grow to be a container for it all is full of wonder and miracles.