Healing is messy

(Nimue)

Sometimes, before things can get better, they have to get worse. On the physical front, that was evident back in the winter – cancer treatments take a huge toll on a person. At this point, Keith is still dealing with side effects, but he is doing really well.

It is very much true of emotional healing. If you patch yourself up to keep going, you can end up with the emotional equivalent of shrapnel in your body. Potentially quite a lot of it. Undealtwith grief, unprocessed trauma, unresolved issues all lie around on the inside taking up space and getting in the way of life. You can’t function well when you’re full of the things that hurt you in the past. Healing means dealing with them, getting in there and removing what’s on the inside that does not belong on the inside.

I’m finding this a useful metaphor at the moment. This kind of healing is a lot of work. It is worth noting that healing does not often happen in an effortless way. Having space and peace gets a lot done, and makes it possible to get in and deal with the issues. For anything dramatic and serious, healing is a process that involves active engagement.

An experience is damaging when it impacts on a person in ongoing ways. That can mean being overwhelmed with anxiety, or triggered by anything that seems similar to the initial experience. For me, the damage has most often taken the form of becoming less able to trust myself. I second guess my own feelings and needs, question if my needs really are needs, I struggle to ask for help when I most need it, and I am so easily persuaded that absolutely everything is entirely my fault.

I’ve done quite a bit of unpicking in the last year, and rebuilding. The work of learning how to trust myself, and to trust the validity of my feelings is ongoing. I’m deeply grateful for Keith’s support in all of this. His gentle wisdom holds me steady, and his care is something that shows up in active way. As he pointed out recently, it isn’t care if it doesn’t do anything – another important lesson for me to take onboard. When people say they care but do nothing that helps, that also leaves marks.

To be able to imagine that I’m ok, I need to get to grips with the idea that I have, historically, been treated in ways that were not ok. This is not easy to do – because it means re-interpreting the nature of some of my past dealings with people and accepting that I trusted people who did not honour that trust.

There’s a popular online saying about ending up in therapy as a consequence of the people who really should have had therapy but declined to go. There’s an element of that here – people acting from their own wounds in ways that wounded me. I can’t do anything about those situations, but I can do my best not to carry on and wound someone else from my own places of distress.

Which is not – I remind myself – about expressing me distress or asking for help. These are not abusive actions. It is not a kind of violence to cry if you are hurt, or to beg for change if you are suffering. It’s not an act of cruelty to flag up if something doesn’t work for you, especially if what’s happening is increasingly unbearable. To be treated as though it is, can be incredibly damaging, and I am squaring up to that damage and to the idea that maybe I’m not a toxic monstrosity after all. Just someone who needed some kindness.

I’m throwing this out there in case someone else can use it to help navigate their own healing. What’s happened to me isn’t that special – so many of us suffer from handed down wounds, and from contact with unhealed people. Many of us at times will be the unhealed people whose suffering impacts problematically on others. All we can do is try to clean out those wounds and replace the damage with something healthy. It’s not just about self care, it’s about being someone who can better relate to others. By this means we all become more able to grow and heal, supporting each other as we do so.