WILL I HEAL YOU? NOT REALLY!

"I am a psychotherapist" I say when asked the typical "What do you do?". "I am in the business of helping people recuperate a harmonious relationship with themselves and others" I add. "You are a healer" some suggest. "No I am there to trigger or support the healing potential in the client that comes to see me" I rectify. 

The question of what I and my clients do in the "therapy" time and space is a profound one, and in this blog I want to have a look at it a bit more closely. There is a short list of features that are unique to the therapeutic space and time that I have made here, but in this blog I want to discuss the very concept of healing and ask where does the idea come from? On what philosophical assumptions does the concept stand? Can healing really happen and is there scientific support for it? If we can find evidence of healing in some humans, how likely would this evidence be representative of all traumatised individuals, and You, in particular? What really makes the difference between who is going to heal or not?

These were all good questions to ask, not with the intent to entertain an intellectual view of the subject, but more radically to know whether we ourselves are not assuming the impossible when engaging with body, heart and mind. If you have read some of my Blogs on Trauma you know the journey is a harduous one, and one where so many of the forces involved in trauma are beyond our conscious awareness and power (e.g. neurochemical, socio-cultural, environmental). So the question of whether we can heal or not must take into account this 'beyond-ness' and at least restrict its view to that area of life where we are at least partly conscious, partly able to recognise an event, a pattern, a something we are not in control of but that is manifesting itself through us, and that we see. 

I find questions related to healing even more important than the questions related to being traumatised or not. In aswering the question "Am I traumatized?", we have only been risking of providing a false argument  for an inner discomfort that is not trauma. That can be misleading and ultimately unproductive. But in tackling the issue of healing, and trying to answer whether we can heal from trauma or suffering in general, we would be taking a higher risk, and one that could cost a lifetime of struggle and delusion.

To assume that we could erase the presence of a phenomena, trauma, we have no real grasp of, would be like assuming that we can "change the world" when the world as we see it does not even exist. Sure, we know we can influence the world, we always do in fact, unavoidably, but to "change it" in the exact image we hold of it, that would not be possible, not now nor ever. The world as is, is of a level of complexity immesurably higher than the image we hold of it, and so is the human mind and body. Approaching inner-world changes with the same false assumptions about how we can intervene and influence, is bound to make us as miserable, as miserable we become when we engage with idealised change in the outer world.

Thus whether you are intellectually inclined, or more sensual, emotional, or practically oriented, to know how to recognise the first and most basic assumptions of the enterprise of healing, would be to ensure that efforts in that direction would not end up building senseless hopes and struggles.

Ok, with this in mind, let me now turn to the actual concept of healing by trying to bring together several sources and descriptions of it and see if they converge somewhere towards one or more ideas.

Wishing you Well,

Your Shrink in Bansko