It’s not a secret I have a difficult relationship with the word “healing”. In our modern society healing seems to be a “one and done” situation. You get sick, you take medicine, and though it may take a while to recover depending on the severity of the illness and the treatment proscribed generally if someone is “healed” they recover. Except, healing doesn’t work that way. For some illnesses they simply go into remission and the symptoms can become apparent again. And for some illnesses, the ones labeled chronic, they ebb and flow in severity, but never really recover.
If one of the characteristics of health is a balanced integration of all parts of the organism, the health of the body of the world involves redressing the imbalances that have occurred in part through inordinate human desire to devour the whole rather than be a part of it.
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The role of the healer in this view will necessarily be somewhat indirect; it will not be of the miracle worker intervening to cure one diseased part but of a helper working to restore right relationships, proper balance among the parts.
- Sallie McFague, The Models of God, pages 147-148
Our culture doesn’t think of healing in this manner. They think of healers as miracle workers, swooping in at the last moment and saving the patient from calamity with some type of therapy or new medication. When it comes to matters of the spirit, including mental health, allopathic methods such as traditional psychotherapy are viewed in much the same matter. If someone simply talks to someone who is trained and has a piece of paper on their wall, then they will be healed. However, those of us who have dealt with mental and spiritual illness know that it can be difficult to find a well-trained therapist if you’re not marginalized, and if you are, then finding someone who believes your lived experience is even more difficult. It can take years or decades to find a therapist who believes your lived experience and who can help.
What drew me to that quote was the idea of a helper working to restore right relationships and proper balance among the parts. There’s plenty to chew on when thinking about the inordinate human desire to devour the whole (extractive capitalism) rather than be a part of it, but when it comes to our own spiritual storytelling it’s the right relationships and the proper balance among the parts that does the heavy lifting.
I’d go a step further to say it is the right relationship with ourselves and the proper balance among our parts that’s at the core of creating personal restoration.
How do you find that right relationship? Through storytelling.
I’m not talking about making things up or creating fallacies around which we live our lives. The type of spiritual storytelling I’m focused on, is where we look at the stories that we have internalized, the stories we tell about ourselves and we believe to be true about ourselves, and then examine them.
If we believe harmful stories about ourselves, then we do not have a good relationship with ourselves.
The truth is for many in the communities to which I belong and work with, we’re told things about ourselves that are simply not true. As someone who is late diagnosed neruodivergent, I believed that I was simply “weird” and not in a good way, that my brain was broken, and I couldn’t “human” the way other people were human. I believed that the fact that I never fit in was my fault. And then, I received a diagnosis as multiply neurodivergent. I learned more about what it meant to be both autistic and have ADHD. I discovered studies, that showed in many cases the responses I received from those I worked with, even when I was helpful and extremely good at my job, weren’t my fault. (This is one of many that show neurotypical people immediately do not like autistic/neurodivergent people.) With all of this new information, I began re-examining my stories and letting go of ones that were false.
I began to restore my relationship with myself. At this point someone might use the word healing to describe what I’m doing, but the question also arises, was anything really broken to begin with other than the way I internalized the stories that others told about me. The wound that began to be healed existed not because I was sick, but because our society has an intense ableism streak that centers the normative, neurotypical individual.
And this is why I prefer the word restoration over healing. I restored my view of myself. Yes it changed, and yes I’m the better for it. But it wasn’t broken through anything I’d done, besides believe what people told me. This is why spirituality is so important. Because that connection with something bigger than ourselves, whether it’s divinity, awe, wonder, or simply nature itself, helps to provide a grounding, a centering, of our selves so that we can work on restoring those relationships and creating new ones that feed us, rather than clinging to those which harm.
