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Why I Don’t Talk About Healing

If someone talks to you about healing, first it implies that you have something wrong with you, that you’re broken and need “fixed”. I’m a firm believer that no one is “broken”, that we are all whole and complete. This realization helps us to take back our power and examine why we believe we might be “broken”, and when someone is trying to “fix” us that can be not helpful at times. The work I do isn’t so much about “fixing” someone as helping them create discoveries about themselves to fully understand their authentic and embodied self. That’s why I don’t talk about healing.

When I talk about the work I do and the reasons for it, I try very hard not to talk about healing. I know that seems counterintuitive. Just going to any social media platform and you’ll see ads and content talking about how this or that was healed and why you, too, should buy their products to be healed. The medical profession talks about healing, even in chronic cases where the goal is management, not erasure of symptoms. As someone with fibromyalgia, I’m not going to lie, anytime someone tells me that they’ve “healed” their fibromyalgia, I usually give them the side-eye. Some conditions never are healed, they just go into remission. It seems ingenuous to use the term “remission” for some conditions and not others.

Now, there are cases when healing can happen. I got a cut on my hand recently. I applied antibiotic ointment and put a bandage on it as it was in a place I kept bumping. (Plus I do farm chores which right now consists of dealing with a lot of mud.) The cut healed within a few days. Do we say the cut went into remission? No. The skin repaired itself and the cut is gone.

But I’m going to say something that I suspect a great many people will not agree with, in part because it means what they’re selling or offering to people isn’t really based on solid ground. There are some conditions that will not “go away” magically like the cut I experienced. Though we may learn to work with those conditions, even rearrange our lives to make them less of an issue, it is at the very least insincere to talk about healing in those contexts.

What cannot be healed can be transformed

I am thinking of long-term trauma, mental health conditions, or even chronic physical conditions for which there may, or may not, be things that can be done to ease the symptoms. I think here it’s not hard to say that the state of healthcare in the US is abysmal for people assigned female at birth who have certain conditions. I’ve long contended that fibromyalgia, for example, is the modern era’s “hysteria” and even now as we’re learning so much more about ME/CFS, Long Covid, and other similar conditions, still reminds a throwaway diagnosis in that it’s the patent who is thrown away.

As my work centers around reconnecting with our higher selves and creating restoration with the stories we tell ourselves and have internalized, this is a long term, ongoing process. Trauma literally changes the structure of our brains. And if you are neurodivergent, queer, or chronically ill/disabled (not to mention a person of color or poor), it’s virtually impossible to get through life without at least some trauma. We must transform the way we think, begin to see ourselves as divine beings, so that we can make those connections with our higher selves, our authentic being, and begin living as ourselves and for ourselves, not just working to live.

The Term Healing Can Cause Disappointment

Finally, if someone talks to you about healing, first it implies that you have something wrong with you, that you’re broken and need “fixed”. One thing I’ve learned is a lot of those people who think that I needed “fixing” really weren’t comfortable with my neurodivergence. They didn’t want me to be who I am with my quirky interests and the fact that I did really well in school. There’s a reason why ABA (applied behavior analysis) began as an offshoot of conversion therapy, because in our western world a lot of the “healing” that’s done is often just converting people into conformity.

It can also cause disappointment. Just like when a doctor tells you to try a new medicine–of course it will work and you’ll feel so much better–there’s a lot of pain and disappointment when it sometimes doesn’t work. Someone saying they can heal you and then you realizing that while you can go into remission, or change how you think, the past you, the trauma you experienced, is still there and a part of you.

Healing implies bandages, quick fixes, and absolute eradication of whatever issue is occurring. The truth is we’re human, and humans are messy. Even a knitted (healed) broken bone still aches when the weather changes. Yes, the bone is no longer broken, and so conventional medicine says it’s “healed”, but also, it still is going to hurt when the weather changes. You’re still aware it’s there, and that is the case with a great many things we face. We’re still aware that they happened and still exist within our body schemas.

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