Just What is Healing?

I see and read it almost daily in therapeutic circles- healing. You can heal from your past trauma. Healing is available; healing is possible. Writing this I almost feel like I’m some Benny Hinn type of faith healing revival.

Unfortunately, with all this talk about and promises of healing, I’ve seen very little about what that healing actually is or what it entails? With a physical injury, this seems obvious, right? As kids our scars and bruises would naturally heal and fade away. Athletes, after serious Knee or Achilles injuries get expensive surgeries that repair and eventually help rebuild ligaments that were torn.

But, what about psychological healing? What does it actually mean to heal from trauma? How do we even know that we are healing?  Is it merely something that we want to believe and maybe profess? 

So, before sharing my thoughts here, just as a sidenote, this isn’t a bad question to ask any prospective counselor, therapist or coach you might see- before actually seeing them or paying for their services.  Just saying. 

So, what is healing? 

Simplest put, healing is two things—awareness and acceptance.  Awareness of our thought and behavioral patterns of avoidance and the painful feelings that our egoic patterns try to protect us from.  Learning to turn towards or to also be simultaneously aware and accepting of these not only these patterns, which are often automatic, but also of the painful feelings is what allows us have more tolerance of the difficult emotions we often react out of. 

To be sure, this is a simplified explanation.  In truth, healing can be much more difficult.  Our egoic thought and/ or behavioral patterns serve an important function—to protect us!   Unfortunately, in protecting us from intolerable feelings, our patterns can often eventually wreak havoc and suffering in our lives and become maladaptive. 

In fact, they do such a good job of protecting us, we often don’t even realize them for what they are- egoic/ protective patterns protecting us from painful feelings!!  Healing occurs as we see, notice and become more aware of these patterns, the feelings they are protecting and learn to be allowing or accepting of our experience of each. 

This is a process that involves awareness of the physiological bodily sensations of painful and threatening feelings and ideally the meanings that we attach to those sensations in a given situation.  Further, it involves inviting safety and ease to those feelings and the body that inhabits those feelings through acceptance of those difficult feelings and the protective patterns that work so hard to avoid and/ or distract from them.