If you’re a wounded healer who isn’t healing, aren’t you just the walking wounded? Someone who is trying to help others emotionally, mentally, physically or spiritually while not practicing what they preach seems hypocritical. After all, the first task of a healer should be to heal themselves, right?
Lately, I’ve been questioning this assumption. I think you can be a wounded healer and still help others. In fact, I’ve been thinking about the possibility that a person can only heal themselves by healing others.
Now, helping others because it makes you feel good may seem like a selfish act. I wonder, though, if that isn’t a very sane motivation. For the highly empathetic, which is how I identify, we feel things deeply. Participating in the happiness and well-being of another person can only have a positive effect on us. If this is part of the reason for taking up a position as a healer, I think that’s fair game.
Lightening the load with baggage of my own
I used to think that it was hypocritical of me to want to pursue being a healer of any kind when I still struggle so much with my own skeletons and demons, more colloquially know as anxiety, depression, complex PTSD and borderline personality disorder. Who am I to tell anyone else how to live their lives or change their habits?
Well, who am I not to? After all, I’ve survived this far, skeletons and demons in tow, and it seems like a valid idea to share how I got here with anyone dealing with skeletons and demons of their own. Who better than someone with lived experience to be able to relate to someone experiencing mental illness: the daily battle with yourself; the grief about things in life that pass you by because you’re not well enough to obtain or sustain them; and the simple struggle to get through the month, the week, or the day when you don’t see a light on the other side of it?
Forgiving myself for moments of hypocrisy
I can’t speak as someone who has mastered the skills required to survive and thrive. I speak as someone who is learning to master these skills. I speak as someone who knows they never will fully master these skills completely, and frequently feels like they’re falling short.
I know that, too often, I’m not practicing what I preach. Often the advice I give others is the very advice I need to hear myself. I’ve been giving myself advice for years—as my own therapist, if you like. I’ve been a wounded healer to myself for as long as I can remember. I’m doing my best, and I have to find a way to accept that. I need to validate that my best is still pretty good. Maybe the only way I’ll ever be able to be a healer of any kind is to be a wounded one. Some wounds may never heal. Being an unwounded healer is not an option available to me. However, aren’t we all wounded to one degree or another? No one gets through life unscathed.
The difference between me and someone who doesn’t live with mental illness is that they don’t have to deal with being at war with themselves like I do. I wish I could make my depression disappear so I could be more productive and less prone to isolating myself. I wish I could control my anxiety, so I wasn’t such a damn perfectionist and didn’t feel like I’ll never be good enough to have the things I want most in life.
What I want most in life is to heal. To live a life without mental illness. That may not ever be possible. The key to my own healing is to accept this possibility and go forward and live my best life anyway. Part of that best life is to walk the path of the wounded healer and never stop striving to facilitate the recovery of myself and others who are in search of healing, too.
The healing power of empathy
I have the desire to help other people because I empathize with them and know how bewildering and relentless symptoms of mental illness can be. I also recognize that the desire to help others will always be married to my desire to help myself.
Helping others makes me feel more human and more myself. I feel more complete. The truth is, I can’t be a whole person all by myself. I need other people for that. The more of a whole person I become, the better position I’ll be in to facilitate the healing of others. Helping others helps me heal, and the progress I make in my healing helps me to help others even more. It’s a beautiful domino effect.
It’s painful to accept that I may never recover as much from mental illness as I wish I could, but it’s rewarding to channel that pain into something beneficial for other people. I’ll never stop wanting to be a healer, wounded or otherwise. My lived experience is worth something, even if the destination isn’t one of having all the answers. None of us do. Let’s help each other.
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image 1 congerdesign from Pixabay 2 image by Greg Montani from Pixabay
