Self-portrait, 2007I'm not sure I buy the concept of healing. From my own experience and from my observations of and conversations with others, I don't see much healing happening. Rather, I am, and I see others, as damaged, unhealed, trying to navigate the choppy waters of insult, trauma, sudden change, and violation.
This isn't to say I don't make my way through the days. I do. I often do pretty well.
Always underlying my making through, though, is unhealed damage of one kind or another.
Before I write a word or two about this unhealed damage, let me admit that I might have the prompt wrong. Maybe the prompt, "healing", suggests that one is never healed, but always on the way of healing, that things get gradually healed, but never completely.
Nonetheless, here's some of my experience:
Back in October, 1981, my first wife, Eileen, suggested we go out for ice cream and about half way through a bittersweet nugget, told me she didn't think she wanted to be married to me any longer. At the time, I couldn't tell if she was talking hypothetically, but I soon learned she wasn't and in December we were separated and in August, divorced.
Understandably, I was devastated. But, I believed that over time, I would heal from the emotional and psychic trauma of this divorce. I took friends' advice as well as that from books and other sources. I tried not to stuff my feelings. I expressed my anger. I cried. I sought therapy. I believed that these actions, along with letting time heal this fracturing of my life, would eventually bring me to a point of peace.
It never has. I continue to feel the pain of the loss of my first marriage. I'm ashamed of myself. Everything in the church, the world of psychology, and in how people talk about these things says that after nearly twenty-eight years, the healing should be completed, I should have let this go, and I should not be feeling the pain of this separation and divorce.
It's not how it's worked for me. I won't do it here, but I can point to any number of other insults, disruptions, violations, and failures that are not healed, that happened as recently as two weeks ago and as long as forty years ago that are still pretty fresh, unhealed, and cause me suffering and regret.
I feel and experience parallel doubt about my body. I suffered a serious industrial accident in 1973 that involved the inhalation of sulfur dioxide and heavy metal dust. I suffered toxic pneumonia. While I've been functional and even successful in the thirty-five or so years following this injury, as I lie here typing this post, I can hear my wheezing in my chest, whistles, squeaks, and rasping. I am recovering right now from a bout of pneumonia that started about six weeks ago. I think that because the toxic pneumonia never really healed, that I'm having problems with this pneumonia healing because the first pneumonia, in my opinion, compromised my respiratory system.
Maybe I've had my hopes up too high about healing. Maybe I see advertisements for the healing arts and I put too much hope in what they can do. Maybe I've put too much trust in the long- term healing impact of therapy. Maybe I have believed too strongly that time heals and that when I settled into middle age and as I moved toward old age, these old injuries and events would have dissolved into the past and I'd feel healed.
But I don't.
It leaves me wondering just how much healing really takes place in the aftermath of the events in our lives that cause us so much pain and suffering.
It leaves me wondering to what degree our trust in healers and healing is misplaced and if a major part of the human experience is not healing, but continuing to suffer.
If you'd like to read other contributors' pieces on healing, go here.
1 comment:
Glad to see you are posting again! Subject to pneumonia myself, I listen for the sounds of disaster and generally miss them...
It does seem that there's a wide gap between wellness and healing although I didn't recognize it for years.
Hope you continue to get better!
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