Where Healing Work Begins

determine what we need to do to find resolution and relief. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to resolving our painful experiences. For some of us, particularly if our experiences were profoundly painful, we might only need insight, processing, and getting some emotion up and out. We might find it enough to troubleshoot troublesome situations—such as difficult social interactions—by learning to identify our triggers, meanings assigned, and beliefs formed, and how to revise them and to know their origins. For some of us, it may be as simple as learning how not to feel threatened by our negative emotions and instead how to sit with them. For many, it is the fear of our emotions, of feeling certain things, which causes so many of our most troublesome symptoms.

Where Healing Work Begins

This book is built on the premise that true and total healing can occur. Being a wounded soul does not have to be a permanent or perpetual state. It isn’t, or at least need not be, our lifelong identity. Certain therapeutic and support group settings operate on the assumption that once a wounded soul, always a wounded soul—that if a person has need of therapeutic intervention and support services, they will forever need them to stay afloat emotionally. This view offers little hope that we can find full and total healing from past experiences.

Regardless of how prominent this assumption is, we could also argue that our minds and souls are capable of complete, and in some sense permanent, healing. Advancements and discoveries

in therapy research, specifically in our understanding of how painful experiences affect the brain, have brought about new areas of exploration and approaches to therapy. These emerging strategies can help the brain relearn how to respond, relate, perceive, and feel. In essence, we are finding ways to help our minds heal from injury—not physical injuries, but deep emotional and spiritual ones.

In a sense, at least for the purposes of this book, it doesn’t matter what kind of injury, whether it’s diagnosed trauma or simply a painful sense of disappointment and regret in life. This book will speak to all profoundly painful events we can experience. An experience does not have to be traumatic in a clinical sense to leave a mark on us. Depending on our life experiences, certain chapters of this book might resonate more than others. However, the knowledge that can be gained from each chapter will be universally useful to all, regardless of the unique history of their woundedness. And even if we have not suffered any profoundly painful experiences that have left a mark, undoubtedly we know others who have.

This book starts from the premise that we—indeed, humanity as a whole—have all suffered because of events that should not have happened. Why is this important to clarify in a book about healing? Because sometimes in our effort to make sense of the pain in our lives and the life of the world, we buy into the assumption that if something “bad” occurs, it was meant to happen. We should accept it and move on. Yet this is a form of avoidance, a way to turn away from the complexity and reality of the free will of ourselves and others. Instead, we must exercise great caution

when asserting that anything resulting from these free choices was meant to happen. When we use our free will to engage in behavior that harms others, we cannot justify it as something that was “supposed to” happen that way. Such excuses could do great harm to others, not to mention to ourselves. Further, they lead to the belief that those who suffer—which sometimes includes ourselves—somehow deserve what they experience. In the end, these assumptions undermine trust in God and in others, and they inflict people with a terrible sense of shame.

There is another way beyond these simplistic assumptions that we will always be wounded and that the bad things are meant to happen. When we start to step back to see the larger picture of our lives, when we start encountering new experiences that result from transforming the ways we relate with ourselves, others, and our surroundings, then we begin to feel as though we had never suffered the painful experiences. We reach a place where memories learn to be past memories, where previous emotional triggers no longer trigger us. We learn to relate with ourselves and our external world as if we had not suffered those past experiences. It’s true that we will always have memories of the painful experiences we’ve endured, but when we engage in healing work, they have a chance to fade and lose their power over us. In short, we get to keep the good and let go of the bad. Even if our wounds are deep, once we encounter healing, we get to keep the wisdom and humility we gained from working through those painful experiences while also letting go of the fear, pain, and shame that once held us captive.