Towards Hope

The word ‘healing’ has become a lot more common in talks around mental health and therapy, mainly to describe how people access support or take steps to build coping skills so that they can reach a place where they’re growing and feel more positive, or at least that’s my interpretation. When we look at the actual definition of ‘healing’, we typically see two definitions:

• “the process of becoming well again, especially after a cut or other injury, or of making someone well again” 
• “the process in which a bad situation or painful emotion ends or improves”

So healing is about an end to suffering, or an improvement of our current situation so that we can ‘become well’, or as other sources describe it; ‘become whole’. If I was being especially pedantic today I would dig a bit deeper into what ‘becoming well’ could even mean, especially in our current social/economical/political climate which seems to be the antithesis of ‘well’! But for today, I think looking at the practicalities of healing could be a first step – looking at what the process would actually look like and if there is an end result.

Generally, I feel people talk about healing as though it’s a linear process. You go to therapy, maybe take medication, practice some coping skills, and then you’re at a place where you’re ‘healed’. The emphasis is on that final state you arrive at, a state where you past traumas, wounds, and emotional responses are no longer bothersome and you are free to be… what? ‘Normal’? Yourself? Well? If we go with the earlier definition, it could be that healing is simply a place where we are no longer in pain, physically or emotionally, and so healing is the absence of suffering. This definition fits with the idea that healing can be linear, or that eventually we reach a point where we no longer suffer. At the same time, life is full of difficult moments in which we will struggle; it just isn’t realistic to expect healing to be never struggling again and only experiencing positive things.

If we are bound to experience difficult moments, crises, heartbreak, and pain in life it can feel tempting to lean into the idea that healing is impossible, just an unrealistic wish. Adapting the way we perceive healing is so important to avoid this kind of catastrophic or pessimistic thinking. Perhaps healing can be a set of behaviours, ways of thinking, and skills we develop rather than a set destination we arrive at. This way, healing is not a place we come to by practicing these skills but rather the act of having these skills and experiences and consistently practicing them.

As mentioned, we aren’t going to be able to avoid pain in life. But if we can feel more able to cope with it, more able to return to baseline after, more able to act in a way that’s important to us personally, then we can feel a lot more able to cope with what life throws at us and experience peace more often. Let’s say a person has experienced trauma around rejection, and has just had a long-term friend cut ties with them. This is an incredibly painful thing to experience regardless of your healing status, but can feel life-changing when we’re triggered and our nervous system feels it cannot cope. In this case, a person may shut-down, rely on unhealthy coping skills, feel consumed by their emotions and thoughts, and feel the impact of this loss for a long period of time.

If we compare this to someone who has ‘healed’, we can see that this loss is still incredibly painful. The difference is that this person is likely to be more able to cope in a way that aligns with their values, goals, and sense of self. They feel more able to reach out to others for support, experience their emotions without judgement, access their coping skills, and feel safe even when things go wrong. I find the biggest thing I’ve noticed in people who have made steps towards healing is that they feel stronger in their sense of self; they know that difficult experiences don’t make them ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’, and oftentimes they can accept that they’re in pain and need to be gentler with themselves. 

I also find it’s important not to define healing just as being more able to cope in difficult times and not have it ‘take over’ so much, but also as an increased ability to take part in life. Being able to get out more, socialise, create meaningful relationships, enjoy hobbies, and do all the wonderful things that make us feel good. Our ability to feel healed is not solely reliant on being able to cope when things are tough, but also being able to flourish when we’re feeling good. And this isn’t just the idea that we must be able to cope and be productive 24/7; this is one of the biggest things in current society that irritates me, that being more productive or more able to work means that we’re ‘fixed’. So often our mental health systems are focused on us being able to hit a score on a questionnaire or say we went back to a 9-5 so we’re all good now, but our ability to engage in the world around us, love other people, do things we really enjoy, just isn’t counted. It’s really tied to this notion that in order to be good people, we must be as productive as possible (which again, I could go on for hours about!) rather than self-actualised. I don’t have any hard data on this, but I get the feeling that community, meaning, and joy are more connected to better mental health than ‘productivity’ as our current society defines it!

All of this said, healing can be an incredibly personal journey and it’s important not to lose sight of the individual person and their needs when talking about it with someone. What healing looks like for one person may look completely different to another. For some clients I’ve spoken with, healing looks like having an independent income and their own space, and feeling like they’re in an environment they can make their own and be creative with. For others, it’s about processing internal feelings and feeling that they can see themselves in a more neutral light, or at least be kinder to themselves. Either way, it can be helpful to know what healing might look like for you.

This post has been quite rambly, but I feel that having some notion of what healing can actually look like for people is important. In a world where we’re so fixated on specific results and having things ‘fixed’ for good, understanding that healing can be fluid and take time is so important to recognise. 

I’d be interested in hearing about what healing means to people, so please do feel free to leave a comment if you’d like to share your journey and what healing could look like for you.

Thanks for reading, and here’s to hoping my next post won’t take so long to upload!