“If you desire healing, let yourself fall ill, let yourself fall ill.”
Rumi
It’s not uncommon to hear clients use the word “fix” in session, often said with some amount of anxiety:
“I want to fix this.”
“I haven’t been able to fix this.”
“I’m afraid I’ll never fix this.”
They all essentially expressing the same sentiment: frustration that their past difficult experiences were influencing their present perceptions and emotions to the extent that they were.
It’s understandable, and I can 100% relate. After years, sometimes decades, of self-development work, something happens in life that challenges us in an old and familiar way, a way we thought wouldn’t happen again. We find ourselves automatically performing an old pattern of thinking, behaving, or feeling that we thought we were past.
Or maybe we feel like we’ve never quite had a handle on our reactions the way we have wanted to, and we’re just tired of getting triggered in similar ways, time after time.
Almost all words are metaphors, and I don’t think that fixing something broken is as good of a metaphor as healing a wound.
When something is broken, it often breaks suddenly, is fixed quickly (e.g. when you take your car to a mechanic) and often it needs parts replaced, or isn’t as strong or valuable after fixing (e.g. a broken ceramic or a cheap plastic toy).
Injuries of the emotional “heart” are not “breaks” that need fixing as much as they are wounds that need healing. And healing connotes a more gradual and psychobiological process. Rather than conjuring the image of a car being dropped off at the mechanic’s shop, healing brings out an image of a sick person in bed resting, or an injured animal being rehabilitated with care.
Healing wounds is a biological process, and biology is generally more complex than material objects, to which we apply the language of fixing something broken. And psychological wounds are fairly complex, because they involve the brain and nervous system, which is biological. Literally, when we are psychologically wounded, we are biologically wounded. The body “heals”, not fixes.
The metaphor of healing a physical wound lends itself to visualizing a gradual process that can take substantial time more easily than the metaphor of fixing something that was broken.
A hindrance when we are healing is the all-or-nothing view that we are either broken or fixed. But for personal “growth” (another life-science word, like healing), it’s important to keep in mind gradual change. If we think of success as categorical (we’re either broken or fixed), we’ll take any sign that there is still work to do as evidence that we haven’t even started. But this is never the case when someone has started to find a therapist or coach. The fact that they are seeking professional help is a sign that they have already recognized the injury to some extent and have begun to heal.
And it’s important to recognized that we’ve already started, because it is proof of concept. It’s hard to take the next step if we believe we haven’t taken any steps before. By recognizing we’ve already come a long way (or even a little way), we can more easily keep walking in that same, positive direction.
Usually, in my experience, clients have already done a lot for themselves before their first session, and need affirmation that they’re generally on the right track. They need to hear that even though there is plenty more healing to do, they’ve already healed a lot.
It is probably easier to have compassion for a wound than a broken object as well. The etymology of “compassion” comes from “suffer with”. It means being with pain rather than fixing pain.
A broken object elicits some active fixing by a repairman. A wound elicits tender loving care, so the organism can heal on its own. It doesn’t need an external intervention, it needs rest, nourishment, and a safe environment so it can do it’s own thing in time.
When we view ourselves as broken, it tends to create anxiety because we think something needs to be done. But this anxiety creates a secondary problem and injury. Now we’re wounded as well as afraid. It was hard enough when we were just wounded. But the fear causes us to second-guess our path and progress, which was typically the right one. It makes us freeze up and focus on safety rather than growth. It makes us question any growing pain as a possible sign that we’re making a mistake, that we’re not doing it right.
Imagine someone fighting a virus and being terrified of the symptoms that accompany the immune response (aches, chills, weakness, fever). The fear creates stress which weakens the immune response, thus delaying the recovery. Or imagine a physical therapy client who does her rehab exercises, but then stops because they evoke some discomfort which is part of rehabilitation. This will slow the healing process.
This is similar to what happens when someone is changing their psychology or personality and experiencing discomfort. Let’s say they are dropping their defenses, becoming more assertive, respecting themselves more, or opening up to others more. All of these changes are likely to create anxiety because they are unfamiliar and were unsafe at some point earlier in life. If they then stop their progress because they’re afraid of the discomfort, healing is delayed.
The metaphor of fixing broken objects doesn’t capture the experience of going through growing pains or rehabilitation discomfort. But the metaphor of healing a wound does. If our growth hurts, we can take comfort knowing that healing wounds often involves pain.