Medic!
Many self-help books and spiritual teachers consider relationships and the trials found within them opportunities for healing and growth. These lessons suggest that the people in our lives that challenge us the most are also our greatest teachers about ourselves and what needs to be healed, one way or another. In her book, A Return to Love, Marianne Williamson writes about relationships as an opportunity for mutual healing. That sure sounds nice, but healing comes in many forms.
When we think of healing, we might associate it with drinking apple juice and watching TV in a hospital bed, wearing a nicely wrapped bandage in a state-of-the-art facility while hooked to a morphine drip.
But sometimes, that ain’t it.
Sometimes, a wound has to be cauterized shut on the battlefield of life, while we’re laying in a puddle of mud in a war zone that we may have mistaken for a halfway decent relationship, and all we need to do is get up, get moving, and get the BLEEP out of there. Technically, if the wound is closed and it doesn’t get infected, that counts as healing, too.
Sure, you might walk with a limp or have a nasty scar, but that doesn’t mean it’s not healing or we haven’t learned our lesson. Sometimes, people serve us by causing us enough heartache to force us to never want to experience the same kind of pain again, and finally start making different choices.
Self-help and therapy can sometimes come across as a little soft and cushy. Some people lambast it as the cause of all our cultural harms, pure navel-gazing or over indulgence that encourages weakness or bad behavior. Often in therapy, the words are kind and encouraging, the lights soft, the couches kind of squishy. Usually the counselors delivering messages we need to hear are dressed professionally and speaking in calm, even tones. We don’t necessarily see them as medics on the battlefield, patching us up so that we can heal and live to fight another day, but maybe we should.
The reality is that life can be extraordinarily painful, put us all through some BLEEP, and still create healing and growth. In fact, those wounds acquired on the battlefield are often the ones that force us to grow up and get better the fastest.