What is Healing, Really?

A different Perspective on Moving Forward

Over the years, we’ve talked about and written on the topic of healing from multiple perspectives. We continue this conversation that we might be able to hold this construct better as we strive to find safety and security in some of the most difficult personal experiences a human endures.

Our understanding of healing is that it is a restorative process of bringing the body to a state of wellness or wholeness, particularly after injury or illness; meaning a reparative process of healing broken bones, or tissue.

With the increase of trauma in our social framework, we now add emotional wounding and healing to this understanding, including a need to heal emotionally or psychologically from the wounds others inflict on our hearts and minds.

But, what do we really mean about healing, and how do we know if we are healed or not?
These, and other questions, we’ll hope to unpack in this week’s edition.

Let’s get into it!

What Do We Mean by Healing?

Is healing and recovery the same? Is healing permanent once it is achieved, or is there potential for there to be a decline or a regression back to an unhealed state? Do we actually heal the past?

These questions and others are at the root of understanding what healing really is and how it is accomplished.

We often focus on healing being something we accomplish, as if we arrive at some destination where everything is as it used to be. This is not the case.

Healing is a Process of Distribution Updates

No one can go backwards in time to undo or fix a poor decision or an event choice. Dealing with experiences is different when the behaviors are caused by another.

To heal from the pain of life decisions, our or those of another, we re-evaluate the event or experience so that we can learn to carry the outcome differently into the future. 

   *This may feel like a blanket statement, easy to say when there are so many variations to hurt. Likewise, there is the difference between a poor choice and the patterns of choices to abuse another human. How we see justice in these cases varies – but this is not the topic of this particular post. 

Here’s an example that might fit with the issues many of us face with husbands who target abuse. 

• Original decision: Trying to explain how his actions hurt you.
• Updated decision (to distribute the pain better): Learning that sharing doesn’t help or heal. It may make matters worse to talk to the abuser. In the future, we find safe people who will be supportive, rather than say things that may result in further abuse.

Small, corrective measures that don’t undo the original harm caused, but mitigate future harm and hurt feelings from a husband who doesn’t seem to care about how his behavior or words cause you to feel, is just one step in the process of learning to better carry life experiences.

     *Additional steps and tools can be found in our Micro Experiences and Community Courses.

The point; we don’t change the past. We learn from it. We update the meaning we’ve made of it so that we can healthfully go forward into the future – learning to carry the weightiness of life’s pains in a way that allows us to progress, rather than regress.

Healing and Change – Difficult and Uncertain

Healing is a lot like change, in order to get to the goal or objective, we are often doing things that are uncertain, uncomfortable and difficult. 

Since we aren’t going to go backwards to some past point of perceived wellness, the path isn’t known. We’ll be trying something new, potentially anxiety producing – at least until we’re familiar with the new present, and find comfort in that change and growth. 

In the example presented above, the updated way of interacting with the abuser, helps protect the victim from future harm. She learns that no matter how much she wants to be able to share, abusers often use the information a wife gives to further abuse and punish – leading to a lack of safety. 

There are times when what we adjust in healthier interactions is in the quiet movement forward into our personal safety – it’s not a retreat. We don’t acquiesce to the abuser. We solidify what we know to be true in our mind, and choose accordingly.

Healing, Doesn’t Stop the Hurt, or Cause Something to Go Away/Disappear

Healing isn’t the process of a cessation of hurt or harm. Nor is it that an event or behavior – especially that of another person, ends. The point of healing, or of moving forward toward a better state – after harm has occurred – is in the internal strength we work to achieve because of the injury or harm. In meaningful ways, we turn toward the injury, clarifying them, taking ownership for the change – not because we caused it – but because we are the only one who can do the change work. 

Too often, we expect that once the abuse, or harm stops, we’ll be better. That is not true because the events happened. We have the feelings and meaning about the event that we have. 

If, in a perfect setting, our abusive husband suddenly understood how awful he had behaved and turned himself around – living in amends the balance of his life – it would not erase what happened. There would still need to be changes for growth to occur, inside of the victim and the perpetrator.

We Can’t Rewrite What Happened, but We can Influence What Happens Next

“Assuaging abuse, isn’t acceptance, it is the agentic taking charge of the effects. You are not responsible for the injury, but you are entitled to tend to its effects” (Coach Joi).

Whether you speak of healing, or of recovery, as the process of calibrating your future well-being – the whole of this task is in your hands. No amount of correction or cessation of abuse will help. 

That sounds like an awful statement, but the reality is, once these egregious deeds are done, they cannot be undone. Even stopping the abuse might not ease the pain of the experience. 

In so many ways, the change from our state of feeling in despair and traumatized, is more of a psychological event than a physical or relational process. We heal our minds with the way we hold the meaning of the events.

This is largely because memory and pain are not in the body, or the nervous system – but this is a topic for another post.

Healing Tools from Center for Peace

Healing, in this framework, is neither passive endurance nor forced positivity. It is the disciplined practice of restoring dignity where it was violated — while recognizing that your capacity to choose, respond, and rebuild is still intact.

Center for Peace has several services where you can be either in-person guided or self-guided in ways that will help you live well. We encourage you to participate in our Micro-Experiences held monthly or in the longer courses within the Society for Dignity or the Living Well Academy.

For more information, please email us a Center for Peace