The Wounded Healer
Hardships as catalysts, an alchemy of medicine.
Welcome to this edition of Liminal Walker Musings!
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Dear ones,
If you are a new subscriber, a special WELCOME! Today’s writing comes on the heels of last week’s post, Wellspring of the Heart. There I shared about Love and how it helped me deal with trauma and shame I experienced as a child. In the comments section, there was a wonderful conversation which included the Wounded Healer. Inspiring today’s post!
From my heart to your heart, Love to you all!
The Wounded Healer
For some time, this archetype has been appearing and popping up in my field of awareness. Like some kind of fairy or trickster playing hide and seek with me. Sending me snippets of what I am ready to hear and integrate, leaving me intrigued and wanting to know more. Over time I have gathered these pieces, placing them together like a jigsaw puzzle. As the fuller picture of this archetype began to form, I could see it was a mirror and I was reflected in it.
As an Archetype…
Initiation is the birthing point for the Wounded Healer. Baptized with one or more personal challenges such as illness, trauma, injuries, mental health issues or loss. We all have these in our lives to some degree. With this archetype however, these hardships have no mainstream prognosis or prescription, they aren’t alleviated through others’ help. People can be a support, but it is up to the individual to find their own therapeutic means for healing or a way to live in harmony with their ailments. Consequently, they become alchemists. By surrendering to and entering their sufferings, the needed medicine is made. Not an Allopathic type of medicinal bent on attack, eradication and a projected idealized healing. Instead, it’s inclusive. The willingness to discover the mystery within the strife as the dissolution of old patterns. An embodied felt-sense of loving interconnection.
Wounded Healers can be found in many healing professions, as well as outside them. Devoted to continual self-growth, they are inclined to be open-minded and observant. They tend to be good listeners, intuitive, compassionate and empathic. Understanding that difficult circumstances in life are not something to fix or circumvent but opportunities for navigation.
In the shadow, an unripened Wounded Healer can be arrogant and exploitive. Not grounded in appropriate boundaries.
Message from Rumi: These pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.
Personal Meaning…
There is another aspect to the Wounded Healer that I feel is relevant to our current culture and times. That is the call to meet the shadows of life, to visit the darkness of the underworld. Here the psychic wound or pain of conditioning pushes as a catalyst for inner growth.
Personally, this has brought me to my knees. Both as humbleness and surrender. Inviting me to be present. Without turning away or being consumed by the pain. Finding peace in not having solutions or answers. Recognizing that untangling dysfunctional wiring means at times to sit with confusion.
Seeing that it isn’t about the “will”, has been a hard lesson. Willfulness as this attempt to master the wound and arrive at some healed quintessential place. This ongoing hamster wheel of determining the problem and fixing it. A mind-based, binary way of dealing with life. Resulting in objectification of the body, feelings, and challenges as some sort of project to complete.
What I have discovered is there is no ultimate supreme healing. Life is untamable, impermanent. It’s from those messy bits that something amazing and beautiful emerges. The wound is a sacred doorway into love and our humanity.
Message from Rumi: What hurts you, blesses you. Darkness is your candle.
Life Examples
Food Addiction: As a late teen and young adult, I turned to food to fill this abyss of emptiness I felt inside. When I eventually sought help, it was through the twelve-step program. It supported me in discerning that following someone else’ path or some preformulated method would not work for me. I needed to find my own unique way through this addiction. I started listening to my body, asking it what it needed to heal. Letting this inner wisdom lead rather than outer prescribed diets and plans. It was a slow process and healing happened.
Illness: In my early forties I was a mother with two young children, had a demanding job that required fifty hours a week, and did the accounting for my husband’s business. What was I thinking? If I wasn’t going to stop pushing to achieve, then my body would. Resulting in adrenal fatigue. The first year I was bed ridden, allopathic medicine didn’t help. Finding Ayurveda taught me a wholistic way of being with my constitution as a full lived experience. Again, a slow process, but healing happened.
(These two examples I go into more detail in: Healing is not Fixing.)
Trauma and Shame: I believe shame was the root of both my addiction and illness, the source of emptiness and overachieving. As a child, I received messages that I was deficient, damaged in some way. Over time the outer voices of my parents and society morphed into the inner shaming ones in my head. Their purpose? My submission. Cultivating me to ignore my intuition, emotions, sensitivities and inner wildness. Meeting shame has been a reorientation. Bringing me home to self-love. Connecting me with the vital energy of existence, reinvigorating my inherent natural traits, bringing them back to life. Healing has happened, yet these voices of shame continue to be a constant companion. I believe in part as the Wounded Healer in me. An ongoing means of making medicine for myself and others.
Integration: There is also this incessant need for perfectionism. Fix the flaws, reach and accomplish, obtain and procure! The dangling carrot, the ever unattainable ideal. Never here, always one step ahead. Yet keep going anyways… Transcend it all! Urrgh! True transcendence is not outside the physical. Beyond this existence and impermanence of it. It’s inside the embodied experience of each moment as love.
Message from Rumi: The wound is the place where the light enters you.
Questions for you…
What pain or ache is asking for your attention rather than your fixing?
Are you a Wounded Healer?
What vital lessons have you learned through your challenges?
Would love to know your thoughts and feelings. Let’s have a conversation…
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The Wounded Healer is one I am intimately familiar with. I think you and I have swapped stories of this before. Even after my illness, even after becoming a healer for others, I struggled to claim the word 'wounded'. I felt like it left a stain of victimhood on me. It was actually one of my spirit guides that sat me down and told me to start seeing wounds for what they are. They have nothing to do with shame or weakness. They are experiences. More than that, though, they are portals. The person I'd been before left through the wounding and a different version came through. I see the profound value in that now. Thank you so much for this beautiful post on one of the most sacred, most transformative archetypes in the realm. ❤️
This is so timely Julie. I was at a plant medicine retreat this weekend and finally spent some time with my recent headaches and shoulder pain. I was able to quiet my mind and list to the pain.
It told me I too deserve to be seen, listened to, and held in the same way I offer to others. I not only deserved healing space for myself, it is the only way I have room in my heart and the energy needed to be any kind of healer. I unconsciously held the belief if I made room for others, helped them feel safe and seen, then after it would be my turn and I would have earned access to the same, as if there was only so much caring/healing available to us all.
The journey helped me see I can, and have to, make space for myself and that won't mean there is less left for someone else. There is infinite space and energy available. By listening to my body screaming at me I'm reminded of the necessity of self-care if I want to be available to others.
By making safe space for myself I create more room to hold space for others.
Thanks for the opportunity to slide a few more pieces of the puzzle of me into place!