Healing through, not healing from

When I chose the name for this newsletter, it wasn’t just because I love alliteration (and trust me, I do). It’s because I want to be able to look beyond the stereotypical ideas of what resilience is. I want to crack the code that explains why sometimes we are taken out by a setback and other times, failure is like rocket fuel to a whole new discovery.

Notice I didn’t say some ‘people’, I said some ‘times.’

Therein lies one of the fundamental myths that underpin so much bias and self-doubt.

When we attribute resilience to something we are, instead of something we have, we run the risk of short changing ourselves and others from all the good that can come from a setback. And no, I’m not suggesting we tell someone they have the ‘good kind of cancer’, that you heard in the vulnerable story of my good friend, Rachel.

I am, however, suggesting we get curious about why things are the way they are. Why we are the way we are.

Starting around the age of 12, I had very frequent headaches. At some point the term ‘migraine’ was introduced and because there was a hereditary predisposition, it just sort of became something that was.

Over the next 15 years, I endured CT scans, numerous medications and a seemingly endless search for answers. Waking up with a dull pain behind my eyes became the norm, to the point I gave up trying to figure it out.

Then, at the age of 27, I found myself doing a mindfulness exercise where I was instructed to describe my headache.

• If my pain were a color, what color would it be?

• If it were a shape, what shape would it be?

• If it could talk to me, what would it say?

I engaged in a series of mindfulness questions like this until the pain subsided. While happy, I was also curious and skeptical. The next day, I woke up without a headache. Loved ones who I reached out to were worried about me because it was so unheard of to be pain free, the exercise had to have been some kind of mind control.

But it wasn’t.

It was a perfect example of healing through rather than healing from. For years I had unsuccessfully tried to heal from the pain, to no avail. The path through meant tracing the pain back to its origin and finding an incident that I didn’t know how to process at the time. It was easier to keep my confusion to myself, which is what I did for 15 years.

This life-changing experience and the ensuing freedom from chronic pain spurred me to study and embrace the benefits of an integrated approach to healing, whereby insights from neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry, and somatic therapies are combined to process trauma, of the lower or uppercase variety.

This brings to me a critical distinction. Being curious about why something happened is NOT the same as saying you deserved that thing to happen. No one deserves trauma. The very inquiry about what happened to us can also lead to blame, avoidance and judgement, of ourselves and others.

However, it’s often this avoidance that leaves us stuck. According to the NIH, there is evidence to show that suppressed anger can be a precursor to the development of cancer, and also a factor in its progression after diagnosis. I don’t know about you, but that’s enough for me to want to know more.

Whatever setback you might be going through today, be it an argument with your spouse or a major health challenge, what support would you need to be able to get ‘closer to it’ such that you might one day soon be able to let it go?

Could the potential of healing through something bring you new answers, each a step toward freedom?