Earlier tonight I saw someone post this statement: “I release the belief that I have to be healed in order to be able to heal others. #woundedhealer”
As someone who’s practiced both before and after her own trauma healing, I’m gonna say the after is way better than the before.
It’s not that you CAN’T heal anyone before you heal yourself, but why would you WANT to? Why not put your oxygen mask on first before helping others? We can only show a path we’ve walked down ourselves. And besides that, everything about your life – especially your abilities in your modality, as well as knowing how to run a business with integrity, charge what you’re worth, and market yourself authentically – upgrades once you’ve cleaned your own house.
The whole point of Chiron the wounded healer was that he went around fixing everyone else while he himself was still suffering. Why? Why would anyone want to aspire to that archetype? Why not stop your pain before you wear yourself out taking care of everyone else? It’s better for you and it’s better for the collective.
When I feel into it, I believe that this kind of desire or statement comes out of a belief that healing is arduous and difficult and is going to be too expensive or take too long for it to be worth it to do before we start our practice. That doesn’t have to be true: you can take your path as slowly or as quickly as you like (even if taking it more quickly means increasing the intensity if you’re gonna not cut corners), and the universe really doesn’t care how much money you spend, as long as you’re committed one way or another. And in fact, it’s our healing ourselves that leads us in our work with others. Once we’ve figured out how to do something for ourselves, we can teach what we know, since we’ve done it and experienced it. The belief that healing is too difficult to do before practicing on others is just the ego in disguise wanting to preserve itself.
So… I don’t know, man. Sure, you can release that belief if you want to, but I could think of some other ones that would serve you better.
(Note that I’m speaking of healing core wounds, attachment styles, dysfunctional patterns, and social programming – not speaking about things like chronic illness that people can’t help or solve for themselves.)
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