“We are cured when we no longer have disease. We are healed when we are restored to community.” (Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona )
Cured?
Most religious faiths have some sort of tradition around asking their understanding of the Divine to heal people of this or that infirmity. It can sometimes be a challenge to our faith when the answer appears to be “no.” Mind you, working through that faith challenge has a way of introducing a growth process, but it can be quite painful.
Often the ritual or process of asking for healing involves inviting others to join us in the petition. I’ve come to believe that coming together is the healing. It just isn’t the “cure.” The Lewis Mehi-Madrona quote above underscores the distinction I’m making: “Cure” is about no longer having a disease or ailment. “Healing” is about experiencing our place in a community.
I tapped on this in part 3 of the Tell Me a Story blog series. I want to dive a little deeper in this blog.
Unbroken
Someone sent me a funny meme the other day. It read:
THERAPIST: You tend to pursue damaged people and try to fix them.
ME: You do that too.
I laughed. I almost didn’t repost it though because I bristle at the idea that a therapist “fixes” clients. Clients aren’t broken. They don’t need to be fixed.
I believe that all of us human folk are working on healing all of the time. It’s a lifetime project. Therapy is one place where we can both gain the resources that help us heal, and experience the human to human connection that facilitates our healing.
Carrying Our Stories Together
In the first blog of the Tell Me a Story series, I wrote about how, before we develop the neural circuitry required to self-regulate, we imprint on a caregiver’s emotional regulation. We absorb their sense of relative safety and attachment through our skin. Our bodies learn to self-regulate by mirroring the caregiver’s energy.
With that early imprinting, we become hard wired to heal when securely connected to others. When we share our stories, whether in counseling or in other healing conversations, that empathy and connection piece solidify “the story of us.” We often reconsider and re-write those stories and how we hold them when we perceive them through the experiences of others. When we approach this with intention, it can be profoundly healing.
Rituals
I love the fact that the United States is wildly culturally diverse. I’m very grateful to have grown up in and around Washington, DC. Between the Diplomatic Core, military families, international organizations, embassies, and a large ground swell of everyday immigrants from literally all over the world and from nearly every socioeconomic strata, I have enjoyed influences from countless cultures throughout my life. Every perspective expands my understanding of life, humans, the world and everything in it.
There are also downsides to living in that ever-flowing, ever-changing environment. Because of the nature of what brought people to the area to begin with, many in the DMV are only there for a time. It’s a very transient area. Because of that, many of the life rituals that people would otherwise have observed are largely absent or happen on a much smaller scale.
Rituals are important markers. They let us know that as we move more deeply into our lives, we do not do it alone. Our achievements are helpful to all. Other’s achievements are helpful to us. The rituals remind us that we exist as part of a fabric of people. We belong. Rituals may or may not cure us, but they faithfully heal us.
What’s Being Healed
From the time we are born, we incrementally move toward being separate from our parents, developing our own unique identities and manifesting a life where, hopefully, we can bring our gifts, receive other people’s gifts, perpetually learning and growing until we are done. Separating healthfully from our parents requires that we first attach healthfully with them. We need to know fibrously that we are part of something so much bigger than merely ourselves. We need to know that the onus of our growth is not entirely on our still-naive shoulders.
Rituals reflect back to us not just who we are and that we are important, but also how we fit into the larger human family as an interdependent giver/receiver in the greater whole. For those of us who live in the absence of cultural rituals that accomplish this, we would do well to seek out alternatives that accomplish the same goal. It’s an essential part of humanning.
Alienation
We are in a strange time where, thanks to technology, we are socially connected to more people than ever before, but also fewer, all at the same time. I literally have fascinating and wonderful friends all over the world, but very few who would come pull up a chair in my kitchen or help me do a home improvement project. It can take quite a bit of effort to connect with people we will bond with over doing things together. It’s a different kind of community.
I encourage you to make the effort. Find the affinity groups. Learn and teach by being with people in projects and experiences. When we connect to community we heal and we are healed by the experience, even when we remain “uncured” in our lives. It’s well worth the effort.