Our Sickness Must Grow Worse

Profound healing follows profound wounding. In the world of the spirit and care of souls, what that often means is this: profound healing requires profound honesty about the profound wounding that has been there all along.

^{Photo by Jair Lázaro on Unsplash}

Dusting off an oldie but a goodie this week from the archives. In addition to physical therapy, the image below is one of my most used metaphors in the counseling room.

I remember the first time my mother used rubbing alcohol to clean a wound. Streaming out the front door in my soccer uniform and excited to run around with new cleats and shin guards, I tripped over the steps onto the sidewalk and skinned both knees. Boy did it hurt! But then Mom poured this clear liquid on my bloody knees that burned like fire. It hurt even worse! I would have gladly put up with the gentle sting of exposed tissue compared to the pain caused by this liquid torture device. But of course it was actually a cleansing agent, and thankfully mother knew better than my seven year old wisdom that intensified pain in the short-term is worth it for long-term and deeper healing.

Therapy is like that. What we often seek is pain relief, but instead of acetaminophen we really need isopropyl alcohol. Sometimes this involves uncovering raw emotions that have hidden behind activity, comfort, and analgesics, literal and metaphorical. Sometimes a cleaning agent isn’t enough, and so “the wounded surgeon plies the steel / that questions the distempered part.” Sometimes the surgical steel questions the claim to have grown up in a “loving Christian home,” which Curt Thompson observes is often code for “Life sucked, but I can’t really say that out loud.” Though it hurts, healing can’t ignore the concrete ways that life sucked; not for everyone, but for you, uniquely and individually.

Speaking out against the cultural Christianity of his day, Søren Kierkegaard wrote that “Christianity is done away with, for it has become an easy thing, a superficial something which neither wounds nor heals profoundly enough.” Profound healing follows profound wounding. In the world of the spirit and care of souls, what that often means is this: profound healing requires profound honesty about the profound wounding that has been there all along.

Quotation from T.S. Eliot

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Our only health is the disease If we obey the dying nurse Whose constant care is not to please But to remind of our, and Adam’s curse, And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

Question

What would it cost you to be honest about the hurt that you need healed? Who can you be a wounded surgeon to and for, by creating space and safety for profound honesty about past and present wounds?