Healing

Making Choices

“Ultimately, no matter the burden we are given—apartheid, cancer, abuse, depression, addiction—once whittled to the bone, we are faced with the never-ending choice: to become the wound or to heal.”

                              Mark Nepo (The Book of Awakening)

I had a friend in high school who was a beautiful, sweet girl. Her mother was mentally ill and had paranoid delusions that caused her to think her daughter was doing things she wasn't. Life for my friend was absolutely unbearable—sometimes her mother locked her in a closet, or wouldn't allow her to go outside the house. My friend somehow endured this atrocious childhood, went to college on her own dime, became a nurse, married and had a family. Every time I cross paths with her, she talks about the goodness of life, her grandchildren and her faith. I don't hear bitterness in her voice. I don't hear resentment.

As a counselor, I heard many sad stories like my friend's; of childhoods spent in broken or abusive families, of loneliness and abandonment. People grow up sometimes with untold sorrow and fear. They are wounded, damaged. There is no way to easily undo the harm done. Together we plowed through that sadness and layer-by-layer peeled it away, until at the heart of it, we found a kernel of health. Then we built on that healthy center until there was more good than bad, more love than hate, and more hope than brokenness.

I also know people who clutch their pain to them like a precious child. They refuse to see any light in the tunnel; they remain angry and filled with resentment. They are so identified with their wound, that it becomes who they are. They expect others to be in service to that wound; it poisons their relationships. That is one option for living, but it shuts out all the sweetness that life has to offer.

Even in the worst of circumstances, we have choices. We can keep alive all the misfortunes of life, we can stoke their fires, and feed them with our tears, or we can bless them and let them go. We can work at recovery and healing. Carrying around the wounds of childhood, or failed relationships, or whatever darkness life presents us—and every life has some darkness—is like dragging a sack of rocks behind us. It's hard work and it slows us down. We can be the wound, or we can heal. The choice is ours.

                                         In the spirit,

                                        Jane