The 26th leg av the Camino.
Today our lovely guide asks us to put our intention on “healing” today. And I meet with another point of internal resistance.
One which takes me completely by surprise.
I was listening to a podcast the other day about trauma. The interviewee’s position was that people who have insecurities have them because they were traumatized as children. And after all these years of therapy, I am beginning to wonder if there is really any benefit in using the metaphors of wounds and healing and scars when it comes to processing the emotional experiences of our lives.
The whole paradigm of trauma implies a state of perfection that is damaged. And I find myself asking: where is that state of perfection? If someone has a concept of that, my guess is that it precedes the time where they became conscious of their own point of view being discrete from the rest of the world. The toddler whose mother closes the bathroom door for the first time while she pees alone, may very well experience that moment as a small trauma: an abandonment. The spectrum of abandonment is long and varied and ultimately subjective.
Isn’t our concept of this “first trauma” a form of nostalgia? A fiction?
I am in no way belittling or denying the reality of the pain that we endure. And believe me, it both surprises me – and makes me uncomfortable – that I find myself asking these questions.
What if we framed the small and large events of our lives as something other than trauma? These are events. Phenomena. I am certainly aware that this is not a novel thought. I’ve read the philosophers, but there is always a different kind of understanding when you plod the long way around and bump into to the idea on your own: experiential-ly, not intellectually.
Healing is generally defined as a form of “restoration”. Or reparation. I find it ironic, the definitions of the word reparation – one being healing, and one being payment for being wronged. Am I the only person who has muddled the two? Expected healing in the form of payment: a lollipop from the dentist, an eye for an eye, a medal, a title – moral superiority.
It might just be me. I’m not proud of this. I often question my motives for having “shown off” my scars. Doing so always leaves me with with a feeling of shame. When will I decide I am “healed”? Believe I’ve received enough reparations to move on?
I’m considering other metaphors. These events as shapes, not ugly or pretty in themselves, but shapes I can sort into mosaics. These stories (since I cannot let go of the stories) that are not about healing and happy endings, but about the weaving of compassionate observations into a greater whole. How can experiences make me a better person, but – no: and not give me a sense of being more deserving?
I’m grateful for many of the concepts I have internationalized from my childhood faith. Martyrdom is not one of them.
What if the “work of healing” is nothing more than willful creativity? This is the material you are given: a bit of mud, a bit of coal, a fleck of fool’s gold. Make something of it that is yours.
It’s our nature to be altered by phenomenon.
Just like the trees that grow around the fence posts, that layer their bark each season – callouses that look like faces, faces that read like stories. Nothing healed. And nothing gained. Just part of the great forest.