Healer, heal thyself.

You can’t move someone from trauma to health, if you yourself are locked in trauma! Is this true?

Sort of, yes, with a few nuances.

There are degrees to which we have clarity and which we don’t, where we know the experience and suffering of separation, verses where we believe that separation is possible and so we suffer.

As a therapist, coach, counsellor, if we find ourselves commiserating rather than empathising, we are unlikely to be making any difference to the client before us. In fact, we are simply helping them hold in place the trauma pattern, the attitude, beliefs and behaviours from which they’re actually suffering.

And it can’t be faked, because non suffering radiates from the heart like a magnet.

I was once told that my job within youth justice was time served because I couldn’t be around suffering without too experiencing suffering. For years I didn’t believe that. And then I noticed that I started to believe it and as I did, it was suddenly true. Just.Like.That.

The evidence of it being true was in my lived experience suddenly being chronically stressed but being told that I was mentally ill. My mind had taken in the data, ideas and beliefs of those around me and copied them into my experience. The movie played out without any awareness that it was indeed a movie. And I was the star of the show.

It took me several years to unravel and to see that I’d played my part so well. So innocently. And that in doing so, I was in no position to help someone else out of their suffering.

Therapists, coaches, counsellors, regardless of your clients suffering, your job cannot be to show someone how to heal if you yourself don’t know how to heal.

It makes no difference the degree of their triggers: rape, domestic abuse, sexual abuse, burnout, phobia of buttons……non are more traumatising than the other. Non are harder to work with than the other.

The work is as challenging as the fences you build to avoid healing.

Ambulance workers are no more challenging than post office workers, shop assistants or dancers. Neither are teachers, medics, social workers and so on. The likelihood of healing isn’t dependant on their job role, their activity or their responsibility, and neither is yours.

Healing is dependant on you seeing that for yourself so that you can then show it to your clients.

So do you have to be fully healed, have no triggers, experience no suffering in order to help others to heal?

No. You have to be aware that to be human means you always will have triggers, beliefs and trauma responses and that the human body and mind is designed in such a way as to spot the difference between those, and real danger.