What is Healing?

What is healing? 

When I began my career as a therapist, I used the definition of healing that most therapists were taught in school: healing was a reduction or alleviation of symptoms. Medically speaking, I suppose this is an adequate definition of healing. I knew I was healed from my ENT surgery when my stitches fell out, I could breathe, swallow, and feed myself normally—and when my doctor gave me a clean bill of health and no additional appointments were scheduled to check up on the operated area.

Since most therapy and counseling programs operate on the medical model, it made sense that we adopt the medical definition of healing too. 

Except there are many problems with the medical model and the intricacies of how experiences and relationships impact us holistically is not taken into consideration. Humans are not just a set of symptoms that can be treated (exclusively) individually and independently of each other. 

In this way (and so many others) the medical model is insufficient. 

When I began my doctoral research on healing nearly 99% of the research I was finding was matching this definition of healing. This dismayed me because while this was the widely accepted definition it wasn’t my lived experience—nor was it the lived experience of so many of the clients I was working with. In fact, this definition of healing actually increased my guilt and shame as I believed that the specific ways I should be able to see if I had healed got further and further away each day. 

I couldn’t understand how certain symptoms were alleviated or reduced while others got worse or new symptoms appeared. Extreme weight gain was the most noticeable symptoms I experienced and since I was not experiencing a reduction or alleviation of that symptom (many times it was the opposite) I assumed I was not only not healing, I thought I was getting worse. 

Several months into my dissertation writing process I sheepishly approached my dissertation chair (the person who was in charge of my research, including if I passed or not) and told her I didn’t think I was qualified to write about healing since I was clearly getting worse. She had known me for a while at this point and knew my story. She was empathetic to my dismay but instead of agreeing with me, she challenged me to consider that my definition of healing—the medical model’s definition of healing—was limited. 

I was hesitant to accept this as a suggestion—mostly because I feared that if I did accept this as a solution, I might have to let go of some of the hopes I had for what healing would look like on me—literally and figuratively. However, I couldn’t deny that I was exhausted and beaten down…and more discouraged than ever. I decided to trust my chair and tentatively tried on a new definition of healing. 

With very little research to back me up, I embarked on a journey of redefining the process of healing from trauma. I wanted to know that everything I had been doing, everything my clients had been doing, was not in vain. 

And the thing is, that’s exactly what I found. 

I found that healing was not a fixed end point but that instead, it was an ongoing process that could happen in any small or large moment. Healing could be different choices, ways of responding, or coping. Healing could be noticing what was happening inside of us, it could be catching our automatic thoughts or it could be living from the knowledge of our inherent goodness. 

I do believe that healing is a life long process. And while that may feel heavy and daunting, I would submit that a life long process of healing may actually give much more space for lightness and ease than healing as a fixed point. See, when healing is a fixed point, nothing matters unless you get to that finish line. Even if you never reach it, you must keep working toward it. And if you do reach it and then something happens that throws you off or would indicate you’ve back tracked from that, you’re back at square one. 

Healing as an ongoing process means everything counts. It’s not to say that you can’t have overarching goals, desire symptom reduction or alleviation…it’s just that those aren’t the only things that count. Every moment can count. It means that we don’t wait until the finish line to start living as a healed person, we live as a healing person every day. It means that just because the end goal hasn’t been reached, you are not doing something wrong, needing to work harder, or even assuming the worst and living with shame because that one thing hasn’t yet been achieved. I believe it means that you can live more freely because…you’re actually living.