what is healing?
This is something I often ask myself.
I have a 15 month old toddler. He's amazing in so many ways and such a teacher. He doesn't hold back. He doesn't wait to ask a question, like others might, nor does he politely endure some food he doesn't want. He spits out that food and maybe chucks it on the floor, he gets right in my face and shouts until he has my attention. These are baby's ways and that's fine. But to me as a fully trained up human, some of these developmental traits can feel 'too much.' When a person (no matter how tiny) is in your face, shouting for attention, tugging at your trousers are you peel potatoes, it is kind of irksome - it shows a lack of decorum, and displays the unrefined nature of the human animal - something we then train out of the baby so they can become 'real' people. This is a big responsibility, when I think about it.
It is important to see ourselves as animals; we have bodies with strong physical feelings, especially when we are young. We all have all vied for the reassuring feel of parental attention. Because when we are tiny we 'feel' everything. No words for hunger so it's "aaaaahhhh!" instead. No words for "I'm in pain" so again it's "aaaaaahhhh!" Tiny people feel and attempt to draw parental attention to feelings they don't understand. They are not used to being in the world and they need a lot of reassurance that everything is ok. That is a massive part of the parent's role. All of this is done without conversation and relying on emotional intelligence, or intuition - things that are equally not concrete or solid, like language is to older kids. We have all been through this. All of us, in different ways.
If I ignore my little boy tugging at my trousers I am sending him a message - I am feeling stress and don't wish to pull away from the important work I'm doing of trying to feed everyone. It's a difficult one to resolve, anyway! He feels unsafe and starts to cry, because he's not getting the emotional reassurance he needs. He is also tuned into my stress and feels that. Little ones are so open to our moods. They feel it all and they feel it as reality, in the moment. They don't think "what's his problem?" or "jeez, he's a bit upset today, I'd better give him a wide berth." They are tuned into our emotions and feel those emotions as instability.
As an example, when I was 15 months old, my sister Aoife was born with severe cerebral palsy. It hit my parents heavily and much of their energy went into making sure she survived her first year, and then following years, with a somewhat fragmented family and no guidebook for the situation. This, of course had a knock on effect. I wanted attention, I had stressed parents. As an adult it makes complete sense. To a 15 month old, it was likely a difficult time. There was no understanding of why things had suddenly changed. I imagine how it would be if that happened in our lives now - I don't know how we would cope, nor how our 15 month old would cope. My parents, of course, did everything they could for us, it couldn't have been any other way. However, as I grew up I was angry at them and I blamed them for stuff that wasn't their fault, things I didn't understand, couldn't see the whole story of. In other words, those feeling from being a little toddler stayed with me and on some level I was acting out from those feelings of being tiny and not understanding, like a little angry boy tugging at the trouser leg. Decades of confusion followed - I never quite worked it out and so I kept those feelings of loss and inattention, the feelings of a toddler.
I use this example because I see it's important to be aware of where we come from, of our formative years. I see that we need to heal. We can carry 'wounds' with us throughout our lives because of what we experienced as very young children. These wounds can pull our strings, emotionally, colouring our attitude towards how we trust, how we experience rejection, how we experience our every day lives. This has certainly been the case for me. I have chosen to heal childhood wounds, to follow my 'stuff' back to where I feel it originates, bringing awareness and self-compassion to my stories, changing those stories and seeing that they are just part of the bigger picture, of circumstances neither I nor anyone else could control. In our lives we hold on, we feel fear and we hold on. We hope that others will save us, we might even spend our whole lives not trusting, living from our traumatised selves.
In our society we don't appear to hold healing as important. We want to push forward all the time, as if we're wanting to get away from something. We even seem to celebrate people acting out from their traumatised parts, wearing their unhealed, aggressive, defensive, unloving and unloved parts as badges of honour: Trump, Putin, Johnson. And you could say "well, I dislike all those people!" but, in truth there are millions and millions of people in the world who think these people are doing/have done great work! We have a responsibility to heal, both for ourselves and for the world around us - yes, even for the likes of Trump and Putin - to get to a point of acceptance of our hurts and move on, to ground ourselves in the natural world and in our every day experience - to just feel our feelings and listen to what's happening within us. We all started off as babies, with parents who were busy, or absent, or who were there but not quite in the way we needed and these complex feelings and attitudes still live within us.
Open up to your experience of who you are and how you feel - that's the invitation to heal - to feel. Let yourself feel. I share these thoughts and ideas because I see suffering in the world, suffering that can be helped and healed.
If you enjoyed this piece, please get in touch, drop me a line - I'm always up for being in contact with people. I have tried and continue to try many different ways that work to keep me balanced and aware - also always being aware that I am a human animal, with needs and feelings, with scars and still wounds to heal. I only wish to open up more deeply to my experience, in order to connect more deeply with others.
Peace