What Does it Mean to Heal?
I’m writing this coming off of one of the most personally meaningful emotional/spiritual healing coaching sessions of my life. Obviously, I can’t share any details—those belong to the person who is still in the healing process. But I can write about what I’ve learned (and am still very much learning) about healing by witnessing it up close.
The first thing is that I know what healing is not. It is not fixing, solving, or striving to improve. There is a way of thinking and acting that is goal-oriented, aiming toward creating a specific outcome. And there is nothing wrong with this. It is part of the creative act, building some-thing where there was no-thing. It is also closely related to healing in that this aim of fixing/solving/improving arises from a sense that we and/or the world just aren’t right.
This sort of thinking and acting can bring us to a space where healing might happen, but it can never actually heal. The reason for this is that healing is not something that our fixing/solving/improving parts can do. It is simply not within their power. God bless them, they can bring us to the healing waters, but they can’t make us drink it, and they sure as hell didn’t create those healing waters.
What I’ve noticed in real emotional/spiritual healing is that space opens for a deeper life source to flow through us. Some thing or things were blocking that flow, and through the right combination of action and total surrender, those things move aside and the life force flows, restoring healing to the system.
Those blocking “things” are actually parts of us—parts who (from the perspective of Internal Family Systems) have an important job in our inner system, their own history, and their own strategies for how best to help us. Healing involves coming into loving relationship with these parts, building trust, and helping them to ease back so that more life force flows.
This is a frustrating process for most of us who have been trained in the striving, goal-oriented culture of the modern West. I have many clients with advanced degrees and important positions in the corporate world who treat our IFS sessions as projects to perfect. They’ll get confused at the flowing, present-centered nature of IFS insight practice and say: “I’m not sure what you want me to say!”
I’ll respond: “I don’t want you to say anything. Just notice what’s happening in your body right now.”
What I’m listening for are the big protective and wounded parts in the way of that deep source, that True Self, life force inside. And we can’t approach these parts with an agenda to fix or solve them PRECISELY BECAUSE THAT AGENDA IS COMING FROM ANOTHER PART!
It’s a seeming paradox that the only way to heal is to let go of the agenda to heal. This helps us unhook from the parts holding that agenda, and thus allows the real True Self, the deep life force inside, to emerge.
Our parts with their agendas bring us to this holy river of True Self healing, but their abilities end there. Once at the water’s edge, we just let go and fall in.