Dissolving the illusion of healing

This is for everyone who one day woke up and decided to heal but it hasn’t been what you hoped for. It’s for all the clients I’ve worked with that don’t give themselves the credit they deserve for going forward because forward has no pace. And it’s for me because that’s who needed it today.

When I sit down with clients in the first three to four-week follow up to do an assessment of how they’re responding to starting treatment, I often get the same report – “I feel the same.” And yet as they start to share details of the past few weeks of life, I notice I’m disagreeing with their assessment in the fine lines of their story that seem inconsequential to them. I’m not sure where we’ve gotten the idea that there’s a standard for healing. I’m quick to blame media but it’s true too that we’re often our own harshest critic and it could be the voice inside telling us that we’re not doing it fast enough, never will and are doomed to an eternity of suffering.

Healing is a number of incremental shifts and mundane moments that you might not even notice and won’t mean a thing to the person next to you who does what you just did 20 times a day without thought. One day you’ll get up from the restaurant table and walk to the restroom without sweat dripping from your armpits and you’ll pee and wash your hands and walk back to the table to join your family. And the thing you remember from that night is that the salmon was a little bland and not that the woman sitting at the next table was silently judging the way you struggled too long to decide which door was which based on the abstract stick figures of the man and woman.  One day you’ll wear the musty shirt that you let sit in the washer too long to the meeting because you got lost in a good book and ignored the timer and you’re not letting anyone down for it. Your eyes will meet the grocery store cashier’s as you’re mid-conversation about the new kombucha flavor and you’ll know she sees the mascara smudged on your face because you cried that morning but it didn’t consume you in a mass under the covers for the rest of the day.

It's going to be the bland salmon and the musty shirt and the smudged mascara that fill you again with hope. The mundane moments that serve as pegs holding up the lifeless line graph of meltdowns, panic attacks and sick days. Moments that weren’t there before that made you feel like you were either flying or falling and going nowhere at all.

And the problem is that if you’re searching for the day that you’re dancing dust-covered at Burning Man in a wave of collective ecstasy to mark the pinnacle moment of healing, you’re going to miss it. All of it.

Healing isn’t being healed but the evolution towards it. It’s not the promotion, the engagement, the house or the finish line. Healing is being able to partake in the miracle of waking up in the morning. It’s being present to the boredom and the less-than-expected and the absolutely awful. Life is gut-wrenching and messy and just okay at times. You’re still healing on the days this reality breaks you and brings you to your knees. Maybe, you’re even doing better because you let it swallow you and actually showed up to meet yourself in a puddle on the bathroom floor.

There’s no instantaneous moment of profundity where we stop aching, escaping and overthinking our way through life. You’ll bail on the coffee date and reach for your phone at midnight a hundred more times before once, you don’t. You’ll meditate every day for 29 days and on day 30 you’ll plan your grocery list out in your head. And as you continue to fumble and fall and fail, you’ll be right where you need to be. We get to do this exact life in this exact body only once. More than ten years after that day I woke up and decided to heal, I’ve only just now learned that I never had anywhere to get at all. I just had to find a way, amidst the madness, to be right here.

With love,

Dr. Kayla Amin

https://mcimh.com