What is healing? How do you define a healed state from an unhealed state? Of course, you can see it, you can feel it— it’s rather easy to pick a “healed” person from an “unhealed” person in a crowd, if you will. Not literally, but in conversation, in their interactions with others, it’s quite easy to identify with even a little bit of a perceptive eye. 

So, then, what is it? How do you define it? What is the “healed” state versus the “unhealed” state? What is the pursuit of the ideal that drives the therapeutic process for some? I have my criticisms of the current zeitgeist surrounding the mental health field, particularly in how it is represented in the media, as well as my praises of it. 

There’s always, always a balance to be struck and found. There are some ways in which an excessive focus on “boundaries,” self-love, and self-care become antithetical to the growth of the individual. I view the formation of the actualized self as involving a necessary degree of a variety of ingredients. There is a cookbook to the production of the “best self”, or the self-actualized, self-realized human. 

I do believe that one of those ingredients is discomfort. A therapeutic process that does not involve facing one’s fears and embracing discomfort where appropriate and within balanced doses is not a therapeutic process at all to me. It is my observation that a regressive attachment to what is comfortable can be veiled under seemingly-enlightened language such as “boundaries,” “self-love,” and “self-care.” How do we remedy this? And, additionally, what am I to do as an aspiring therapist who truly wants to help and aid people in their process of growth? I fear that I will have clients and patients who merely want a sounding board, and to have their ego coddled and stroked, without ever actually taking an honest look at themselves and doing the work. That is what I want: clients who are willing and eager to do the work. 

Now, do not get me wrong: I am not advocating for a cold, strict, critical, disciplinarian approach, nor am I saying that the aforementioned — boundary setting, self-love, and self-care, to name just a few — is of no value. I am, however, advocating for balance, and a closer examination of what those things really mean. 

Is self-love about an attachment to comfort?

Part of me believes in an innate trinity to our being. Symbolically, we can consider ourselves to be our own father, our own mother, and the child, all at once. Now, imagine the ideal approach to parenting along the permissive-authoritative axis. Balance is appropriate, is it not? I suppose the point that I am trying to make here is that I sometimes see the modern therapeutic process as being overly permissive — soft, coddling, and without a sufficient degree of encouraging growth. 

We must strike a healthy balance between being our own father — appropriately critical in the spirit of demanding that you use your strength, for no, you are not a helpless victim — and our own mother — giving nurturing warmth, security, and nurturing, filling your cup that you have sufficient fuel to be your strongest self. 

If I were to speculate, I might say that, due to therapy as a whole being a business, therapists are naturally going to want their approach to keep patients coming back to ensure a steady income. Could there be therapists who consciously or unconsciously stroke their patients’ egos, focused on making them feel good about themselves, simply to ensure their return? I do not know — this is mere conjecture. 

I do think that therapy is work and it should encourage work. It’s like hiring a personal trainer — you don’t hire a personal trainer who is going to tell you how great your body looks and make you feel like a king or a queen. You hire a personal trainer to show you what work to do to get where you want to be. I believe that an honest examination of oneself can, most of the time, be rather painful and raw — and what is therapy but an honest examination of oneself?

I am sure that this entire piece of writing has been loose, tangential, and perhaps not as cohesive as it could be. I suppose that all I am advocating for, as always, is an alchemical marriage of opposites. I am pointing out that there are some things I see on social media that pertain to the therapeutic healing process that leave a bad taste in my mouth. 

Here is what I believe: the process towards wholeness and true healing is about integration of the shadow. How do you define the shadow? Whenever you shine a light on something, and make one thing your focus, something behind it is inevitably left in the dark. This is to comment on the fact that people strong in one personality trait will often have an “equal and opposite” personality trait left in the shadows, unintegrated. I believe that the healing process often necessarily involves us finding what is there in our shadow for us to integrate.

I believe that there are people who are too hard on themselves and refuse love. For them, the therapeutic process will involve softening, and allowing themselves to receive love. Tears are almost always, as a rule, shed in this process. 

I believe that there are people who inadequately own their own power, independence, and self-sufficiency, and need to find greater strength. For them, the therapeutic process might be about hardening. Not via coldness, but almost like how a muscle that is exercised becomes harder — the hardness is reflective of potency, not reflective of a refusal of love. These people may need a critical voice to remind them that they have the keys to better their own lives in their hand, and they are only self-sabotaging by perceiving themselves as victims. 

I guess, to go full circle, one of the infinite ways in which I’d differentiate the “healed” state from the “unhealed” state is “integrated” versus “unintegrated.” Healing involves wholeness, while being unhealed involves inner incompletion. The unhealed, thus, are more likely to enter codependent relationships, for they cling to another to fulfill the unintegrated half of their psyche, rather than embracing it themselves.

I do believe that the most potent forms of love, and perhaps one of the many forms of “true love” that exists — possible in any kind of relationship, romantic, platonic, familial, et cetera — involve finding someone who embodies the unintegrated parts of ourselves that we have refused to accept. They will often embody for us something that exists quite literally inside of ourselves that we have built walls around, perhaps condemning it on a moral basis, perhaps fearing what it could bring, et cetera. However, until we integrate the unintegrated, it will continue to present itself in the external world, and we will continue to run away from it; but guess what? No matter how far you run, your shadow stays right behind you. 

Carl Gustav Jung — “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”