healing

Symptoms of illness and distress, plus your feelings about them, can be viewed as messengers coming to tell you something important about your body or about your mind. In the old days, if a king didn't like the message he was given, he would sometimes have the messenger killed. This is tantamount to suppressing your symptoms or your feelings because they are unwanted. Killing the messenger and denying the message or raging against it are not intelligent ways of approaching healing. The one thing we don't want to do is to ignore or rupture the essential connections that can complete relevant feedback loops and restore self-regulation and balance. Our real challenge when we have symptoms is to see if we can listen to their message and really hear them and take them to heart, that is, make the connection fully.

If we keep our heads down, either out of defeat or loss or shame or tiredness... whatever the reason, we are going to miss the beautiful sun (and Son) that is right there in front of us, shining its warmth on our faces and our souls!

Underlying the attack on psychotherapy, I believe, is a recognition of the potential power of any relationship of witnessing. The consulting room is a privileged space dedicated to memory. Within that space, survivors gain the freedom to know and tell their stories. Even the most private and confidential disclosure of past abuses increases the likelihood of eventual public disclosure. And public disclosure is something that perpetrators are determined to prevent. As in the case of more overtly political crimes, perpetrators will fight tenaciously to ensure that their abuses remain unseen, unacknowledged, and consigned to oblivion.The dialectic of trauma is playing itself out once again. It is worth remembering that this is not the first time in history that those who have listened closely to trauma survivors have been subject to challenge. Nor will it be the last. In the past few years, many clinicians have had to learn to deal with the same tactics of harassment and intimidation that grassroots advocates for women, children and other oppressed groups have long endured. We, the bystanders, have had to look within ourselves to find some small portion of the courage that victims of violence must muster every day.Some attacks have been downright silly; many have been quite ugly. Though frightening, these attacks are an implicit tribute to the power of the healing relationship. They remind us that creating a protected space where survivors can speak their truth is an act of liberation. They remind us that bearing witness, even within the confines of that sanctuary, is an act of solidarity. They remind us also that moral neutrality in the conflict between victim and perpetrator is not an option. Like all other bystanders, therapists are sometimes forced to take sides. Those who stand with the victim will inevitably have to face the perpetrator's unmasked fury. For many of us, there can be no greater honor. p.246 - 247Judith Lewis Herman, M.D. February, 1997

Healing is the gateway to peace and peace is the path to passion and purpose.

There is a fine line between paranoia and sensibly caring for our already overburdened bodies.

Deep within the human constitution lie written laws of nature that should guide man in the conduct of his life.

You have a great body. It is an intricate piece of technology and a sophisticated super-computer. It runs on peanuts and even regenerates itself. Your relationship with your body is one of the most important relationships you__l ever have. And since repairs are expensive and spare parts are hard to come by, it pays to make that relationship good.

I was being cured of soldiering on endlessly: my job was now to be still, which had become almost easy at last.

Survivors often develop an exaggerated need for control in their adult relationships. It__ the only way they feel safe. They also struggle with commitment__aying yes in a relationship means being trapped in yet another family situation where abuse might take place. So the survivor panics as her relationship gets closer, certain that something terrible is going to happen. She pulls away, rejects, or tests her partner all the time.

We become side-tracked if we make physical health our aim and imagine that because we are children of God we shall always be perfectly well.

Life comes and goes. _If you know that, you know it all.

Bit by bit, Dr. Driscoll helped me to peel away the layers of protection I had built up over the years. The process was not that unlike the peeling of an onion, which also makes us cry. It has been a painful journey, and I don't now when it will end, when I can say, __K, it's over._ Maybe never. Maybe sooner than I know. I recently told Dr. Driscoll that I feel the beginnings of feeling OK, that this is the right path.

So long as the processes of healing were not understood and man thought that the power to heal resided in substances and things outside of him, he logically sought for extrinsic means of healing, and a healing art was a logical development. The system of medicine, as we know it today, was a logical development out of the fallacy that healing power resides in extrinsic sources.

Things get worse before they get better, but this is a worse that feels too big.

Wash, wash, wash. Tone, tone, tone. Strip the oil, then add an oil-free moisturizer to replace the oil. This is how we've been taught to care for our skin. It seems a little crazy when you see it in print, right? Take all that oil out and add chemicals to replace it. Nuts!

I may distance myself from God from time to time, wandering off in the ignorance of my self-absorbed preoccupations and attitudesBut God is never far off. Never distant. Never remote.He is close enough to hear the raw, unbridled "fuck" in my silent prayer of anguish.Close enough to feel the groaning angst and tension in my gut that oft threatens to rend me to pieces. Close enough to hear my heart slam itself in abandon against the walls of this temple of skin in holy desperation; clutching at the veil that dulls and distorts my vision. Close enough to catch me as I stumble in my blind and weary state yet again and again and again.Yes, He is close. She is never far off. God is my faithful friend and traveling companion, though I see Him not yet with these orbs of flesh.

Two Immeasurable Things: The healing power of love and the destructive power of hate.

The part that needs healing is our personal life. Personal life has nothing to do with work. Besides, what better way of healing than to find our center of self-sovereignty? Isn't that the whole point of healing?