Entry #1: What is Wounded Healing?

Welcome to the Wounded Healing blog. For our inaugural post, we’re going to talk about the origin and history of wounded healing.

I must say that the title of this blog holds deep significance for me. My undergraduate degree is in Latin, so I spent a lot of time studying ancient mythology, where the notion of the wounded healer was first recorded. And my later degrees are in psychology, where the idea of wounded healer was welcomed and really developed. So I love the fact that in one way or another, I’ve been studying wounded healing for a very long time.

Let’s start with the history. The concept of the wounded healer goes back millennia, and first appears in recorded history in ancient Greek mythology. Chiron was a centaur (part human, part horse) who was widely known as a great healer and teacher. He had as students many of the great heroes of Greek mythology, including Jason, Achilles, Hercules, and Esculapius, known as the father of modern medicine. Though he was immortal, Chiron was hurt accidently by one of Hercules’ poisoned arrows, and suffered an incurable wound in his leg. No matter what he tried to do, he was unable to heal his own wound. But for some time, he roamed the country and continued to heal others with great skill. Eventually he decided to give up his immortality because of his insufferable pain. Zeus allowed him to transfer his immortality to Prometheus, and made Chiron into a star in the constellation Sagittarius. The story is told to emphasize the irony that one of the world’s greatest healers couldn’t heal himself. He was doomed to be a wounded healer, and the experience was so painful that he decided to die.

This theme has echoed throughout medicine and many healing traditions. The idea that healers are wounded themselves, and practice medicine or giving help as a displaced attempt to heal themselves, is highlighted in many cultures, from African shamanism to the story of Christ to the origin stories of many modern superheroes. In 1951, Carl Jung, an early psychiatrist, coined the term “wounded healer” and pondered that it was perhaps the counselor’s suffering in life that was their greatest teacher in working with wounded clients. He believed that the therapist must be in close contact with their own inner wounds in order to access the ability to care for the inner wounds of others.

I first learned of this archetype in graduate school, in my last year of classes. The professor for my last clinical placement brought in a reading from Michael J. Mahoney’s Constructive Psychotherapy: Theory and Practice. It was the final chapter of the book, where Dr. Mahoney reflected on his own journey to becoming a psychologist, and what it meant to be human and a therapist. In it, he recounted his unlikely career path and described his experiences as a wounded healer. I read every word with eyes wide; I had never heard someone in psychology talk so vulnerably about their own self-doubt and the fragility of the psychologist’s soul. I felt much of my own journey and being was reflected in his writing. But what most impacted me was his comfort with his identity as a wounded healer, that in fact, he found power in this. I had struggled for years in graduate school wondering if I was too wounded to become a psychologist. Here, in one chapter, I was given permission to be wounded, nay, to be celebrated for it. I still had a long way to go, but this was a key turning point for me.

Over the course of my career, I have met thousands of wounded healers. The term wounded healer can apply to a lot of professions. Certainly countless mental health professionals – psychologists, psychiatrists, marriage and family therapists, social workers, alcohol and drug counselors – find themselves under this archetype. Wounded healers can also be found in all types of health care providers – doctors and nurses, surgeons, dentists, pharmacists, hospice workers, physical therapists, speech therapists, EMTs and paramedics, and on and on. Leaders and guides of most religious faiths meet this archetype – priests, parsons, rabbis, reverends, imams, chaplains, clergy, elders, ministers, even the Dalai Lama. At times parents perform under this archetype, in how their children look to them to be models of stability and health. The more I look, the more I see wounded healers EVERYWHERE.

My own history is deeply connected to being a wounded healer. I came to the profession of psychology with deep wounds – severe mental health issues and addictions to food and pills – and was trained and supported to address them, for sure, but also to suppress and separate them from my role as healer.

This is the unfortunate side to being encapsulated in this archetype – wounded healer professionals are expected to hide the wounded side of themselves as they perform the healing role. I have learned that this creates a lot of distress in the professional. The intention of this blog is to explore this tension, to talk about it, and to discuss ways we can deal with it.  You may notice that I change the term in the title of this blog to Wounded Healing. I call this blog Wounded Healing to note the active state of healing that I want myself and wounded healer professionals to focus on. The gerund Healing reflects that this is a present and continuous “doing,” not a “being” like the term healer embodies. I believe to be true wounded healers we actively battle our wounds as we heal and help others heal. And I wanted to also highlight that the two parts – wounded and healing – are intricately interwoven, and fundamentally can’t be separated. Finally, I want to show that it’s the active process of engaging in our own healing that gives us the greatest abilities to help others, and that really, we wounded healers should be talking about this stuff.

In the next blog post, we will be talking more about that tension – what it is like for a helping professional to feel like they have to suppress the wounded part of themselves. Until then, I hope you can begin to embrace your wounded and healing states.

Jorja

*This blog post contains excerpts from Wounded Healing: The Art and Soul of Surthriving