As I see it, at the heart of all healing and therapeutic endeavors is a longing for relationship. Those who seek healing want--perhaps not in so many words--to recover a safe, loving connection of some sort. That connection could be personal, spiritual, relational, familial, societal, emotional, etc. There comes a realization of a rupture that tore us away from some part of our human birthright: from our own being, from belonging, from healthy becoming, and now we want to heal that rupture, to re-connect with the part of us that went missing. We want to be whole.
Things can get disconnected and go missing in many ways:
Grief and loss are experiences of disconnection.
Childhood neglect creates inner doubt, self-sabotage, and shrinking.
Chronic pain registers a lack of safety and belonging in one’s own body that causes dissociation.
Abuse severs relational health and replaces it with disease or numbness.
Trauma rewires the brain and body toward hypervigilance.
Commercialism equates value to money, status, and performance, divorcing from our own humanity.
Religion often perpetuates self-pathologizing systems that teach us to mistrust ourselves and others, shredding relational trust.
Toxic workplaces crush internal motivation, initiative, and collegiality.
Poverty requires all energies to be focused on survival, amputating the creative and nurturing energies of individuals, families, and whole communities.
And the list goes on and on.
Fragmentation.
Disconnection everywhere.
We avoid feeling the pain of what we have suffered and lost using a whole arsenal of defensive armor.
Busyness, pills, success, exhaustion, substance use and abuse, addiction, codependent relationships, depression, anxiety, work, and entertainment.
Different people hone different defenses, both consciously or subconsciously.
But in the end, the pain and emptiness catch up to most of us.
We get to an awful breaking point, and we know:
something has to change.
“I can’t keep living like this,” we say.
It becomes time to find our way back into reconnection,
time to come home.
Finding our way home,
finding a way out of the disconnection
and back into Life.
This is the heart of healing work.
It’s coming back to life,
re-connecting,
being in safe, healthy loving relationships with ourselves, with those we love, with the divine, and with the planet we call "home."
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