The social significance of healing

I have written rather a lot about healthcare lately, within the context of healing versus curing. Let’s assume that healthcare professionals recognize their fundamental role in the relief of suffering. However I believe there seems to be less understanding of the social significance of this true, holistic healing. Carl Jung and Scott Peck, Carl Rogers and Aldous Huxley, have all written in their times of the social impact of wounded behavior and the significance of individual healing within this context.
I think I have mentioned the work of psychiatric and mental health nurse Conti O’Hare before but make no apology for this. She has a vision for the importance of nursing in the healing of society in the twenty first century. Writing about the nursing profession in the USA she urges nurses to understand the wounded healer concept in their profession, stressing how important it is for them to heal themselves properly before they can generate true healing in their patients and in their profession. Conti-O’Hare reflects on the ills of the world, such as terrorism, addiction and violence on our streets, that she recognizes as symptomatic of our inner woundedness. Nurses, she says, have the potential not only to heal their own profession but to foster healing in the world. ‘We can only wonder,’ she says, ‘if people with serious emotional disorders will seek healing solutions or continue to inflict woundedness on others by their antisocial and unacceptable behavior…What a glorious expectation for nurses to be armed with the knowledge that they are wounded healers who have participated in transforming their own health and that of others.’
O’Hare has developed what she calls the Q.U.E.S.T. Model for Self-Transcendence to help nurses and other health professionals to heal themselves and their professions, as an aid for them to transform and transcend wounds to become true Wounded Healers. This transformation (from walking wounded to wounded healer), she believes, ‘will have a positive impact on the health care system, society and the nursing profession as a whole.’
While O’Hare merely hints in her book at the profound responsibilities of the nursing profession as Wounded Healers to the world, there are others who are more positive in their vision. J. J. Means, a pastoral counselor at the Des Moines Pastoral Counseling Center, Iowa USA, is more certain of his wider healing role in society. The medical and caring professions are in privileged and indeed socially responsible positions to reach those psychological and spiritual roots of social strategy, within the domain of the nation’s healthcare and soul care. And while the ills of the world at first sight may seem to be far removed from the day-to-day practice of medicine, in fact I agree strongly with these pioneers that here are issues that are inextricably linked. I think these professions have a profound responsibility to recognize their role as healers to the world. As is so often the case, North America seems to be taking the lead in this, for other countries no doubt to follow in due course.

References:
Conti-O’Hare, Marion, The Nurse as Wounded Healer: from Trauma to Transcendence, Sudbury, Massachusetts: Jones and Bartlett Publishers. London: Jones and Bartlett Publishers International, 2002, p. 141, 144.

Means, J. J. ‘Wounded Healer/Mighty Prophet,’ The Journal of Pastoral Care and Counseling, Spring 2002, Vol. 56, No. 1.
Means, J. J., ‘Pastoral Counseling: An Alternative Path in Mental Health,’ The Journal of Pastoral Care Fall 1997 vol. 51 No. 3.

© Eleanor Stoneham 2011

The Nurse as Wounded Healer - Empathy in healthcare

We have a popular saying in the UK. If something happens in the United States, be sure it will soon come over to us in the UK! We often say this of snow storms and gales, (usually accurately), but this adage also applies to many other cultural ideas and issues. There today, here tomorrow.
Therefore I was absolutely fascinated to hear on our BBC Radio 4 Today programme on Monday that Huddersfield University has created a Compassion in Care doctoral scholarship research post. The first to take up this post is Barbara Schofield, a consultant nurse for older people in the Calderdale and Huddersfield National Health Service Trust.  She will study dignity and compassion in care and whether it can be taught to student nurses.
When I was researching and writing about the need for compassion and empathy in health care, I was impressed by the green shoots of a more holistic medicine visible in the US, that could be held up as an example for the UK, where acceptance of compassion and empathy training in the healing process seems rare, and mostly confined to pediatric and cancer care. Such a holistic approach had been advocated for example by Eric Cassell, who has written much about the need for healing as well as curing, and Larry Dossey, Norman Shealy and Dawson Church, to name a few, who recognize the need for a more holistic style of soul medicine to complement the traditional and more technologically driven current health care. But there is still a long way to go here, even in the United States.
Recently the UK's health Ombudsman has written a damning report, that the UK National Health Service was failing to respond to the needs of older people, and citing some disturbing instances of neglect of the elderly. Schofield clearly has plenty to get her teeth into, and I would recommend first that she reads Marion Conti- O'Hare's excellent book on The Nurse as Wounded Healer; from Trauma to Transcendence, and looks at her Q.U.E.S.T model for transcending trauma. But I also find O'Hare work interesting for her recognition, albeit in a fairly low key way in the book, that the work of the Wounded Healer in holistically healing our patients has a wider social significance in healing the social ills of our world. 
I think Barbara Schofield has a fascinating few years of research ahead of her.

The Wounded Healer - again

However we define and categorize our wounds, we now know that who we are and how we behave as adults is not only a combination of our inherited gene and possibly also our meme makeup. We are also affected by subsequent influences in our upbringing and our experiences as we develop through childhood and beyond. This is what is meant when we talk about ‘nature versus nurture’.  So as well as our inherited physical characteristics, we pick up mental wounds from the collective experiences of our ancestors. The unhealed wounds of mankind inflicted through millennia of evolution by strife and violence and disaster mean that hundreds of millions of people are psychologically, emotionally and physically scarred and wounded and in need of healing. It has even been suggested by some psychologists that ‘human culture as a whole has been saturated by unhealed wounding, which, if unchecked, will continue on a downward spiral toward inevitable disintegration.’* This is not a good thought. 

Books abound, both popular and academic, on the psychological study of why we behave as we do. But I think the bottom line is that we must understand how our wounds manifest themselves in many different and undesirable personality traits. We see greed and envy, craving for love and attention, consumerism, lust for power, superiority, violence, overspending, addictions to work and substances, depression, cynicism, despair. All these come from our unhealed wounds. What we need to cultivate instead is a compassionate trend, always sensitive to the pain of others. We are wired for empathy - we just shut it out a lot of the time! We need an instinctive urge to support the weak and the vulnerable. And we must combat violence, both against each other and against the planet. Violence is probably threatening our very future more than anything else. And the most obvious violence that we inflict upon this fragile planet is consumerism. That I have written of before, and will do again!

I have just found another good blog commenting on the Wounded Healer.
There the point is made that we can all be Wounded Healers. I cannot wholly agree.

Yes we certainly, most of us, have the capacity to become Wounded Healers, but along with many others, I believe that there are stages of healing along the path to the ultimate Wounded Healer when we can do more harm than good. See for example Conti-O’Hare’s excellent book The Nurse as Wounded Healer where she writes of the “Walking Wounded”, and also http://www.intuitive-connections.net/2004/book-beethoven.htm where Clayton Montez reviews Pearsall’s The Beethoven Factor, and writes on the Thriving Response. And there are other stages. The author of the said blog, writing clearly from a medical healing perspective, confesses to a lack of empathy by the bedside. Yes that is certainly true. There is much that needs to be done to reintroduce empathy and soul back to the sick bed, and I have written at some length on this myself elsewhere, re our health services, following in the footsteps of Larry Dossey, Dawson Church, et al. But I also believe that this archetype of the Wounded Healer has enormous social healing significance beyond the caring professions, for healing the world’s greater woes. I will come back to that in later posts.

*see Judith Thompson and James O'Dea "Social Healing for a Fractured World."

The Wounded Healer

There is quite a bit of misunderstanding around as to the real nature of a Wounded Healer, and indeed many are not familiar with the term at all. I have been interested for a while in the whole concept, and in the social significance of the healing process to this world of ours that seems to be in such a mess.
I am prompted to publish this short article by a comment I saw recently on another blog: “We often hear about wounded healers in the healing arena. These wounded healers can sometimes offer a bad reputation to the healing community because they are trying to heal their wounds through their clients.”*
Of course someone who is using their clients to heal their own wounds is surely not a wounded healer at all and it is unfortunate that such people give the real “Wounded Healer” a bad name. Analytical psychologists are required to undergo personal analysis in order that they may understand their own wounds and the compensations they make for them in their own behavior. This ensures that those wounds do not interfere in the therapeutic process with their clients.
Professor of Psychology Charles Carver has identified several stages along the road to the true Wounded Healer.
Firstly, if we fail to recognize wounds in ourselves there is a danger that we allow them to crush us. We turn them in upon ourselves, and then we harbor thoughts of anger, resentment, envy, lust, greed, and all the worst character traits of mankind. They cause us to be unhappy or discontent. This impacts on our relationships with other people, in everything we do, in our work, in our creativity. Without intentionally setting out to do harm, we allow those wounds to hurt those around us, as Simone Weil explained: “A hurtful act is the transference to others of the degradation which we bear in ourselves.”
Then there is the “survivor” response, seen in the desensitization we can experience if we are continually bombarded with the wounding images of horror, either real or in the relentless gratuitous violence of screen or computer game. This is so relevant in the context of our responsible and healing use of creativity.
There are other stages of healing that we may recognize in us or in others. For example there are the “martyrs” and the “thrivers.” We all know the “martyr;” he could also be called the moaner or whinger and hardly needs further explanation.
The thriving response to our wounds is complex and the subject of much research. In simple terms the “thriver” may be defined as the “person who experiences the traumatic or stressful event and benefits or gains in some way from the experience and can apply that gain to new experiences, leading to more effective subsequent functioning.” An example would be Beethoven who overcame his deafness to find joy in his music making. But this response type may not always be what it seems. I believe it may sometimes be similar to what I think of as the “self-help response.”
Next is the “inspirational” phase. Here we use an understanding of our own wounds to work for the benefit of others with the same afflictions. Superman Christopher Reeve was a fine example – he fought paralysis after a stunt accident whilst filming and fought for more research to help others suffering from the same disablement. Such people campaign, they set up charities, they march for a cause, they fund-raise. This is praiseworthy but it does not make a Wounded Healer.
Mental health nursing expert Marion Conti-O’Hare describes one more stage along the road to Wounded Healer. These are the people, she explains, who have experienced trauma and are using it to help others but without understanding how they themselves are affected. O’Hare describes Diana Princess of Wales as an example of what she calls the “walking wounded.” Diana died tragically before she could transcend much of her suffering. She did however devote much of her later years to causes such as the victims of HIV infection and AIDS, almost certainly reflecting her own advanced stage along the road to Wounded Healer.
The person who has taken his wounds into his soul, fully comprehended them, and has transformed and transcended them achieves the ultimate healing goal. From those transcended wounds we have the insight to fully understand and care about the sufferings and wounds of others. We can be with them in true empathy and compassion. Compassion literally means; “to suffer with” and means much the same in this context as empathy. We identify with you in your suffering. We can bare our own souls and walk in your shoes to share your suffering; that is true empathy. And that is the Wounded Healer.

It seems appropriate to be writing this now, as we enter the Christian season of Advent and await the birth of Jesus Christ, as he is of course the greatest Wounded Healer of all time.

Of course this subject is vast and I have only scratched the surface here – do let me know of any experiences you have of the Wounded Healer in your own lives.

*See http://serenitynowwellness.wordpress.com/2010/11/30/the-sweetness-of-doing-nothing/#comment-6

** see http://www.intuitive-connections.net/2004/book-beethoven.htm