Henri Nouwen Wounded Healer

I enjoy reading Sojourners, it's stated mission: "to inspire hope and action by articulating the biblical call to racial and social justice, life and peace, and environmental stewardship."
Even though I live in the UK I find much of the magazine just as relevant here as it is across the Atlantic.
Each month editor-in-chief Jim Wallis writes a feature under the heading "Hearts and Minds." Real change in the world requires changes in our hearts and minds, something I have written about quite a bit over the years here and in my books. I therefore particularly appreciated Jim's article in the January 2016 edition which I have just received: Lessons from a Wounded Healer. And the Wounded Healer is of course the late Henri Nouwen, that great Catholic spiritual writer who became such a best seller with his wonderful book of the same name: The Wounded Healer.
As Jim points out, Henri certainly didn't have his life sorted. He had a history of spiritual struggle, which has been used to inspire us all in the rich legacy of his books. A very thoughtful article from Jim concludes that:

Henri Nouwen's life was an example for us all in how to encounter and incorporate both spirituality and social justice into our lives and work. 

In fact it was reading a biography of Henri Nouwen while I was on holiday a few years back which inspired me to research the concept of the Wounded Healer in greater depth and to try to consider how we might apply the archetype to all aspects of our daily lives, whether in our economy or our healthcare, our environmental issues or our creativity, our worship or our communities.
It took a very long time to research and write. I may not have got it all right, but it has certainly hit the right spot with many. And at the same time it was a cathartic experience, knowing that like me Henri had struggled with his own mental and spiritual condition - and his books were extremely helpful to me.
In a world of doom and gloom where there seem to be so many intractable problems I believe there is great hope to be found in applying the principles of the empathy and spirituality and humility of the wounded healer into our lives, whoever we are, whatever we do in our work and leisure lives. Thank you Jim Wallis and Sojourners for bringing this to the forefront of our minds again.
  
 Sojourners
Healing This Wounded Earth - inspired by Henri Nouwen and the Wounded Healer

The iconic monolithic rock hewn church of Bet Giyorgis (St George) visited on my recent memorable trip to the wonderful Ethiopia - written about in detail in my other blog Ethiopia - in search of the Ark of the Covenant

Wounds as a source of healing in pastoral and medical care

I love the idea of the Wounded Healer, the concept that a person's own suffering can be a source of healing for others. I believe this has enormous social significance for us all, in many different ways. 

This idea was reflected in the consolatory ministry with its accompanying literature from Ancient Greece onwards. I'll write more about this consolatory ministry later. Suffice to say here that by the seventeenth and eighteenth century in Western Europe the idea was well established in pastoral healing, mostly among the clergy of the time, but also in use by some physicians. Men such as George Fox, who founded the Society of Friends (or Quakers), George Trosse and Timothy Rogers, both Nonconformist English clergy of the seventeenth century and the English Physician George Cheyne, these and more used their own personal stories of suffering in their successful healing ministries. They were all reflecting the power of the wounded healer to heal others. 
But it was only with the development of the modern psychological schools of Freud, Adler and Jung, picking up the threads of pre Hippocratic holistic care, that the concept was first articulated, by Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961), as a recognized healing archetype. Research papers and specialist textbooks on the concept of the Wounded Healer are plentiful, but these are mostly within the realms of analytical psychology. Both Jung and Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939) were at certain periods of their lives deeply disturbed psychologically. By submitting themselves to their own styles of self-analysis, they both came to understand their own sufferings more clearly and were able to appreciate and treat their patients more effectively.
Jung introduced extensive self-analysis as an essential part of the training of a psychotherapist, to be followed up by continuing clinical supervision, because, he said,
"The patient’s treatment begins with the doctor…in any ongoing analysis the whole personality of both patient and doctor is called into play. There are many cases that the doctor cannot cure without committing himself. When important matters are at stake, it makes all the difference whether the doctor sees himself as a part of the drama, or cloaks himself in his authority. In the great crises of life, in the supreme moments when to be or not to be is the question, little tricks of suggestion do not help. Then the whole being of the doctor is challenged…the Doctor is effective only when he himself is affected…‘the wounded physician heals.’ But when the doctor wears his personality like a coat of armour, he has no effect." (1)

Elsewhere Jung wrote:

"Without too much exaggeration a good half of every treatment that probes at all deeply consists in the doctor examining himself, for only what he can put right in himself can he hope to put right in the patient…It is his own hurt that gives the measure of his power to heal. This, and nothing else, is the meaning of the Greek myth of the wounded physician." (2)

Jung’s followers proceeded to give the term special significance in their work and thinking and it was Jungian analysts who apparently started referring to the Wounded Healer Archetype as a recognized tool in the healing process. Jung’s ideas were specifically developed in the context of the doctor and his patient in psychotherapy, but this wisdom is surely just as relevant today within the context of the general medical practitioner’s relationship with his patient.

It was the Dutch priest and successful spiritual writer Henri Nouwen who did so much to popularize the use of the term Wounded Healer in his own works in the context of pastoral healing. In the introduction to his book The Wounded Healer he wrote; ‘nothing can be written about ministry without a deeper understanding of the ways in which the minister can make his own wounds available as a source of healing.’

Like Carl Jung, Alfred Adler (1870 – 1937), a pioneer Austrian Psychiatrist, was a prominent member of Freud’s psychological group, before they both broke away from Freud to develop their own psychological theories. Jung developed a more analytical psychology, introducing the concept of the introvert and extrovert and the Collective Unconscious, with a description of the various archetypes of man’s basic and inherent psychic nature. Adler on the other hand developed his own ‘individual psychology’ theory, and introduced the concept of the ‘inferiority complex’. ‘The method of Individual Psychology begins and ends with the problem of inferiority,’ he wrote. Adler believed that all human motivation was power induced, for example by the drive to be superior or the drive to control others. Somehow that rings very true in much that we see around us today!

But these psychological theories and the treatments arising from them were developing apart from rather than in cooperation with clinical medical practice. 

Indeed in many medical circles the new psychologies were viewed with suspicion and regarded as nothing more than ‘quackery’. 

Science was coming to be regarded as the supreme truth: that nothing could be real unless scientifically proven. 

The scientists thought that there was no room for an intangible global value to exist alongside the material and capitalist values that were reigning supreme. Indeed in many academic circles today the writings of Freud and Jung are still regarded with scorn, on the basis that their theories are too anecdotal and can therefore be of little value to any furtherance of understanding of the human condition and the mind/body problem.

But these ideas should not be dismissed so carelessly. Those of Carl Jung in particular seem to me to be very much in line with some recent developments in the fields of consciousness and intuition, ideas which are slowly gaining some credibility and significance in modern medicine, as I shall explain later on...

to be contd......

(1) Jung, Carl G., Memories, Dreams Reflections (London: Fontana Press, 1995) pp.154-156.

(2) Jung, Carl G., Fundamental Questions of Psychotherapy, in The Collected Works of C G Jung, 1953-1979), vol. 16: 111-25, on p. 116.

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 doctor as shaman - a point of view

‘To be a good doctor you have to be a compassionate chameleon, a shape shifter, a shaman,’ wrote the late Cecil Helman, family doctor, medical anthropologist, poet, traveler and observer of health systems worldwide, in his book Suburban Shaman. From fascinating anecdotes of consultations with traditional South African shamans or Sangomas to the curative trance dances in the Brazilian favelas, he reflects on how western Doctors can learn much from the folk wisdom and shrewd knowledge of human nature as demonstrated by these indigenous Wounded Healers.In the midst of the poverty, illiteracy and appalling living conditions of the shanty - towns of Southern Brazil, a Brazilian doctor, Carlos Grossman, has developed an innovative Community Health Program. The ‘social doctors’ who work in such areas not only provide the primary health care for their patients but also devote as much as half of their time to community development, to health education, to campaigning for improved conditions and generally engaging with the underlying social conditions of those patients in their care. This, says Helman, is ‘real’ medicine.
The shantytown conditions of Brazil or the indigenous medicine man may seem far removed both culturally and geographically from our own Western experience. But the healing methods of indigenous tribes are found in the culture of the Native Americans, in the Ayurveda of native Indian, in Chinese Oriental medicine and in many other cultures worldwide. These traditions go back thousands of years. Nevertheless I would suggest that the importance of the personal, subjective and social elements of patient care are no less relevant in mainstream healthcare provision in the USA or the UK than they are in the favelas of Brazil.
The World Health Organization (WHO) first recognized the value of these traditional shamanic healers as long ago as 1978, but only as being really relevant in areas where there were few conventional doctors. The shamans, the WHO said, should be allies of conventional healthcare, not opponents, as they had the holistic advantage of ‘viewing man in his totality within a wide ecological spectrum, and of emphasizing …that ill health or disease is brought about by an imbalance…of man in his total ecological system…’ The shaman could work cooperatively alongside conventional physicians in helping to combat AIDs, to promote family planning, child health and mental illness for example, as ‘social workers.’
Unfortunately the genuine holistic healing skills of the true indigenous shaman are too often today confused with the fads and abuses introduced by some of those unscrupulous ‘medicine men’ and ‘faith healers’ in our twenty first century culture, who are driven more by monetary gain than by any altruistic motive. This insults true shamanism and its origins.

As I watched President Obama make his inaugural speech to the American nation early in 2009, I was concerned. ‘We will restore science to its rightful place,’ he said, ‘and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its costs.’
With the emphasis on technology there was no recognition of the need to support an integrated healthcare. Perhaps that was neither the appropriate time nor occasion to raise such issues. But it may be that Obama’s two aims for healthcare are incompatible. Ever more complex drug regimes and technological advances are alone unlikely to lower the costs of healthcare. Also hurling more money at the present healthcare system seems to me like handing out more pills to deal with the side effect of a prescribed drug, rather than looking for a more appropriate initial treatment without that unwanted reaction.
Let me stress, by contrast, that the healing power of the spirit is free and wholesome, with no unwanted side effects.
We know that the American president understands the compassion and empathy of the Wounded Healer. He also understands that government policies cannot work alone, but require changes in our own hearts and minds. I hope that healthcare professionals enlightened in the latest advances in integrated healthcare are involved in any discussions on reform and that Obama’s own empathic sentiments will spill over into America’s healthcare system as soon as possible.
What do readers think?

© Eleanor Stoneham 2011

empathy in medicine

In my last post I wrote of the recognition in some quarters that empathy in the doctor can aid the healing process within his patient. This should hardly come as a surprise. The overriding problem in healthcare today seems to be that too often our doctors are ‘Techno-doctors’and ‘Super Specialists’ in a system that reduces patients to paper statistics and doctors to slaves of machinery, forgetting the importance of the personal, the subjective and the social aspects of care. ‘By their very nature doctors deal with bits and pieces – microbes, hormone deficiencies or tumours – while patients experience illness as the disorders, disruption and possible disintegration of their ordinary lives…Every healing art sees illness in its own terms. Patients need to remember that the illness is theirs and theirs alone.’And physicians need to remember this also.

Apart from the palliative care available for patients at the end of life, it still seems that the different forms of spiritual and religious healthcare (S/RH), complementary and alternative medicine (CAMs) and conventional allopathic clinical practice are not working together as well as they could and should. Many of the CAMs are gaining credibility within mainstream traditional healthcare but the influence of S/RH lags woefully behind.
‘It’s time we heed the symptoms indicating that our medical system is dangerously out of balance,’ says Joan Borysenko. ‘Modern technology is marvelous and lifesaving, and if we can integrate it with the deep wisdom of the past then we can birth a medicine that exalts and nurtures rather than one that is predicated on the fear of death.’
I believe that we are indeed seeing the dawning of a new paradigm in the history of medicine: we are entering an era where the spiritual healing needs of the patient can be met alongside both alternative and complementary therapies and the very best of the latest clinical medicine. There are certainly pockets of excellence across the healthcare establishments, for example the Integrative Medical Clinic of Santa Rosa, California, is at the very forefront of this exciting new world of enlightened healthcare. And in the UK we have the Christian Healing Centre Burrswood House. As in so many fields the USA leads and the UK will in due course follow the lead of America in the full recognition of truly holistic healthcare that is available for all. But much work needs to be done.

 The tableau is from our last Healing Service held in our church.



References:
Helman, Cecil, Suburban Shaman: Tales from Medicine’s Frontline

, London: Hammersmith Press, 2006
Joan Borysenko, ‘Putting the Soul Back in Medicine’ article sourced at http://joanborysenko.com/html/news_artcl4.html 18 November 2005 now available as chapter 4 in Healing our Planet, Healing Ourselves: The Power of Change within to Change the World, at http://www.healingourplanet.com/

© Eleanor Stoneham 2011

Doctors who feel your pain heal more patients

This should hardly come as a surprise to many people but " doctors who feel your pain heal more patients." I quote: "Empathy is often seen as a nice — but nonessential — part of medicine. Indeed, for surgeons in the operating room, seeing the patient as a human being may actually be an obstacle to successful performance. At the bedside, however, doctors who are more empathetic actually have healthier patients, according to a new study published in the journal Academic Medicine.

For earliest man physical illness was inextricably linked with the mind, with spirituality and with religion. The original belief was that disease came from the gods as punishment for invoking their displeasure in some way. Amulets found alongside the remains of Paleolithic man were almost certainly used as charms for healing purposes, a recognition at that time of the importance of the mind to the cause of illness, a precursor of modern psychology long before it was known as such!

Later, but still long before the birth of medical science, man called on his religion to heal his pain and suffering. He sought wholeness of the body, a holistic approach to healing.

Medicine largely lost this holistic wisdom with the advancement of medical science, not to be rediscovered until the second half of the last century. In this new millennium I believe that in time we will come to marvel at how we could have lost this sense of the soul’s healing significance for so long.

Carl Jung understood very well the essential empathic link between doctor and patient when he wrote: "The patient’s treatment begins with the doctor…in any ongoing analysis the whole personality of both patient and doctor is called into play. There are many cases that the doctor cannot cure without committing himself. When important matters are at stake, it makes all the difference whether the doctor sees himself as a part of the drama, or cloaks himself in his authority. In the great crises of life, in the supreme moments when to be or not to be is the question, little tricks of suggestion do not help. Then the whole being of the doctor is challenged…the Doctor is effective only when he himself is affected…‘the wounded physician heals.’ But when the doctor wears his personality like a coat of armour, he has no effect."
Elsewhere he went on to say:
"Without too much exaggeration a good half of every treatment that probes at all deeply consists in the doctor examining himself, for only what he can put right in himself can he hope to put right in the patient…It is his own hurt that gives the measure of his power to heal. This, and nothing else, is the meaning of the Greek myth of the wounded physician."

Jung’s followers proceeded to give the term special significance in their work and thinking and it was Jungian analysts who apparently started referring to the Wounded Healer Archetype as a recognized tool in the healing process.
Jung’s ideas were specifically developed in the context of the doctor and his patient in psychotherapy, but his wisdom articulated in these passages should surely be recognized to be just as relevant today within the context of the general medical practitioner’s relationship with his patient."
Do you agree?

The Jung quotes are taken from:
Jung, Carl G., Memories, Dreams Reflections (London: Fontana Press, 1995) pp.154-156.
Jung, Carl, from The Collected Works of C G Jung, volume 10 The Undiscovered Self; Princeton University Press, 1970 pp304-305 as quoted in Claire Dunn: Carl Jung: Wounded Healer of the Soul An Illustrated Biography (London: Continuum, 2000) p.199.

© 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.