This may be an unpopular way to get back to work here on The Anxious Morning, but I want to challenge our widespread use of the word “healing”. Before I go on, I am not here to invalidate anyone’s pain or past experiences. Many problems in life are emotional in nature, based on past experiences. They do involve emotional pain and the need for things like healing and forgiveness for ourselves and others. I’m not dismissing that. But try to open your mind and consider for a minute that not EVERY problem is automatically a healing problem. Also consider that more than one thing can be true at a time.
If you have learned to be afraid of your own body and thoughts, are you broken? Is that a disease? Are you defective as a result of a structural shortcoming or wound?
If you listen to a song that you like and mis-hear some of the lyrics, you may love that song and sing those incorrect lyrics for years. You are completely convinced that your favorite artist is singling one phrase, when the rest of the world is hearing a totally different phrase. Your brain is sure that it is correct. Just like your brain is sure that you are in danger when you feel anxious, while the rest of the world sees no such danger. If you are to correct your misheard lyrics error, must you heal yourself? Are you broken, diseased, or damaged? I’m guessing you are going to say no, you just need to learn the right lyrics and start singing them.
So why do we so often insist that recovery from an anxiety disorder is based on healing? Because our sacred thoughts and emotions are involved? Because our bodies are involved? Surely these things are critically important and therefore they deserve something that carries more weight than simply learning! Learning isn’t profound enough for our special thoughts and feelings! We need HEALING!
But really, do we? What if you are not broken, wounded, or damaged? What if you were just mistaken? What if you are not diseased or ill? What if you’d just learned and reinforced some bad habits? Imagine that?
There may very well be pain, negative experiences, or even trauma in your life that will require some healing. But that doesn’t mean that every challenge you face and every problem you are trying to solve is a healing problem. You may have pain to heal, but you may also have incorrect lessons and bad habits to correct. More than one thing can be true at a time, and one of them has nothing to do with you being broken and in need of being healed.
Hey it’s Monday and that means that today at 2 PM Eastern I’ll do my “Recovery Monday” livestream on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Come join in!
136. Are We Healing, Or Learning?