Physician heal yourself is a familiar and sometimes caustic comment make by someone, who either cares about us and or need to step back, or is made as a caustic comment by someone who doesn’t want to hear advice how ever apt.
Living on earth in a world of people always in some kind of conflict is not easy, but it is amazing how people develop mechanisms to live grow and be happy in such a world. Much of what we learn about coping comes initially from or parents and loving friends, and indeed it is loving compassion which sometimes opens the door to realistic thinking about life and problems. I remember, as a child feeling the restrictions of loving caring parents, who had very rigid beliefs, but I learnt that this was from love especially once when I was very sick and woke up to find both my parents watching at my bedside.
I have spoken before about life as a journey, and for most people this analogy is easy to relate to but perhaps not so easy to endure. The small child kicking and taking tantrums in the large supermarket is causing embarrassment to the poor overstretched mother but the child is in a confusing phase of development moving from ‘me’ to ‘I’. Moving through this phase with a child is beautiful if you understand its purpose for the child is developing his/her ego, or sense of self, and with appropriate support guidance and understanding will negogiate this stage well.
No one ever completes the life stages of development completely and engagement with others and the horrors of life soon bring the innate defence mechanisms into play. Sigmund Freud identified some of these as part of his development of psychoanalytical theory, and today they are constantly being refined and added to as understanding of them develops and the world changes, In our current circumstances with the pandemic we can see a lot of denial ,repression, and projection, to mention just a few. It is important to see these for what they are, and that they have conscious and unconscious dimensions.
The defence mechanisms come into their own during trauma and when used in a healthy way may support and prevent the complete disintegration of the ego. I t is when we use them to exclude reality that they become unhealthy. The guy who insists that he is fine when he has a large hole in his leg is a case in point additionally we can repress matters we need to work through and eventually they will damage ‘our way of being’ in the world, furthermore we may become so unaware that we blame others projecting and giving away aspects of self and scapegoating others. A classic example of this is often seen in groups where a group member glorifies another maintaining ‘you are so clever’ I could never do that!
This simple entree into a complex set of behaviours, I use only to open a door to discussion and reflection on our need to revisit our lives and journey in life especially at this time to check on our health and behaviours with others. ‘PHYSICIAN HEAL YOURSELF’take time to step back and renew your strength for no one is complete and remains, throughout their life’s journey ‘a wounded healer’ this metaphor emerged centuries ago and describes healer’s throughout and within many life philosophies probably the most well known in this country is ‘Christ as our wounded healer’ standing in our place and transforming our iniquities into newness of life.
In psychology Carl Jung took up the metaphor and refined it into ‘depth psychology’.In brief , and that almost seems like an insult the therapist travels through considerable years of therapy in order to understand himself and heal his wounds so that he can engage with the patient who is dealing with raw and psychotic wounds. In this engagement the therapist takes the wounds of the other into or unto himself contains, and holds them, and if he/she is healthy will not be destroyed by it and because of this the patient is healed the wounds have been transformed by the therapeutic engagement. If however the therapist has open untreated wounds then he/she may be contaminated by the patients pathology and become ill.
All of the above is offered in simple terms to support healthy work and engagement with self and others. Yesterday I heard a pastor say that in recent times he had buried 6 young people one after the other. He went on.. to say I’m traumatised by it by what I could deduce I felt I would like to touch him on the shoulder and hear what he needed to say because the word trauma has entered the public domain people now use it but not necessarily to its fullest extent. The truth is we are all traumatised by the pandemic because we have had to experience it without a template and accordingly have had to build coping methods almost daily and become familiar with new rituals. Additionally we are vicariously traumatised by the others story, it gives us the horrors feelings of stress etc.
If you find this blog see it as my appeal to you to recognise this as a double entity at the very least and do your own work so you can stand by or into others in a healthy way!
KNOW YOURSELF!
Tag Know yourself!
aoibheann thoughtful reflections 