Biology for the Brokenhearted
Making Sense of Healing in the Era of Denial and Self-Actualization
“Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.”
There is a question you can pose to someone you know, or indeed, to yourself, that frequently engenders disappointing and cyclical responses, that being "What is soil?" or "What is dirt?" It sounds like it might yield at least a touch of analysis but often what you get in return is something akin to "Well, dirt is, um...dirt." Or you might hear "Dirt is soil."
What we often don't think about is that dirt is not a whole, defined thing unto itself. It is a mixture of many things, which become, over time, what dirt really is, the stew of decaying matter. It is the compost of life. Various things live and die, plant, animal, or in the case of mineral, simply break down. These myriad compounds go through radical changes, dissipating into their constituent parts, then spreading wide into the soup of everything else around, strangely and beautifully, becoming both less and more than what they once were.
Like soil, most of life never fully disappears. Matter and energy are simply changed and then shared with other forms of matter and energy. This, surprisingly, is the way things are with us too. In this case, I don't mean physically, though that is also true. I mean psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually. Our experiences, our pain and trauma, our joys and ecstasies, our disappointments and innumerable explorations, do not work in us for a season, then vanish. They remain in us, only changing with time, as they slowly digest and integrate across the myriad regions that makes up our innermost landscape. Nothing really leaves; it just becomes something else.
Among the many souls I've known in my four plus decades, I've met several who passionately embrace the notion that, "I'll deal with that thing, then it will be done." "It's a season. No more. And when I'm healed, I'll move on." While this pretends to be reasonable, and seems to fit seamlessly into our era of self-actualization and personal development, it is a lie, and one that can do a tremendous amount of damage to our psyche, our emotional core, and our relationships.
We are not machines. And as prevalent as the idea might be in our day, the human mind is not a computer. We are infinitely more complex than machinery, more nuanced than the digital arena. And our internal makeup comprises an array of overlapping realms that do not conform well to any model we might otherwise create.
No matter how acute our understanding of ourselves or how dedicated we are to "doing the work," nothing we experience will ever cease to exist. Each experience is integrated over time, breaking down into both nutrients and toxins with the potential to either nourish or to slowly kill. If this were not so, why is it that even long-buried memories or hurts, those we felt were entirely dealt with and surpassed, resurface years later to haunt us again, the old feelings, the old pain, the old joy or sorrow, crawling back up the tunnels to emerge once again and dance around in the midday sun? Life is more like one long meal we continue to eat. The courses change but the evidence of what was served before remains on every dish relegated to the periphery of the room.
What of the question of time? Doesn't time heal all wounds? If it did, we wouldn't have so many hurting people in the world. If it did, therapists would be out of work, priests on vacation, and self-help books would be a dying market. Time doesn't heal, it simply gives us an opportunity for healing, a chance at greater understanding and maybe even a little wisdom. Time no more heals than a road drives us somewhere. We're still in the driver's seat. The road merely offers a path, the potential for a way through to a conceivably better, or at least, different place.
So, we ask ourselves, "Did I not heal then?" Yes, you did. But more accurately, you still are, and will continue to do so indefinitely. Healing is not the turning of a page or the ending of a chapter that is never to be read again. It isn't the sealing off of a compartment (that's called repression and self-delusion). It comprises a lifetime of shifting internal and external experiences, processes, explorations, and reinterpretations. In short, healing is change, growth, and expansion. And we need the nutrients of our experiences to feed each one of these.
This doesn't mean that our pain will plague us forever. What time does do well, is dilute. It thins things out, breaking it down into smaller pieces and then spreads them out over a wider landscape within our being. If we live and work through the pain consciously, compassionately, the perpetually-diluting material will eventually feed us. If we try instead to circumvent, to go around instead of through our struggles, the dilution doesn't happen the same way. It has staying power. It refuses to decay at a normal rate, seemingly preserved in the embalming fluid of denial and self-medication, whatever form that takes in each of us. And if it remains untended, whatever thinning it eventually accomplishes will spread something that disrupts our natural growth processes, like chemical waste on crops or microplastics in the ocean.
There is however, an overly-conscious approach that yields results just as damaging. This harkens back to my earlier statements about individuals who believe they've dealt with and therefor, must be done with their experience. For those whose usual method is to attack everything like a virus, those who think they can force healing upon themselves like winning a legal argument, those who believe that lifting weights and severe cardio will cure the flu, those who make and then break friendships with little consideration for their long-term value, those who write off the past and put their faith solely in the merits of the future and every ambition that lies in its theoretical womb, to these are the rightful spoils...a hardened heart, a seared mind, high blood pressure, addiction, a lack of intimacy, and a boiling sea of anxiety. Attempting to beat something into submission is just as damaging as avoiding it altogether.
Our ability to continue the process of healing and learning is measured by our willingness to remain present in our suffering, but to do so with grace, forgiveness for ourselves and others, and with an abundance of patience. It asks us to take on a mindset that welcomes, no matter how uncomfortable it might be, the vastness of human experience, instead of a zero-sum outlook about things too intimate and too deep to ever completely map.
If you happen to be one who worships at the throne of pragmatism and process, you may find all of this just a bit "woo-woo." But our discomfort with a thing doesn't dissolve our relationship to the same. Our experiences and what we need to learn from them don't give up their hold because of our demands on them. What is...is. What has been cannot be undone. It can only be understood, digested, integrated, expanded.
We heal by understanding and acceptance, and by our willingness to grow up and grow out. We heal by entering through the gates of experience, not by climbing over them. One of the biggest fallacies we encounter during our time here is the belief that healing is a goal. It isn't. We cannot conjure healing. It is the inevitable and eventual positive consequence of dealing with our struggles as they come and as they are passing into each successive phase of their metamorphosis within us. And doing so with humility, a vulnerable but courageous heart, a willingness to accept change, and by welcoming the painful but ultimately rewarding process that pulls wisdom from the raw materials of suffering. We have a relationship to our experiences, both for better and worse. And like any relationship, we have to tend to them.
While all of this may not be comfortable, it is hopeful. It reminds us that life must not be a repeated act of self-surgery, the forceful attempt to remove painful and consequential parts, but a willful and humble relationship with the complexities of existence and the same within our own internal world. We are quite good at cutting things from ourselves, skilled at hacking and slashing. And some of these DIY operations work temporarily. They provide relief for a time. They allow us to feel more powerful, more in control. And we can keep on cutting right up until we have little left to operate on. We cut until that point where we extricate most of the things inside that make us human. In the process we become little more than eating, drinking, moving vessels of emotional distance and brutal efficiency.
Our psyche is not like the body. You cannot simply cut out the tumor and keep going. The mind and heart work by other rules. The unseen realms that make up our core are governed by more fluid and boundless mechanisms, paths that lead, in essence, everywhere. And the only way to navigate such a place is not to deny and repress this truth, but to accept and even welcome its potential.
No matter how painful this is at times, think of how beautiful, how expansive this also is. We don't merely experience something and then lose our connection to it. We retain a portion, a memory, a feeling, a whole set of feelings. Without this we would never learn a thing. We know this. We've understood this since childhood, that learning and retaining any amount of knowledge obviously requires memory. But we pretend that the same isn't true of complicated emotional or relational experiences.
When we try forcefully to exercise them from ourselves, to medicate and obliterate, we lose our ability to learn anything from them. They remain, of course, as these things do, but instead, are forced to crawl downstairs into the basement, gather reinforcements, recruit devoted allies from our growing horde of repressed memories and emotions, fortify themselves against maturation and understanding, and become, in the absence of our attention, monsters. Clean pain now is better than murky pain later. The former is a lot easier to navigate.
Paradoxically, healing often has more to do with acceptance than with action, more to do with willingness than with will, and it has as much to do with death as it does life. To access this life, we must die to much that once was. We have to die to old versions of ourselves, die to expectations, to our notion of perfection, the always and eternal ideal life. We must die to our fierce grip on unforgiveness, our need to control, our quiet belief that all things will eventually conform to our design. We must die to the demands and chains of the past while never forgetting their import, their weight, their lessons, and their beauty. This death is the breaking down of those lost or changing forms of life into the decaying and dispersing matter from which new life will rise.
Try to welcome the slow but faithful process of healing by approaching things with your eyes open, without dodging, and with the knowledge that every experience, good, bad, or neutral, must pass through the complex system of existential and emotional digestion on its way to becoming something that might nurture life once again.