W.E. Krill, Jr. M.S.P.C.

One person who has strongly influenced my life is a man named Henri Nouwen. He was a deeply spiritual man who was both incredibly strong and genuinely fragile. He was like all of us in strength and fragility, but unlike all of us in spirituality. The spiritual insight he had that has had the greatest impact upon me is the idea of the ‘wounded healer’. Nouwen felt that the best healers were those that are able to recognize and tap into their own history of wounds and healing processes that are based in the wound itself.

We have all suffered bumps and bruises that life brings to us, many of us have experienced scrapes and hard knocks that have healed and only come to mind with specific reminders. Others of us are able to cite several deep and lasting wounds that still feel open and raw, or continue to ache long after the superficial healing.

It’s those deep wounds that produce scars and aches in certain seasons or in certain weather that are most attached to our history. Indeed, some such wounds not only feel raw or ache, but they also effect genuine disability in our current functioning, life satisfaction, and happiness.

Some counselors (and I confess that I used to do the following almost exclusively) guide their clients to retreat to the past for detailed examinations in order to effect healing in the present. Others focus intently on an individual’s problem behaviors almost exclusively (likely one result of the insurance companies press for short term, rapid result treatment…an approach that is workable for a relatively few human emotional issues). 

These approaches tend to then over-focus on the many negatives and painful areas of a person’s life. Over the past several years, I have come to a conclusion that while the past may need to be visited, working from the now with a ‘positive psychology’ focusing on pro-active current functioning adjustments makes far more sense and is far more effective in helping people heal quicker. And genuinely heal the deepest of wounds.

In fact, healing your current functioning while making brief visits to your past wounds has a tremendous chance of helping you to heal your past.

If we have the courage to confront ourselves about how our current functioning is not only wounding ourselves further, but wounding those around us, we have one important key to our healing. By examining our wounds of history with gentle patience, and with the important balance of positive hope,  we can find the second key: the salience of how even in the depth of a wound, we can find the source of healing it.