Healing Is A Together Thing

​Our deepest wounds in life happen in relationships. The wounds we carry with us, the ones we try to drink away, hide from, and the ones that leave scars that seem to never want to disappear - nearly all of them are relational wounds.

And yet, often, we try to heal from them in isolation.

Some of God's earliest words were "It is not good for man to be alone." And yet, Western culture promotes little more than it promotes individualism.

Even in healing. (Don't believe me - google self-help at some point today).

Dr. Dan Siegel says, "Integration is the heart of healing." And integration happens through connection, not avoidance. When Siegel is talking about integration, he's talking about bringing together the disconnected parts of ourselves.

Relational wounds lead us to numb our body from the pains of our mind. They lead us to hide hard emotions that are tied to hard experiences. They lead us to pretend our past has nothing to do with our present. They lead us to hide ourselves from others.

Healing isn't just about feeling better; healing is about reconnecting all of these parts of ourselves that we've allowed to become so separated.

All of this disintegration - it feels like distress. And when we experience distress, our body starts looking for signals of safety. And from birth, we are wired to look for those signals in one another.

A calm voice.

Gentle eyes.

A warm touch.

Someone who is fully attuned to our presence.

All of those signals calm our nervous system so that our brains and bodies can begin feeling and writing stories of healing. When you can share out loud to another the story of this wound you've been holding - and they don't so much as flinch like you might have expected them to - that wound is no longer a source of shame or pain or rejection, it is now a source of connection.

It is on its way to making a healing story out of a hurting story.

Brene Brown says, "shame cannot survive being spoken and met with empathy."

When you think about Jesus, and all of his miracles - his healing - it was almost always to return people to their communities, not just to display his power. Jesus was always trying to integrate people. Maybe because man was not meant to be alone.

But man do we keep trying to prove otherwise.

Avoidance and isolation don't protect you from pain, they actually rob you of the chance to make meaning of it.

You don't need to shout your story to the world. Not everyone is ready for that. Start with finding one person to gently hold your story. And trust doesn't require a leap - maybe start with a simple lean.

One big thing about connection I have learned in my own healing journey is this: you don't have to heal before you connect, healing often begins because you do. We don't have to be ready to connect, sometimes it's connection that makes us ready.

That has sure been my experience.

I used to live like connection was a threat upon my life. I am learning more and more each day that connection is actually a lifeline.

I am learning that we heal together.

We do.

Or we do not heal at all.