Still Wounds Run Deep: The Different Layers of Healing
Hun Ming Kwang
Mental Health Advocate through Experiential Art | Founder, Co-Artistic Director, Producer | Inner Work Teacher, ICF Certified Life Coach, Author, Trainer
In Ferris Bueller’s words, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you just might miss it.”
The rat race is an easy one to get caught up in, and understandably so. The Singaporean Dream waits for no one, after all. But the chase for results and success often leaves us battered and bruised physically, mentally, and emotionally.
People go through all types of illnesses and diseases — chronic pains, migraines, cancers, organ failures, depression, anxiety. The list is endless.
It is natural to think of them in terms of mental and physical illnesses, but research from psychiatrist Bessel Van der Kolk, in his book The Body Keeps the Score, says otherwise. In fact, it reveals that pain is multidimensional — having physical, mental and emotional aspects that are all connected. For a person to heal effectively, it is crucial to first understand the nature of pain.
Thinking about physical, emotional and mental pain as a problem to be solved is the norm. However, consider this: weeds are undesirable and problematic. Cut them away and the problem appears to be solved. But eventually, they return, and the problem arises once again. And why is that?
The answer is simple: the conditions allowing weed to grow are still present. The root cause is still present. And this is exactly the case with pain.
Understand this: pain is not an issue to be solved. Pain is a symptom of a problematic situation occurring in a person’s life that needs to be examined and eventually resolved for the pain to fade once and for all.
It’s a common misconception that the trauma, situation or incident has to be ‘big’ in a sense that it’s dramatic and unusual for it to be considered a trauma, or at least something worth examining. This couldn’t be further than the truth and this perspective, in fact, is a denial of pain and is the least helpful with regards to healing from it.
The word disease comes from dis-ease. From the lens of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), most physical illnesses are caused by emotional and mental imbalances in a person.?
TCM approaches healthcare through the principle that the body is made up of many energy channels, meridians, through which our life force, chi, flows. According to this principle, if an energy channel is blocked and chi is not flowing to an area, that area will start to experience discomfort, subfunction, or diseases.
When a person experiences any form of dis-ease, emotional baggage and mental stress start piling up, causing these energetic blocks. The person is said to be suffering from chi stagnation.
And these sources of dis-ease are in fact present in our daily lives. Think toxic relationships, heartbreak, dealing with a tyrant boss, irreconcilable family differences, bills to pay, mouths to feed, quotas to meet, people to satisfy – the list is endless.
These problems seem like the everyday problems that everybody goes through, but just because everybody goes through them does not mean they aren’t still problems. We’ve just become used to them and resigned to the fate that these problems will always plague us. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
The bottom line is this: if it causes you any kind of dis-ease, unrest, imbalance, pain, and stress, it is something worth looking into.
To illustrate this, here’s an example of women who experience bouts of pain during their menstrual cycle. The emotional wrungs that women tend to go through during that time of the month often causes blockages in their uterus, thereby preventing chi from flowing through the organ. And what happens then?
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Missed periods. Irregular periods. Period cramps. Bleeding too little. Bleeding too much.
The common reaction is to pop the famous pink Panadol to alleviate the pain and feel some semblance of sanity, but it is important to understand that these medications are ultimately just suppressants of symptoms that point to a deeper issue to examine.
Going back to the weed analogy: if a woman who often experiences extreme period pains deals with it only by popping pills, she is going to spend her whole life popping pills without ever understanding where the pain comes from.
This is not healing. Healing is not just about curing the symptom. Healing has never been about the symptoms.
Healing is fundamentally about taking ownership and responsibility to eliminate the problematic situations in a person’s life that causes pain and suffering. Curing symptoms are a result of the process. Medication and painkillers can be used to make life feel a little less painful, but they should not be the sole means of dealing with pain.
The process of healing starts with self-enquiry and is on our onus. We can certainly make the process easier by seeing mental health professionals and life coaches who are trained to guide us towards asking the right questions within ourselves that would allow us to gain deeper insights about our pain. This is a painful and confronting process that requires clarity and personal power to see through – our mental health professionals and life coaches can only be there for us to elevate us into a more empowering state that gives us an extra push to begin resolving our issues.
We still have to be the ones walking the path of healing and doing what’s necessary.
This means being truthful about whether a job is fulfilling. Whether a relationship is more draining than empowering. Whether an environment suppresses our identity more than it encourages and embraces self-expression and authenticity. This is where the importance of ownership comes into place – because if we don’t take ownership over our issues, over our healing, even if we hire the best therapists, counsellors, or coaches, it would still be our tendency to revert back to our original default state once we’re on our own, because the fundamental root issues in our lives are still present.?
What is also important to note is that healing should be approached as a progression – from the psychological, to the emotional, to the physical. These are all different layers that we need to deal with for us to make any real progression.?
If the source of pain is psychological, like a negative work or living environment, a self-deprecating mentality, toxic and unhealthy relationships that don’t respect boundaries, or self-destructive behaviours – deal with that before it manifests into physical diseases like cancer, or even tumours.?
If you are already suffering from some form of physical illness, go to a medical professional to treat it on the physical level, be it through surgery or some other form of treatment, before working on the emotional and psychological aspects of the issue with a mental health professional.
Our wounds are never one-dimensional. We never just develop a type of cancer, a tumour, or suffer from conditions like diabetes or lupus without a deeper root behind it. Our wounds affect us on a physical, emotional, and mental level – they are all linked. Chances are, the root of these diseases was embedded long, long time ago, and never got dealt with properly. Not only that, but the circumstances of life reinforced the conditions that worsened our emotional and psychological pain – it was only a matter of time before it manifested as a physical disease.?
Acknowledging the nature of our wounds and the fact that healing needs to occur on different levels, layers, and dimensions is half the battle won. It all begins with self-enquiry.?
If we really want to get in touch with ourselves, we must develop the ability to observe ourselves and meditate on what’s going on inside us. How many times a day do we pause to reflect on our state, what we can do better, or how we can do things differently??
For starters, meditation and yoga are great ways to begin this journey inwards. These practices are guided ways of getting a person more in touch with the body through the breath.