The Wounded Healer and Leadership

The major effects of the COVID-19 pandemic are more than a year old.

The past year saw waves of the pandemic compound on top of each other, frontline caregivers overwhelmed, and many of us facing continuous adjustment of stay-at-home and lockdown rules. Anxiety reached a fever pitch and stayed there. You may have experienced feeling isolated, ignored, and under-supported.

My own mental health has been eroding, along with the collective mental health around us. To manage this crisis, I need a model for managing myself; I call it the Wounded Healer.

The Healer is the part of you that goes out into the world. The Healer dons her scrubs every day, takes a deep breath, and steps into purpose. The Healer hears her child ask for a bedtime story, and even though she hasn't slept in months, she goes to offer comfort. The Healer, cleaning up while fried after a long day, breathes through the exhaustion at the prospect of giving from an empty cup tomorrow...again.

The Healer gets up in the morning, though wounded, to connect to purpose.

The Wounded Healer is where we expand in the face of challenge, just as our chests expand on the inhale. This is not about the much over-used “warrior” motif we’ve all had on a water bottle or yoga mat. It’s more than being "tough." This is the place where the “warrior” persona telling us to “keep going” erodes us and is unsustainable. Like pushing against a wall, constant resistance is exhausting, inside and out.

It's about opening. In a courageous way, it’s how we accept and acknowledge our fear, our anger, our grief in ways we haven’t yet. These emotions are the companions that are trying to protect us. They serve us; even if a year under a pandemic has them in overdrive. The more we totally accept them as companion parts with their own purpose, the more capacity we create within us.

The Healer, in other words, is all about letting in (not rejecting) the parts that serve us, no matter how they feel; it’s the highest level of inner presence we can consciously experience.

This mindfulness, or presence, is a true superpower. Not only is it the skill for managing the moment, it is also the skill for transforming the self.

It’s how we turn the page from self-loathing judgement to true self love. Typical “Self Care” falls short in this regard: you may finally take that spa day but you do so begrudgingly; riddled with worry and guilt for what awaits you after that treatment.

With every pulse of mindfulness, we dissolve old limits and conditioning. With every pulse of mindfulness, we retrain our nervous systems away from triggers, reactivity, resistance, and self judgement to bring us towards space. We can breathe.

We can observe this in meditation or prayer, where each push and pull of adversity is a tiny test of mindfulness to keep us present. We practice staying centered and present in the formal setting of meditation, so that we're more likely to stay centered in our daily lives. It’s like any practice.

There is something thrilling about aspiring to this level of Healer. We can more easily sustain our draining emotions over a long-term haul like the pandemic and the piles of social and political unrest. 

As you know, something is—and always has been—lurking just around the corner, waiting to kick our butt. This isn’t new. Since you first wore scrubs, it’s been staffing issues, call-outs, flow problems, finding ways to fill our cup after emptying it daily. We're human. We struggle with things that are uncertain, unfair, move us out of control, or away from our comfort zones.

What happens then?

Then our Healer comes in. If the wound is our in-breath, expanding our capacity for whatever's arising, the Healer is our long, full out-breath

Life in every breath

The Wound is where we accept our limitations, back away from intense feelings, and take care of ourselves mentally. It helps us turn to the places in our own heart where we feel loved and nurtured. Maybe that looks like taking 30 seconds to lean back on a wall and focus on your exhale. It's that simple.

See the parts of you that are frustrated, anxious, judgmental, angry, and acknowledge them not as harmful, but vital to your whole self; these are the parts of you that seek to protect you from further harm, even when such harm may be unavoidable. 

Acknowledgment and gratitude of these difficult emotions as valuable allows them to tame; 

the emotions then try less to be heard… 

You’ve just heard the emotion, and thanked the emotion. What matters is the reset; giving the nervous system time to settle and relax. Now you're more likely to hold it together through the next frustration.

The strengths of your Wound and its surrounding negative emotions are (1) self-compassion AND (2) awareness to notice when you're beginning to get edgy and it’s time to care about it. The Wound tells you to get real: 

Where am I right now? 

What’s limiting me emotionally?

How can I acknowledge that?

It teaches us what being over-extended feels like in our bodies and our minds. And self-compassion practices help us accept that it's ok to pull back for a moment (even just a second), to take care of the parts we may normally reject. We’ve all been told to not judge, but it’s the inner-judge that comes out to size up a situation and protect us. Nothing is more compassionate.

We need both the Wound & the Healer. 

For only the Wounded can Heal.

Meditation helps build each capacity. The pandemic is our collective training ground. We don't get to choose the timing, or how long it lasts. We only get to choose how we exist inside it.

The Wounded Healer is our path to sustain ourselves when it’s toughest to do so. You are a Wounded Healer.

(Kris Mailepors is a mindset coach and author of The Easy to Follow Leader)