Living With Trauma: The Healers, 13

It's love among the ruins. Our government-funded mental health services are not sufficient for providing the healing that we are needing. Our government is not a healer. This is not one of its gifts. It is good for funding and ballast. Little more. Those of us who work as healers, or agents of recovery, have a long haul ahead of us. We always have a long haul ahead of us. The policy wonks and stingy dunderheads who set policy and control the purse strings know absolutely nothing about what it's like on the ground here. If any of them have ever had a mental health diagnosis, we are going to be the last ones to know about it. They have never known illness, stigma, or poverty. The world has always been their oyster, and none of them have yet choked on the silver spoon they were born sucking on. Even if most of the union staff are paid better than a living wage, this still does little to address or really and justly compensate how much of their hearts and lives they end up putting into their work for the wellbeing of their vulnerable clients. For peer support workers such as myself, it is of course much worse. We are grossly underpaid and we still have to fight stigma and the snooty hierarchy of the mental health system in order to gain any respect for the work that we do. Even though we have been found to be indispensable as therapists and healers, not by training but by the lived experience of illness that has cracked open our gift and calling as healers. As I have learned from my own four years of therapy, and through interactions with clients, healing and recovery is within the purview of the client, and only the client. My psychiatrist did not have a magic wand to wave and, hey presto! Neither could I do the same for the people I work with, nor would I, should I ever be gifted with such magical power. My therapist was the conductor. I was the orchestra, and I was the one who called the tune. So it is with my clients. This is what I like about motivational interviewing. It puts in the hands of the client the choices and options. Not necessarily the power, since they already have the power, they have always had the power to heal their lives. They don't know this, and in some cases are so comfortable in the stigma they live with that they don't want to know it. Recovery can be scary. It means venturing into the unknown. It is a risk, sometimes a huge risk and the comfort of the known and familiar can be very seductive. Only the individual, with respectful, tactful and loving support from others can decide when or whether to step out into the unknown, to take the necessary risks in order to move forward in the darkness. The strength that we gain empowers us, for our own healing and also anointing us to be healers for others.