Living With Trauma: The Healers, 15

"Only scarred lives can heal." This is a line from one of my favourite devotional books, after the Bible. It is titled "God Calling", written by two anonymous Englishwomen in the early 1930's and edited by AJ Russell. These women claimed that every day God would come to them and speak and they would write down the words which were eventually published in the eponymously titled daily devotional. Both these women had had very difficult and challenging lives, but aside from one being Anglican and the other Roman Catholic, almost nothing else is known about them. In the midst of their suffering God became the constant and enduring reality in their lives. I find it interesting that the most effective therapists in the mental health field are the peer support workers. We haven't had a lot of training and our wages are obscenely low, and but for the blessing of subsidized housing, none of us could expect to survive at this work. But we treat our work as a calling because we work out of our own experience of trauma, stigma and illness, our recovery, and I think if anyone in this industry can claim to work from their hearts, those people would be us. This isn't to say that we can do it all ourselves, alone, on our own, without support or ballast. Of course not. We are part of a team. Remember what I wrote about love among the ruins. Regardless of how uncreative, unwieldy, slow and ridiculously inefficient the various government and NGO organizations we are working for, we would not be able to get a lot done without their help, without the foundation and stability that they provide us. Think of a wisteria vine bearing incredibly beautiful fragrant flowers, or a vine yielding the sweetest and choicest grapes, and one might appreciate the need for, the very importance of structure and support. Our lives have been crushed, broken, trodden upon like grapes for the making of wine. But how else could the inner light, love and healing grace be released in our lives? So trauma, as awful as it is, is so often the most necessary evil for training and equipping the healers of humanity. This isn't to insinuate that we have to be, or ever will be completely healed, restored and able to function in complete independence. Independence is one of the many toxic myths of our individualist and capitalist culture, if that's what it can be called. We all need one another. I have seen very gifted healers who themselves cannot hold their lives together without help and support from others, be it regular appointments with a psychiatrist or counsellor, medications, or subsidized and supportive housing. Some of us still have our issues and relapses and addictions. This makes us no less healers and no less necessary and needed by others. This isn't to give us a pass for not moving forward in our recovery. Of course we are moving forward. Some of us do become fully functional. In my case, I have done my recovery without medications or hospitalization and I live to this day stigma-free, despite some of the well-meaning dunderheads that I work with. There are others, healers more gifted than I, who need some or all of those supports What I am saying here is that we really have to reassess what we value in our society: to start giving precedence and priority to the soft virtues of love, empathy, compassion and kindness, over the cold hard efficiency that keeps the machinery well oiled and running but every bit as likely to kill anyone unfortunate to get caught in it. Love, and not selfishness and efficient greed, are at the very heart of the universe, and for this reason peer support workers and others who have survived trauma and stigma are going to be a needed and essential prophetic voice that is going to have to be heard in this very cold and dysfunctional world that we have made for ourselves.