Living With Trauma: The Healers, 2

It is a sometimes bitter irony that those who are the most gifted and most qualified to be healers will be those who have suffered the most.  This is a cruel paradox. What is meant by healing?  I think that restoration of health would be the simplest and most precise definition.  Who would imagine that the people who have suffered most would have the greatest power to heal?  Ah, but there is power in suffering.  I see this day after day in my contacts with others.  There is something very shallow, smug and empty about the life that has not been tested.  This isn't to glorify suffering as a virtue in itself.  Usually, it's a horrible thing to experience unless you have a kink about pain.  But those of us who have lived experience of pain, suffering, stigma, ill-treatment?  We know what it's like.  We can actually get beside the person who is hurting and we will speak the same language: the language of affliction.  Words are not enough, and we know it, but we can be with others while they are hurting in such a way that they will know that they are being neither pitied nor judged, but understood.  Accepted.  Respected.  Loved.   Professionals and clinicians who have not been there themselves are virtually useless as real healers of broken souls.  They are very good at prescribing medications and recommending programs and activities and making all the appropriate sympathetic noises, but unless the pain of the client enters into your soul and transforms you, you are not going to be able to be much help. I find it particularly appalling that almost none of my clients in my practice of thirteen years as a mental health peer support worker have ever been advised by any of the various psychiatrists, psychologists and rehab therapists who treat them about the value of self-knowledge as a vital key to psychic healing.  I recently had this conversation with two of my clients.  Both indicated that I am the first person in the system who has ever mentioned to them the importance of self-knowledge.  What is wrong with us? It is also concerning that not only is self-knowledge undervalued as a key to recovery, it has been replaced by a zeal to make mental health clients fit as perfectly as they can into consumerist society: recovery has been conflated with employability and social conformity.  There is absolutely nothing here about personal growth or self-actualization.  Could this have anything to do with the fear, subliminal or otherwise, that fully-recovered clients might become fully-empowered persons who will ask  difficult and unwelcome questions and make every effort to challenge, undermine and transform our dysfunctional social system, rather than conforming to it? In order to give one of my clients today an idea of how artificial the role playing in my industry, I described it to him as a three tier system: first, the clients, who are considered to be totally screwed up; then the peer support workers, who were screwed up, or are no longer quite so screwed up and are now getting better; and finally, the union staff, who have never been screwed up since they make all the administrative and clinical decisions.  This is the lie that we have to work with.