Daniel Lev Shkolnik
I heard a quote this week attributed to spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle. It went something like this:
"If you need other people to heal in order for you to feel good about yourself, that means you need other people to suffer."
This is a common ego-trap for those entering the healing professions. Unwittingly, we can tie our own worth as healers — and as people — to our ability to "heal others."
It is easy to become attached to the fruits of our action. And when this happens, we may find ourselves unconsciously preserving the very suffering that we intend to remove.
In the healing professions this might look like unconsciously prolonging treatment by delivering slow-moving or moderately effective care for our clients instead of addressing the core of the issue.
In politics, this can look like two opposing parties who require an enemy to fight or a social problem to persist in order to justify their own existence.
Trying to "heal / fix" the other person in a relationship is another common example of this. This is also the root of the original meaning of "co-dependency," which developed from "co-alcoholic" among Alcoholics-Anonymous groups in the 1970s.
This original meaning of co-dependency is when the partner of an addict may consciously or unconsciously enable the addict's behavior for some personal benefit — feeling like a "savior," or "martyr," the "healthy one," that they are "needed." If the partner ever truly recovered from the addiction they would lose their privileged position. The non-addicted partner becomes "co-dependent" on the alcohol or drug — their own self-worth becomes dependent on the continuation of the suffering.
And so healers seem to be caught in a catch-22: how can we show up in the world and fulfill a genuine call to healing without becoming caught in co-dependency with the suffering we're trying to heal?
I have been married about 6 months now and one of the greatest lessons I've learned from my wife is the ways in which I have unconsciously contributed to the conflicts between us. She has helped me recognize the ways in which I took on the role of the "healthy one" in our relationship, unfairly burdening her with the role of the "sick one" and the source of all our relationship issues.
When I learned to remove my own ego from conflicts, our conflicts naturally lost fuel. Without added fuel, the conflict fizzles and resolves.
It takes two to tango, as they say.
This is not to say we are powerless as healers—far from it. But healing isn't about becoming the main character in someone else's story. Instead, it's about creating the space and circumstances for a person to heal themselves. When this happens, they don't attribute the healing to the actions or words of another person (which is an illusion) but instead to their own inner capacity for healing. Our presence—and sometimes our guidance—can be a crucial facilitator of this process, but it can only work if our soul (not our ego) is at the helm.
I am continually learning how to disentangle my own pride or self-congratulation from the flow of spirit and love that wants to move and act through me.
But time and again when I show up in a genuine way I can sense the layers of the onion falling open and I find myself being carried a little closer to home.
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