Healing is many things. It is: a process a choice the restoration of balance the transformation of energy a revisitation taking responsibility a learning experience a quest for happiness It's a unique process.

Healing is a process you go through.  It’s not an event that happens to you.  It’s not something someone else does to you.

You are your own healer and the way you heal is to participate in your process as fully as you can.

Everybody’s process is different.  No two are the same because no two people are the same.  Everybody's experience of life is unique.  We may do similar things to bring about healing but our experiences of them may be very different. 

There are many different options for healing.  What you choose to do may be different than what other people choose.  It doesn’t matter.  There is no right or wrong way to heal.  There is only your way.

It's a choice.

Sometimes things happen in life over which we have no control.  Sometimes we use bad judgement and make choices that lead to devastating consequences.  Whatever the adversity, and however it was caused, it's up to you to decide how you are going to respond.

You have two choices.  You can give all your power over to adversity and live in the past under a cloud of regret and resentment.  If you do this, you are letting adversity diminish (maybe even destroy) your life. 

Or, you can claim your power and claim your life back.  You can decide to heal from the losses, adapt to the changes and embrace life in the present.  You can decide to live life to the fullest and get the most out of everything it has to offer.

Paradoxically, by taking away your sense of control, adversity offers you an opportunity to take control - not of external events, but of how you direct your life regardless of what happens. 
 

It's the restoration of balance.

All human beings have a common goal.  We want to exist in a state of balance.  We are programmed to constantly seek and maintain balance.  The fancy name for this is homeostasis - physiological stability and psychological equilibrium.

When you are in balance your physiological systems are working well and your needs - physical, social, sexual, emotional, intellectual and spiritual - are being adequately met. 

All these different needs blend together in proportions that are exactly right for you at any given time.  Needs are fluid things that change as you change.  Thus, the proportions in the blend can change too.

When a life-changing adversity happens, it throws you off balance.  Your ordered world becomes chaotic.  Your needs blend gets out of whack. 

In an effort to cope, you may do things that first serve to restore balance.  But they may become habitual behaviour patterns that eventually interfere with your life.  For instance you may devote all your attention to your work to keep your mind off what has happened.  Later on you may find that lack of attention to your personal relationships has caused them to break down.

Healing is the process of getting back in balance and restoring a balanced life.  Everyone has their own optimum balance.  When we achieve this (or get pretty darn close to it!), we're happy.

It's the transformation of energy.

Emotion is energy.  Think of the ways we talk about it.  We "jump" for joy.  We "shake" with fear.  We "boil" with rage.  We "burn" with desire.  We "die" of boredom.  We "burst" out laughing.

Adversity activates distressing emotions.  You feel a whole host of feelings - anger, fear, sadness and confusion are just a few.  They generate energy that you can physically feel (often a feeling of pressure in the chest area or tightness in the abdomen).

The only way to diffuse energy is to release it.  We have two containers for our emotional energy - the physical body and the psyche (comprised of all our thoughts and feelings and the psychological processes that put them into action).  If energy is not released it continues to build up inside the containers.

Healing happens as the destructive energy of troubling emotions is released and the life-enhancing energy of positive new experiences is allowed to flow in (now that there's space for it!).

Healing also happens when you transform harmful energy generated by negative thoughts.  Rather than directly releasing this energy through some form of expression, you redirect it to the positive by shifting your thoughts and taking part in positive actions.

It's a revisitation.

Most of us, for one reason or another, have some unresolved issues lingering in the past.  You may not have had the opportunity or support you needed in order to heal, or parts of the adversity you went through may have just been too painful to face. 

When this happens, people "get on with their lives" as best they can and more often than not, pull everything together again remarkably well - human beings are very resilient!

But the unresolved pain and conflict associated with old issues - even if they are decades old - is often the cause of problems in present day life. 

Healing can involve revisiting the past to better understand what happened to you, how it impacted you, how you responded and the effect your response has had on your life.  Then you can move forward on the strength of that understanding.

You go back to the past not to try and change or rearrange it.  That is just not possible.  You go back to make peace with it exactly the way it was.

It's taking responsibility.

When I was in rehab I sat with my family doctor one night and despondently told her that what had happened to me was not fair.  Many people who have experienced personal loss will at some point have the sense that "life is not fair".

My doctor looked at me and said "no one ever said life was fair".  I resented her intensely in that moment for having said such a thing!  Life had done me wrong.  I wanted her to be as angry as I was about the injustice of it all.

To be sure people have suffered crushing adversities because of terrible human injustice.  Seeking justice is often a very important part of the healing process.  But you don't always get it.  Even when you do, the healing powers of justice are limited. 

The fact remains that something was taken away from you that you did not want taken away.  Your life was changed in ways you did not want it to change.  You had to go through things you didn't want to go through.

You, and only you, are responsible for how you feel about that.  No matter how much you suffered at the hands of others or because of forces beyond your control, you are the one who has to take responsibility for putting your life back together again.

That can be a hard pill to swallow.

Healing involves moving past unfairness, especially unfairness that is beyond your control.  To do that, you have to take responsibility.  Ultimately you have to forgive, and part of being responsible is learning how to do that.

It's a learning experience.

Adversity opens doors to parts unknown.  Healing is a process of going through the doors and discovering what lies beyond.

There are many wonderful things to be found - understanding, insight, strength, new perspectives and attitudes, security, skills, talents, attributes, beauty and joy to name a few.

Within every painful experience, there is something valuable and life-enhancing to learn.  This is what keeps hope for the future alive, despite the most tragic circumstances. 

You are a multidimensional being - physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual.  While one or two dimensions may have dominated your identity for a very long time, you may find that your attention and energy are drawn to other dimensions as you heal. 

Healing is expansive.  It is an opportunity to develop your whole being, to become more fully who you are.

It's a quest for happiness.

This, above all else, is what healing is all about.  It may not seem so during the times you come face to face with your pain, but it is. 

People pursue healing because they want to be happy.  When they feel the pain of their unhappiness it seems as though healing is taking them farther away from what they want (happiness) and giving them more of what they don't want (pain).

Many people equate healing with happiness.  They have an idea that healing will make them happy.

But healing isn't happiness.  It's the road to happiness.  Healing won't make you happy.  Travelling the road will get you to the state of being we call happiness.

Along that road there are potholes, bumps, ditches and mud.  As you go through these and travel onward, the road vastly improves. 

When you get to the place where you can be who you are and live to your potential as a whole multifaceted being, you will have found the roots of happiness.  When you look back on your journey from this place, every step will have been worth it.

There may be times when you get stuck in your healing process.  You might even backslide a little.  This can last days, weeks, months - even years.  It’s frustrating and it’s discouraging.

But these periods are also part of your process and they hold valuable information for you.  Don’t discredit them and look at them as failings.  See them as something to be explored and understood.  Understanding opens the way to more healing.

There are as many reasons for becoming stuck as there are people getting stuck.  They can be amazingly complex, but I think all of them are rooted in one or more of these three categories:

• you have unresolved grief or conflict and the process becomes too painful and too scary (pain and fear go together)
• you don’t have the support you need and the process becomes too overwhelming
• you are fighting against Life in a battle for control.  When you are unable to accept the changes that have happened - even though they're irrevocable - you fight them.  You can't move on in a present day reality you reject.

There are also as many ways of becoming unstuck as there are people breaking through and moving on.  There's no magic healing bullet (how's that for an oxymoron?).  Different things work for different people.

One of the healing options may help to get you going again.  Many factors need to come together for healing to take place.  Timing plays a role, as do external circumstances.

The important thing is to have patience with yourself and the process, and to keep looking until you find what works for you.