Reclaiming Healing Part II: Spinning the Web

Welcome to part 2 of my reclaiming healing mini-series. If you missed part 1, you can find it here. This week I’m going to begin exploring one of the aspects of healing that stand out to me as I explore the meaning of the concept for myself.

But first, a relevant tangent.

In my dedication to radical self-care, I have learned that there is a nauseating pop-culture view of wellness that makes me want to smack people…and then there is the more nuanced concept of wellness as developed by researchers.

If I were to listen to pop culture, I would think that wellness was a light switch with two positions, Well or Not Well. Usually it’s relegated to one or two facotrs, e.g. physical wellness or emotional wellness.

But when I look at wellness more deeply, I realize that it’s a multi-faceted, ever-changing thing. And it’s not so much about obtaining perfection in all of the facets as it is about balancing them and obtaining the best functioning of them all in that period of time.

One version of the wellness wheel. Source: SAMHSA

Thus, someone can have a physical health problem and still be relatively well if they have a strong support network, a healthy environment, plenty of resources, methods of caring for themselves emotionally and physically, and a way of finding hope or meaning through the experience.

Does any of this sound familiar? It should. I think as a society we have a tendency to reduce healing to as simplistic and ineffective a model as we do wellness, but if we were to actually look at a visual representation of healing, I’d bet double the amount I owe on student loans that it would be more like the wellness wheel than like a light switch.

Last week, I talked quite a bit about physical healing and the parallels I see to emotional/psychological healing, but it doesn’t just have parallels. The mind and body are astounding in the way they relate to each other, and science is just beginning to scratch the surface of how interrelated they can be around trauma (for a deeper look, check out Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score).

In the healing work I have done around my sexual abuse, I have had to learn how to respect that mind-body connection and the reality that memory is stored in my muscles as much as in my brain. Both my body and my mind have to heal, but they require different kinds of healing practices. Counseling has been invaluable to my mental and emotional healing, but it took working with a physical therapist to address some of the physical damage.

But like wellness, healing is not just emotional and physical. Growing up in a cult is a relational trauma, and there has been a social component to my healing as well. I’ve had to learn how to trust again. I’ve had to learn how to take relational chances and open up to people—how to ask for help or reach out for support. And most importantly, I’ve had to learn how to set boundaries.

The cult was also a spiritually abusive place though, so healing my spiritual life has been a large focus of my journey. Much of that has taken the form of exploring Paganism and Goddess spirituality…which could also be seen as a healing of my gender identity as I created new ways of thinking about the feminine that didn’t root it in shame, inferiority, and perversity.

Already I have loosely and easily covered several of the wellness wheel spokes. I could go on and on tracing a map of healing in a myriad of places. I use the wellness wheel as a jumping off point for visualizing, but it could be just as easily portrayed as a web.

The short of it is: healing is simply not simple. It’s multifaceted in a gorgeously complex and interdependent way.

 

Wellness vs. Wholeness: Breaking Out of the Mental Illness Paradigm

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the terms that we use to describe our various states of mental health, and some brain vomit got into the computer. 😉 Have fun with this one!

“Mental Illness” has both lost and gained popularity in the last few years. Those who like it do so because they want to legitimize mental health challenges as real challenges people face just like any other health problems. I understand their motivations, but I tend to be on the side of hating the term. It feels clinical, sterile, othering, and disempowering when I think about applying the label to myself. It makes me feel like I need to be fixed, which is not something I believe, despite my strong identification with my PTSD (and let’s face it, I probably have an anxiety diagnosis as well…or could if I don’t). I might be wounded, but I’m not someone’s lab project.

The other popular phrase I’ve encountered in the peer movement is “mental wellness.” On the surface it sounds better. It attempts to emphasize strength over weakness and de-stigmatize mental health. For some reason, though, it still leaves me with the an emotional gag reflex (ooh, remember this post?). I want to smack anyone who asks me what my wellness plan is.

Perhaps by itself, mental wellness wouldn’t irritate me so much if it weren’t for the language surrounding the wellness idea. Questions like, “what do I look like and act like when I’m well?”

I know the answer they’re looking for is “cheerful, happy, good, upbeat, calm, peaceful” and other such saccharine words, but I don’t think that’s wellness. My mental wellness plan doesn’t involve trying to maintain happy or taking emergency action because I feel sad.

Ultimately, though, I think my aversion to “mental wellness” comes from the fact that it’s still working within the dichotomy of wellness/illness. It’s a paradigm within which I don’t even want to operate for my mental health because it sets up certain experiences as inherently “unwell.”

I prefer to think of my mental state as being somewhere on the spectrum of wholeness or fragmentation.

When I’m fragmented, I’m not connected or engaged with parts of myself. I’m suppressing emotions, thoughts, memories, desires, maybe even experiences. I disconnect from my psyche, either entirely ignoring valid emotions or becoming stuck in them. Fragmentation interrupts my daily functioning and interferes with my relationships.

Maybe that sounds like what most people think of as “illness” or “unwellness,” yet I have found that fragmentation can involve happiness. If I’m stuck in happiness, refusing to move through my process by maniacally inducing a feeling of “good,” then my happiness is as detrimental to my wellbeing and wholeness as depression or anger can be.

On the flip side, when I’m moving towards wholeness, I’m integrating all of the parts of myself and actively engaging in my process. Sometimes that means that I’ll be joyous and upbeat. Sometimes it means I’ll be balling my eyes out or screaming into a pillow. The difference isn’t what I’m feeling in that moment. The difference is in whether I’m engaging informatively.

No emotion is inherently unhealthy, negative, dangerous, or bad. All of them have a place in being a whole person. The only thing that can be unhealthy, negative, dangerous, or bad are the scripts we apply to our emotions…and one of those scripts, I’m starting to think, might be the script of mental wellness.

If I am moving in my process, no matter what emotion I’m experiencing, I can be well if I am connected to myself. Healing isn’t about moving towards good feelings. It’s not always about “getting better” or “recovering.”  It’s about moving towards integration of all our aspects.