Does anyone else here get a bit triggered by the word "healing" in the first place?
We belonged to a church community that used this word frequently. The church would hold "Healing Weekends" which were like a revival, I guess. You spent all day Thursday through Sunday morning from 9am-11pm at the church participating in what I guess I'd now describe as exorcisms. You'd spend the whole weekend pouring out every awful thing you've done or less than acceptable thought you've had and then get prayed over. That would usually involve expelling demons out of you. My mom, who is one of the most mentally unwell people I know and has never spent a single minute in therapy, is a certified "healer" in her church community through "Restoring the Foundations" (https://www.restoringthefoundations.org/). She charges people about a thousand bucks a week to pray them through their "healing"... I kid you not.
Does anyone else bristle in their bodies when the word healing is used? Has the word been weaponized for you to prove your unworthiness in the church? Because it has for me. Maybe one day I can make the word mine again... but I think I need another word for now.
When I first read the title of this piece, I thought you might be steering hard right at wellness culture, of which my family is highly entrenched. (My grandma was a first-to-the-party holistic doctor from the 1970s until she died in 2013. In her last few years, my aunt told me, "I understand that vitamins are Mother's hobby, so I make sure she has money to enjoy them.") But I can see you were going into alllllll the layers of healing to be GOOD, accepted, normal, unaffected. And yes... I do think you've hit the nail on the head with this.
Healing as a special interest was probably the only reason I had an open door to suspecting I was Autistic ... because I knew I needed to fix that sh*t right away. Like, wow, NOBODY will hire an Autistic editor and no one will love an Autistic, meltdowny, non-breezy wife. My mind's first response was to see Autism as another thing to "manage." But, ironically, my interest in healing also opened another door to try first EMDR and then Somatic Experiencing therapy, which I've been in weekly for more than three years now.
Does anyone else ever hear themselves processing super simple things in their minds around being a person in a human body? Sometimes I still find myself coaching myself with things like, "All human have feelings." or "Our bodies have neuroreceptors and are taking in knowledge." or "This is what feeling a feeling is like ... not a narrative in my brain." The one I lean back on when I feel an instinct to "heal" myself is, "I deserve to feel good in my body. My life deserves to feel good." And as long as that rings true somewhere, then the new book I'm reading or therapy I'm interested in is given a chance, but not for anyone else but me, deserving to not be tortured.
The “you’re broken and once you’re healed you can make an impact” message is such a common one. If you’re angry at all the injustice, you’re broken. That message is horrific and paralyzing and stops change and reform.
Ugh. That "brokenness" song was one of the main staples of the church I attended to after escaping a verbally and spiritually abusive church that almost killed me. More brokenness was the last things I wanted any of at that point and I was like "nope, not singing that. I'll just be over here sitting down and not listening until you're done". So-called "worship" music is mostly just weird and nonsensical and I'm constantly telling people to actually listen to the words they're singing...which doesn't make me super popular with the people who just want to feel good.
I appreciate you naming this as a double-edged sword. My family identity as a kid was to be the "healthy" child while my siblings were supposedly super-screwed up.
I was astonished a few years ago when reading that (I think) family systems therapy says the most "screwed up" kid is actually the healthiest person in the family--because they are actually being honest about the things that are unhealthy and reacting to them in appropriate ways.
Which: yes. In my actually whole moments I am trying to be that kid acting out, yelling and insisting that things ARE NOT OKAY AS-IS. That wholeness sometimes looks maladaptive.
I think healing has always been my special interest--both the performative kind (not helpful) and the actual kind. Like: I was reading Harriet Lerner books on anger and communication when I was ten (I think my dad was in therapy back then). And binging advice columns forever b/c they taught me how people dealt with life.
And sometimes this has meant that I have felt this drive to be The Healthiest Human Being On The Planet. And also that I was already so healthy wasn't it selfish of me to ask for or seek out more help? (blerg).
But as a coping mechanism it's not all bad. It was better than some of the other ways I might have masked. I mean, it was sometimes a repeat of unhealthy patterns but ALSO it helped me actually heal and it did not physically harm me.
Which means everything we're doing is a mixed bag. Both deeply human and a little ridiculous and ALSO deeply necessary and wonderful work. None of it is perfect and that's good. We're all stumbling around.
and sometimes that turns into dancing almost by accident.
Reading this post and the comments have been so helpful for me this morning. I had a mini ED relapse last week and a (possibly related) emotional relapse this week--spiraling into well worn emotional grooves of hating what my life has become, and feeling terrified of the empty, unconnected, floating feeling on the horizon (a kind of anti-spirituality?) Thankfully, my therapy sessions have been really helpful, and I have one tomorrow. But today this community his helping me feel less alone and unconnected.
A few random thoughts I had in response: I sometimes wonder if Jesus was that intense autistic person who found the status quo intolerable. If that’s why so many of us autistic folks, growing up in this weird, awful church world, honed in on the words of Jesus as the only thing that made sense. And then thought we had a gift to offer to communities who clearly struggled to make sense of the words of this person they worshiped. And slowly discovered his words , this way of being, have always been seen as more of a curse than a gift....
Another: I recently started meditating with my eyes open rather than closed because it felt better. I think it was another subtle shift away from the posture of prayer/fixing myself and toward openness and radical acceptance.
Anyway, thank you as always, DL and this community, for creating space.
relating to this "I ping-pong between the binary of wanting to be completely well and being overwhelmed by how erratic, unpredictable, and human I actually am." it's a wild ride, and when I get really bothered by it, I try to invite myself to have less opinions about myself! Some kind of body practice / action outside my mind can help me get there
It was a revelation to me a few years ago when I realized that my desire as a mom to my young adult kids that they both get treatment for their anxiety & depression so they could be “healthy & happy” was me wanting them to be fixed. It came from a caring place but I am sorry it sent the message that how they are wired was wrong.
well i completely forgot about that Holiness song (thanks 90s repetitive garbage, ever heard of songs without a chorus???) and the white lady's legs, OH NO. why is AI so bad at humans?
anyway, yes i do tend to vacilate between "oh i'm doing great today, did all my self-care, check!" and "sunken into a pit of despair, why even bother". and i want to like, show off to my friends that i'm all done with self-growth (HA!)
A few months ago, I was lying there on the couch, ice pack on my chest because I saw a TikTok about it, and I thought, "Regulate" is a synonym for "control." Isn't "regulating my nervous system" just another attempt to control my unruly nervous system and force my body to do something it doesn't want to do?
So yeah, EVERY word of this, and I really appreciate your thoughts on it.
Like you, I also got a surprise autism diagnosis at 38. I was assigned female at birth in the 80s, and a lot of your writing resonates with me, even though I grew up in a mostly secular household. Part of this journey has involved coming to terms with how *therapy* has harmed me -- I was misdiagnosed with a mental health condition in first grade and ineffectively treated for it for 3 decades. Looking back, I realize that most of what I was struggling with was barriers to access in schools, workplaces, and society. While well intentioned, the therapy I accessed taught me that the problem was ME -- my cognitive distortions, my lousy brain chemistry -- and if I was struggling, it was probably caused by some fault in my psychology and was my responsibility to fix.
So where do we all go from there? I have no idea. I'm trying to live my way into a model for being well that doesn't depend on me internalizing everything and being compliant and likable and quiet. Right now, that looks like resisting the urge to find someone or something to Fix Me.
"You can be centered and angry. You can be centered and highly emotional. You can be centered and speak out loudly against injustice." YES
Love this Danielle. I think of so many times I’ve spoken up about injustices, and did so with emotion and shared personal experiences that affected me to emphasise my point, and have been told I need to heal from that and then get back to them. Infuriating! Looking after ourselves is important, but not reaching some point where we’ve shed our humanity before we can show up, belong and contribute.
I have grown in greater wholeness and freedom as I have moved away from all or nothing thinking especially as it relates to arriving at being healed. "Being healed" was a bar set in the church that when it didn't happen for me, made me feel less than. To self sooth my inner chaos to this outward rejection, I noticed I would mask "being healed" to give me a sense of belonging to the Holy Spirit or gifted by God or belonging to the community of healed believers of Jesus or yadayadayada.
When my marriage couldn't be saved or healed, it became an invitation to accept that "being healed" was not something to grasp or arrive at. The measurement of being healed is impossible. My body knows this truth but my mind wants to disprove it, it wants to oversimplify my humanity.
Instead my life will always be an unfolding of ongoing healing. The space and freedom in accepting this truth has grounded my soul in the fact that the only absolute we have in life is change. Accepting that healing will always be happening in my life invites me to the beauty and wonder of my humanity. Now I desire to revel in my humanity and this is where I find greater freedom and wholeness.
Gosh darn it, D.L, you've taken lines right out of my "notes to self" from therapy over the last few months, including but not limited to: "feeling grounded/connected is just connected, regardless of the emotional state I'm in. Grounded does not have to equal calm and steady" or "well crap, I stuff my brain with data as a numbing mechanism to avoid feeling or being in my body and it might be bordering on addiction" or "even when I'm doing all of this work, be on the lookout for new rules I might be making up about how to 'get it right'" And then I take a deep breath and head back into the messy middle and not just swing from one fundamentalism to another. With you in the midst...
Waitaminnit. Were *my* existential crises internalized autistic meltdowns? It's so wild that I've been leading a completely different life than I thought I was.
Healing as a Form of Autistic Masking?
Does anyone else here get a bit triggered by the word "healing" in the first place?
We belonged to a church community that used this word frequently. The church would hold "Healing Weekends" which were like a revival, I guess. You spent all day Thursday through Sunday morning from 9am-11pm at the church participating in what I guess I'd now describe as exorcisms. You'd spend the whole weekend pouring out every awful thing you've done or less than acceptable thought you've had and then get prayed over. That would usually involve expelling demons out of you. My mom, who is one of the most mentally unwell people I know and has never spent a single minute in therapy, is a certified "healer" in her church community through "Restoring the Foundations" (https://www.restoringthefoundations.org/). She charges people about a thousand bucks a week to pray them through their "healing"... I kid you not.
Does anyone else bristle in their bodies when the word healing is used? Has the word been weaponized for you to prove your unworthiness in the church? Because it has for me. Maybe one day I can make the word mine again... but I think I need another word for now.
When I first read the title of this piece, I thought you might be steering hard right at wellness culture, of which my family is highly entrenched. (My grandma was a first-to-the-party holistic doctor from the 1970s until she died in 2013. In her last few years, my aunt told me, "I understand that vitamins are Mother's hobby, so I make sure she has money to enjoy them.") But I can see you were going into alllllll the layers of healing to be GOOD, accepted, normal, unaffected. And yes... I do think you've hit the nail on the head with this.
Healing as a special interest was probably the only reason I had an open door to suspecting I was Autistic ... because I knew I needed to fix that sh*t right away. Like, wow, NOBODY will hire an Autistic editor and no one will love an Autistic, meltdowny, non-breezy wife. My mind's first response was to see Autism as another thing to "manage." But, ironically, my interest in healing also opened another door to try first EMDR and then Somatic Experiencing therapy, which I've been in weekly for more than three years now.
Does anyone else ever hear themselves processing super simple things in their minds around being a person in a human body? Sometimes I still find myself coaching myself with things like, "All human have feelings." or "Our bodies have neuroreceptors and are taking in knowledge." or "This is what feeling a feeling is like ... not a narrative in my brain." The one I lean back on when I feel an instinct to "heal" myself is, "I deserve to feel good in my body. My life deserves to feel good." And as long as that rings true somewhere, then the new book I'm reading or therapy I'm interested in is given a chance, but not for anyone else but me, deserving to not be tortured.
The “you’re broken and once you’re healed you can make an impact” message is such a common one. If you’re angry at all the injustice, you’re broken. That message is horrific and paralyzing and stops change and reform.
Ugh. That "brokenness" song was one of the main staples of the church I attended to after escaping a verbally and spiritually abusive church that almost killed me. More brokenness was the last things I wanted any of at that point and I was like "nope, not singing that. I'll just be over here sitting down and not listening until you're done". So-called "worship" music is mostly just weird and nonsensical and I'm constantly telling people to actually listen to the words they're singing...which doesn't make me super popular with the people who just want to feel good.
I appreciate you naming this as a double-edged sword. My family identity as a kid was to be the "healthy" child while my siblings were supposedly super-screwed up.
I was astonished a few years ago when reading that (I think) family systems therapy says the most "screwed up" kid is actually the healthiest person in the family--because they are actually being honest about the things that are unhealthy and reacting to them in appropriate ways.
Which: yes. In my actually whole moments I am trying to be that kid acting out, yelling and insisting that things ARE NOT OKAY AS-IS. That wholeness sometimes looks maladaptive.
I think healing has always been my special interest--both the performative kind (not helpful) and the actual kind. Like: I was reading Harriet Lerner books on anger and communication when I was ten (I think my dad was in therapy back then). And binging advice columns forever b/c they taught me how people dealt with life.
And sometimes this has meant that I have felt this drive to be The Healthiest Human Being On The Planet. And also that I was already so healthy wasn't it selfish of me to ask for or seek out more help? (blerg).
But as a coping mechanism it's not all bad. It was better than some of the other ways I might have masked. I mean, it was sometimes a repeat of unhealthy patterns but ALSO it helped me actually heal and it did not physically harm me.
Which means everything we're doing is a mixed bag. Both deeply human and a little ridiculous and ALSO deeply necessary and wonderful work. None of it is perfect and that's good. We're all stumbling around.
and sometimes that turns into dancing almost by accident.
Reading this post and the comments have been so helpful for me this morning. I had a mini ED relapse last week and a (possibly related) emotional relapse this week--spiraling into well worn emotional grooves of hating what my life has become, and feeling terrified of the empty, unconnected, floating feeling on the horizon (a kind of anti-spirituality?) Thankfully, my therapy sessions have been really helpful, and I have one tomorrow. But today this community his helping me feel less alone and unconnected.
A few random thoughts I had in response: I sometimes wonder if Jesus was that intense autistic person who found the status quo intolerable. If that’s why so many of us autistic folks, growing up in this weird, awful church world, honed in on the words of Jesus as the only thing that made sense. And then thought we had a gift to offer to communities who clearly struggled to make sense of the words of this person they worshiped. And slowly discovered his words , this way of being, have always been seen as more of a curse than a gift....
Another: I recently started meditating with my eyes open rather than closed because it felt better. I think it was another subtle shift away from the posture of prayer/fixing myself and toward openness and radical acceptance.
Anyway, thank you as always, DL and this community, for creating space.
relating to this "I ping-pong between the binary of wanting to be completely well and being overwhelmed by how erratic, unpredictable, and human I actually am." it's a wild ride, and when I get really bothered by it, I try to invite myself to have less opinions about myself! Some kind of body practice / action outside my mind can help me get there
It was a revelation to me a few years ago when I realized that my desire as a mom to my young adult kids that they both get treatment for their anxiety & depression so they could be “healthy & happy” was me wanting them to be fixed. It came from a caring place but I am sorry it sent the message that how they are wired was wrong.
well i completely forgot about that Holiness song (thanks 90s repetitive garbage, ever heard of songs without a chorus???) and the white lady's legs, OH NO. why is AI so bad at humans?
anyway, yes i do tend to vacilate between "oh i'm doing great today, did all my self-care, check!" and "sunken into a pit of despair, why even bother". and i want to like, show off to my friends that i'm all done with self-growth (HA!)
A few months ago, I was lying there on the couch, ice pack on my chest because I saw a TikTok about it, and I thought, "Regulate" is a synonym for "control." Isn't "regulating my nervous system" just another attempt to control my unruly nervous system and force my body to do something it doesn't want to do?
So yeah, EVERY word of this, and I really appreciate your thoughts on it.
Like you, I also got a surprise autism diagnosis at 38. I was assigned female at birth in the 80s, and a lot of your writing resonates with me, even though I grew up in a mostly secular household. Part of this journey has involved coming to terms with how *therapy* has harmed me -- I was misdiagnosed with a mental health condition in first grade and ineffectively treated for it for 3 decades. Looking back, I realize that most of what I was struggling with was barriers to access in schools, workplaces, and society. While well intentioned, the therapy I accessed taught me that the problem was ME -- my cognitive distortions, my lousy brain chemistry -- and if I was struggling, it was probably caused by some fault in my psychology and was my responsibility to fix.
So where do we all go from there? I have no idea. I'm trying to live my way into a model for being well that doesn't depend on me internalizing everything and being compliant and likable and quiet. Right now, that looks like resisting the urge to find someone or something to Fix Me.
"You can be centered and angry. You can be centered and highly emotional. You can be centered and speak out loudly against injustice." YES
Love this Danielle. I think of so many times I’ve spoken up about injustices, and did so with emotion and shared personal experiences that affected me to emphasise my point, and have been told I need to heal from that and then get back to them. Infuriating! Looking after ourselves is important, but not reaching some point where we’ve shed our humanity before we can show up, belong and contribute.
Also... those AI images are... well... oddly calming and hilarious? Maybe we do have a few more months before the robots takeover.
I love all of this so much. 💗
I have grown in greater wholeness and freedom as I have moved away from all or nothing thinking especially as it relates to arriving at being healed. "Being healed" was a bar set in the church that when it didn't happen for me, made me feel less than. To self sooth my inner chaos to this outward rejection, I noticed I would mask "being healed" to give me a sense of belonging to the Holy Spirit or gifted by God or belonging to the community of healed believers of Jesus or yadayadayada.
When my marriage couldn't be saved or healed, it became an invitation to accept that "being healed" was not something to grasp or arrive at. The measurement of being healed is impossible. My body knows this truth but my mind wants to disprove it, it wants to oversimplify my humanity.
Instead my life will always be an unfolding of ongoing healing. The space and freedom in accepting this truth has grounded my soul in the fact that the only absolute we have in life is change. Accepting that healing will always be happening in my life invites me to the beauty and wonder of my humanity. Now I desire to revel in my humanity and this is where I find greater freedom and wholeness.
Gosh darn it, D.L, you've taken lines right out of my "notes to self" from therapy over the last few months, including but not limited to: "feeling grounded/connected is just connected, regardless of the emotional state I'm in. Grounded does not have to equal calm and steady" or "well crap, I stuff my brain with data as a numbing mechanism to avoid feeling or being in my body and it might be bordering on addiction" or "even when I'm doing all of this work, be on the lookout for new rules I might be making up about how to 'get it right'" And then I take a deep breath and head back into the messy middle and not just swing from one fundamentalism to another. With you in the midst...
And hokey shit, those images are terrifying!
Waitaminnit. Were *my* existential crises internalized autistic meltdowns? It's so wild that I've been leading a completely different life than I thought I was.