Can you help others while you are still healing yourself?
On tending to others, being tended to, and the spiral of healing
There is a curious assumption I have encountered over the years around those of us who spend our lives sitting with, supporting and tending to other people.
Somewhere along the way, the therapist, healing practitioner, counsellor, spirit worker, energy worker - or whatever name we give to those who walk alongside others - can become separated from the very human experiences we help other people navigate.
There can be an assumption that we should have it all figured out.
That our own wounds should be completely healed.
That if we find ourselves struggling, grieving, questioning, returning to therapy or seeking healing from another, then perhaps we should not be working with clients ourselves.
I find this idea quite strange.
I don't tend to call myself a healer. It has never sat entirely comfortably with me. I work with people. I listen. I hold space. The transformational power belongs to the client; ultimately, it is they who choose to transform.
My work is to help create the conditions in which those changes can naturally occur. I work with Spirit and offer the medicine, practices and ways of seeing that I have gathered through my own experiences, training and the people I have been fortunate enough to learn from.
But I am also human.
Whatever we understand ourselves to be beyond this human form, we are also here, living within bodies, relationships, histories, nervous systems and indeed a world based upon polarities.
We love people and we lose people. Our hearts break. Life changes unexpectedly. Old wounds can speak again when we thought we had heard everything they had to say. There are places within ourselves that we can see with enormous clarity, and others that remain hidden from us until life, or another person, reveals them.
Working with Spirit does not remove me from my humanity, nor do I think it is supposed to.
My own path into this work was born through a need to understand and heal myself. Much of what I have learnt came because I needed it first.
I imagine this is true for many who find themselves working closely with others. Something in our own lives asks us to go searching, and somewhere along that search we gather medicine that eventually becomes useful to someone else too.
But gathering medicine does not mean we stop needing medicine.
Knowing how to tend to another does not mean we will never need tending ourselves.
I think this is where we can become confused about what it means to be a practitioner of the healing arts.
There is, of course, a responsibility that comes with working closely with other people's vulnerable places. We need to know ourselves well enough to recognise when something belongs to us rather than to the person sitting before us. We need to recognise when our own difficulties are affecting our ability to be present, and there may absolutely be times when stepping back, resting or seeking additional support is the most responsible thing we can do.
But needing support is not the same as being unable to support another.
Having wounds is not the same as asking our clients to carry them.
Going to therapy does not make a therapist less of a therapist, just as receiving healing from another, something I have sought at different points along my own path, does not somehow undo the years of experience, knowledge and medicine a practitioner carries.
For me, I am far more interested in whether someone is willing to look at themselves honestly.
Can they recognise when something has become tangled?
Are they able to ask for help?
Can they sit on the other side of the relationship and become the one who receives?
Can they acknowledge that perhaps their own medicine is not always the medicine required?
There is a humility in this that I think is important.
I have met many healers, teachers and practitioners from different traditions throughout my own path, and have lived and learnt different ways of working with Spirit. None of this has led me to believe that there is some final place we arrive at called “healed”.
I don't experience healing as a straight road.
From the outside, it might appear that we have regressed.
But perhaps we have simply come around the spiral again.
We are not quite the person who stood in that place before.
We have lived more. Loved more. Let go of people, places and things. Gathered different resources.
Perhaps developed a little more compassion for the person we were the last time we stood at this familiar place on the spiral of life.
And there may be something else waiting for us now.
Another layer – a new onion skin, as I like to call it, revealing itself to us.
A different kind of understanding.
Another piece of our eternal puzzle asking to be tended to.
Why would becoming a therapist or practitioner remove us from this spiral?
If anything, I think those of us who accompany others through their inner worlds have a responsibility to remain willing to walk our own.
There will be times when we are the person sitting beside someone else, holding steady while they find their way through something difficult.
There will be other times when we need someone to sit beside us or hold our hand.
I don't see a contradiction there. I see something deeply human.
Perhaps part of the problem comes from the pedestal we can place certain people upon. We imagine the therapist who never struggles, the spiritual practitioner who never doubts, the healer who is never wounded, or the person who works with Spirit and therefore somehow floats above the ordinary messiness of being alive.
I have little interest in that pedestal.
It doesn't leave much room for being human.
And I wonder whether pretending to have transcended our humanity can sometimes create more difficulty than simply admitting that we are still here, learning alongside everyone else.
There is a difference between being responsible for our wounds and pretending we no longer have any.
For me, responsibility means continuing to meet myself. It means recognising when I have the capacity to sit with another and also recognising when I need rest, support, supervision, healing, friendship, solitude, nature, Spirit, or the loving touch of another helping hand.
Sometimes our own hands cannot reach the places that need tending.
Sometimes another person can see something we cannot.
We all have blind spots.
Sometimes we simply need to stop being the one who holds everything and allow ourselves to be held.
None of this makes the medicine we carry less real.
If anything, perhaps our willingness to remain within this exchange of giving and receiving keeps something within us alive.
It reminds us what vulnerability feels like, what trust asks of a person, and even how much courage can be involved in sitting before someone and saying, in whatever words we find, “I need some help with this.”
Those are not small things to remember when other people regularly place their own tender places into our care.
We are not standing outside the human experience looking in.
We are fully in it.
All. Of. Us.
There will be seasons when we have much to give, and seasons when life asks us to receive. There will be times when we walk beside another and times when another walks beside us.
I don't believe one diminishes the other.
Perhaps they belong to the same movement.
A great spiral of learning, tending, forgetting, re-membering, healing and becoming, where none of us are really walking ahead of anyone else in quite the way we sometimes imagine.
We are simply meeting one another at different places along the path.
And perhaps those of us who spend our lives tending to others need to remember...
We too are worthy of being tended to.
Not because we have failed in some way, or because our Soul Medicine has ceased working, but simply because we are human.
And humans need one another.
Shamanic Healing
Re-membering Ourselves Home
Fine Art Print by Roberta Orpwood
This artwork depicts the energetic field of a shamanic healing, specifically the practice often known as soul retrieval. It reflects the gentle gathering of lost, hidden or fragmented aspects of self, and the sacred act of calling them home.
Re-membering Ourselves Home speaks to restoration of the Soul. To the quiet weaving back together of memory, vitality and belonging. In shamanic healing, soul retrieval is about wholeness. It is about returning to the body, to the heart, to the truth of who we are beneath survival.
This illustration was commissioned for The Ultimate Guide to Shamanism, published by The Quarto Group Publishing USA and written by Rebecca Keating, founder of Shaman Sisters.
Each print is professionally produced using archival pigment-based inks on heavyweight, acid-free textured fine art paper, ensuring exceptional colour depth and longevity.
DETAILS
Signed by the artist
Available in A4 (210 x 297mm) or A3 (420 x 297mm)
Museum-quality archival pigment inks
Heavyweight, acid-free textured fine art paper
Small white border included for easy mounting and framing
Print only. Frame not included.
© Roberta Orpwood