Your Guides

Cathy’s Journey

I, Cathy, am wounded. My wound is central to who I am. I have always taught and worked with clients through the filter of my own experience, which is my wound. My wound is what enables me to feel and understand the emotions underlying the problems in our clients’ lives. It brings me closer to the client. Through the resonance of the client’s woundedness with my own, I search for the way forward for the client. My wound is the wellspring from which my professional work takes its source. My intuitive wisdom and understanding of the client’s difficulties and needs comes from my own wound. Working with my own wound is at the core of my personality and my life. Without this, I could not be there for our clients and students.

My wound also shows me the themes that need excavating personally, with clients and collectively. My core wound and I have been intimate since I was a child. The theme is transgenerational and historical trauma. As I reach a place further along in my own healing journey, I realize that this theme resonates with the collective. My wound led me on the journey of my life. It led me to a place where I have reconnected with what was broken. I now taste the gift of my wound, which is the sense of belonging that I had been separated from. “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” (T. S. Elliot)
This core wound stems from the trauma and thread of my maternal bloodline and is also part of a larger historical trauma. In the microcosm, it helps me work on this major theme with clients and students and in the macrocosm it resonates with the collective healing needed on the planet at the moment. My wound is the gift from which I find my place in my life through my personal myth, in my work as a healer and in the collective as a conscious being.

Florian’s Journey

I, Florian gained a much deeper understanding of being a Wounded Healer several years ago, when my soul demanded that I stop working as a psychiatrist. While I loved providing for my clients in my private practice and was devoted to them, no matter what, I was getting close to burn-out.

I had thought about the need and desire to stop being a psychiatrist for a while, but there were many egoic reasons why it was difficult. It was hard to ‘abandon’ my clients and say goodbye to them. My identity was excessively wrapped up in my professional persona.

Earlier that summer, while on vacation, I had a profound revelatory experience with the book “The Alchemy of Healing” by Edward Whitmont MD, a Jungian and homeopath. I had heard of the book and been intrigued by it for some time.

This last chapter is about the Healer.  In my memory I had distilled the experience down to a single paragraph, but in re-reading the chapter now it is full of potent statements, that spoke to my soul. My ego/intellect was a helpless bystander as I read the following:

“… in projecting upon the patient the unresolved problematic of his own helpless or sick child, the one who still needs to be cared for and loved or to rebel against authority, the healer may unconsciously try to treat unacceptable parts of himself in the patient. … Projectively seeing one’s own despair in the other aggravates that person’s existing pathology and often induces hopelessness in the
other.”

This passage terrified me more than the scariest movie I had ever seen. It felt like a cold surgical mirror from which there was no escape had been held up to me. My desire to always be there for my patients, no matter what, was due to my own wound from childhood neglect and I was keeping my clients trapped in the client role, unconscious of their own inner healer. In the instant I read that passage, I knew I had to close my practice and commit to working on myself first and continuously. This knowledge came from deep inside me. I finally heard my soul and through it a much deeper earth wisdom. I had to die to that role.

Whitmont goes on to say “Thus the healing force impersonated by and mediated by the healer and his initiator inflicts illness and death and, paradoxically, … itself suffers illness and death, in the service of consciousness and transformation.”

Having read this chapter, I knew I had to stop working as a psychiatrist. My sense of myself, my place in the world, even my sense of the whole world, was crumbling. It was a psychological death process, that I would now identify with the mortificatio stage of alchemy. Without this realization that happened not just intellectually but in my entire being, I would not have been able to grow into the work that Cathy and I are doing.

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