CURE VERSUS GROWTH
In our culture, we are biased in our understanding of what healing means because of the pervasive metaphor of scientific medicine: one goes through specific stages of healing from a "disease" toward an eventual static state, from wound to sepsis to control of infection to scaring, or from infection to mobilization of the immune system to control of infection to recovery. The medical model sees disease as a foreign condition against which one's body mobilizes to cope; with proper aid, the body will fight disease off in stepwise fashion, with a resulting end state of health if treatment is successful. This metaphor of healing has had great utility in the mastering of certain conditions. But with the advent of psychoneuroimmunology, even modern medicine is finding it to be limited in significant ways.
Broadly speaking, the survivor of traumatic situations is not dealing so much with a "disease" as with compromises of the natural course of growth that were made in the service of survival and self-integrity. Healing, then, is really the process of reestablishing the natural cycle of growth and development in relation to those developmental issues that have been most affected by the traumatic situation. Healing from the impact of trauma is fundamentally a process of growth.
In healing as growth, as apposed to a linear progression toward cure, we address and readdress certain issues in ever more accomplished and differentiated ways, in much the same way as we learn any complex task - speaking, reading, or writing, for example. We do not achieve one stage and move on to the next, leaving the previous stage behind. Rather, the healing process is more like the creation of an oil painting: the background is painted in, and then details are added, and then washes and tone are overlaid on the whole. But the painting is not yet done, for the background still has to be refined in light of the emerging details, and then more details will be added and shifted, and as these elements take on new weight and interactions, the tone and the cast of the canvas will be shifted and refined by the artist. Each part of the painting supports and refines the previous part and is supported and refined in turn.
To put this idea another way, growth proceeds in a spiral fashion. We visit and revisit complex issues and tasks with increasing mastery, breadth, and capacity. We approach previously intolerable risks at each new level of the spiral. At each round, at each pass, a new reorganization of the whole field, the whole gestalt, occurs as new capacities are integrated and assimilated, old traumas are undone, and a new self emerges in engagement with the world. "
James I. Kepner
In our culture, we are biased in our understanding of what healing means because of the pervasive metaphor of scientific medicine: one goes through specific stages of healing from a "disease" toward an eventual static state, from wound to sepsis to control of infection to scaring, or from infection to mobilization of the immune system to control of infection to recovery. The medical model sees disease as a foreign condition against which one's body mobilizes to cope; with proper aid, the body will fight disease off in stepwise fashion, with a resulting end state of health if treatment is successful. This metaphor of healing has had great utility in the mastering of certain conditions. But with the advent of psychoneuroimmunology, even modern medicine is finding it to be limited in significant ways.
Broadly speaking, the survivor of traumatic situations is not dealing so much with a "disease" as with compromises of the natural course of growth that were made in the service of survival and self-integrity. Healing, then, is really the process of reestablishing the natural cycle of growth and development in relation to those developmental issues that have been most affected by the traumatic situation. Healing from the impact of trauma is fundamentally a process of growth.
In healing as growth, as apposed to a linear progression toward cure, we address and readdress certain issues in ever more accomplished and differentiated ways, in much the same way as we learn any complex task - speaking, reading, or writing, for example. We do not achieve one stage and move on to the next, leaving the previous stage behind. Rather, the healing process is more like the creation of an oil painting: the background is painted in, and then details are added, and then washes and tone are overlaid on the whole. But the painting is not yet done, for the background still has to be refined in light of the emerging details, and then more details will be added and shifted, and as these elements take on new weight and interactions, the tone and the cast of the canvas will be shifted and refined by the artist. Each part of the painting supports and refines the previous part and is supported and refined in turn.
To put this idea another way, growth proceeds in a spiral fashion. We visit and revisit complex issues and tasks with increasing mastery, breadth, and capacity. We approach previously intolerable risks at each new level of the spiral. At each round, at each pass, a new reorganization of the whole field, the whole gestalt, occurs as new capacities are integrated and assimilated, old traumas are undone, and a new self emerges in engagement with the world. "
James I. Kepner