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Love The Wound
Everything happens here in human school. There may not be an obvious reason why things happen. Shit simply happens. Humans are humans. Life is brutal and beautiful.
Leaning into the tough, heartbreaking, and heart-opening curriculum here in human school is sacred work. It teaches us that we can not be human alone. We must err on the side of presence, connection, and empathy. We are being called to witness ourselves and others. We must lean into our pain and recognize the pain of others.
In this way, we Love the Wound, which is another therapeutic cornerstone here at HOME.
The beauty of witnessing so many families move into transformation and healing, flourishing and joy, is that we get to see people turn into, instead of away from, their hurt. Not an easy endeavor given our collective culture’s obsession with denial and numbing. However, the families that choose remembering over amnesia and feeling over anesthesia are the very same families who begin to accompany each other, much more lovingly. This occurs because they are learning to love the wound.
To Love the Wound does not mean we become obsessed with it and addicted to it. That would of course be a recipe for victimhood and resentment—though of course many choose that. Sadly, in today’s marketplace, we have therapeutic environments, social media influencers, and unwise teachers contributing to this type of emotional quicksand as legacies of blame become entrenched instead of legacies of care. So much of therapy is laser-focused on what parents did wrong, and therefore, parental shaming becomes the ongoing refrain and excuse, a hobby for many. While many mistakes need to be repaired, there are many parents—certainly not all—willing to do the work necessary to prevent further damage and to create intergenerational health.
Please do not misinterpret what I am saying. I have sat with, and continue to sit with, people whose pain was embedded in their bodies and souls at the hands of abusers who continue to abuse. I have witnessed heartbreak and trauma that defies words and makes even the most faithful wonder out loud about God. I have sat with my terror that the worst thing might indeed happen (again). Love the Wound does not mean we cover up the reality with platitudes or stupidity: some people do and will continue to do egregiously horrific things to themselves and others. Love the Wound means we just sit with it—the uncertainty, the mystery, the inexplicable.
To Love the Wound also means we awaken to both the damage we have done and the damage done to us. One of my favorite thoughts around this was written by Henri Nouwen,
“As long as you don’t own your pain—that is, integrate your pain into your way of being in the world—the danger exists that you will use the other to seek healing for yourself. Your call is to bring that pain HOME. As long as your wounded part remains foreign to your adult self, your pain will injure you as well as others.”
We are in this world to help heal each other and to help each other experience radical love. Not to perpetuate hurt. We can not carry out that sacred mission unless we learn to love our wounds.
Loving the wound means we turn toward ourselves with care and tenderness, feeling the full impact of our woundedness and holding it gently. When we do this, we stop bleeding on others who did not cut us. Woundedness is a two-way street. This is an exceptionally important, directional teaching. When we have unhealed wounds, we tend to wound others and continue the cycle of harm. To turn toward ourselves with care and to Love the Wound means we approach ourselves with compassion. This allows us to self-heal and to stop wounding others. We must learn to practice repair toward ourselves and offer the same emotional balm to others.
Therefore, a key element of Love the Wound is accountability. When we stay stuck in our woundedness way beyond what is useful to accept and acknowledge, we perpetuate the intergenerational patterns. It is possible to nurse our pain, to feed it and nourish it like an indulged child. In this way, it becomes hardened inside of us like magma waiting to erupt into lava. And erupt it does, wreaking havoc in the form of blaming, shaming, criticizing, judging, gaslighting, teasing, and bullying.
Learning to soften the hard edges around our hearts encourages us to soften toward the wound and to also open toward others. Here are a few suggestions of what that looks and sounds like:
- When faced with a relational mistake we often make, we can say to ourselves, “There it is again. What is it trying to tell me?”
- When faced with feedback from someone that our actions or words have been hurtful, we can say, “I see how that is hurtful. Can we talk about how I can approach this differently?”
- When we let ourselves down, we can explore by saying, “How do I conspire in my diminishment?”
- When we are reflecting on a painful situation, we can get curious by asking, “How am I complicit in creating the very thing I say I don’t want?”
Last night I was watching the full moon rise. The urban landscape was lit by the lunar light—it felt nourishing and soft, unlike the more glaring light of the sun. I stood on my terrace, taking it all in. I was reminded that this is how it feels to love the wound: soft and welcoming, inspiring and freeing, gentle and slow.