11 How Do I Heal Myself?
Briggs hadn’t expected to feel the way he did. His whole life, Briggs had felt reasonably put together, whole, and composed. Briggs had never felt perfect. He was instead well aware of his several flaws. And he knew he needed to work on them. But Briggs had recently reached a point where he knew that he was deeply broken, not just scuffling a little but truly at his wit’s end. And he didn’t like the feeling. Indeed, Briggs had the feeling that he wouldn’t long survive unless he found some profound healing. The curious thing for Briggs, though, was that his brokenness seemed to be coming not from an outside source but from somewhere deep inside himself, a condition that had long been there but was only now disabling and even destroying him. Briggs knew he needed help.
Brokenness
Some of us, perhaps many of us or even all of us, reach a place of brokenness in our lives, when we realize that something is fundamentally wrong with us, somewhere deep inside. External injuries and bruises happen, from which we need time to recover. But sometimes, the break isn’t so much externally caused but instead more like an internal conflict that is causing the injury from deep inside. We can be so poorly formed or inadequately arranged inside as to produce our own wounding, to be our own worst enemy. Brokenness may not be the worst thing in the world. We can all come from a place of inner fracture, with more fault lines ready to crack with any additional stress. Brokenness can help us release our pride and recover our ordinariness, even giving us humility and compassion. Yet brokenness can also disable us, driving us further down, keeping us from caring for ourselves or helping others. We know, at times, that we need help simply to carry on.
Recovery
Brokenness, then, is a useful construct, helping us to pause, assess, and reach out for help when we realize that we’re only hurting ourselves with the internal conflict that we carry. Take a moment to examine your own brokenness, especially if you’re struggling. Brokenness invites, even demands, that we discover our fault lines and, one hopes, recover from them. Brokenness goes hand in hand with recovery. Brokenness gives us a path of discovery and recovery to walk. Recovery, though, isn’t just a path to wholeness. The process of recovery holds its own value. Recovery from brokenness can teach us things about ourselves and about the world and life. Recovery can heal and restore us, of course. That’s its basic point. But recovery can also strengthen us beyond what we would have been if we had not suffered brokenness and gone through recovery. And recovery can equip us to help others recover. Recovery gives us an experience and tools we otherwise wouldn’t have had. Value not only your restoration to a whole, engaged, and resonant life but also the path of recovery that your brokenness required you to take.
Healing
The process of psychological or spiritual healing differs from the physiological process of healing a physical wound. Healing your physical wound may require some topical or other treatment. You may even need to participate in some therapy. Yet physical healing often seems a process largely on its own. Psychological healing, by contrast, can require one’s own active, desired, even willed involvement. If you don’t want to get better psychologically and spiritually, you may well not. Psychological and spiritual healing can involve something akin to permission. Psychological and spiritual healing may need to be self-actuated even if not necessarily self-accomplished. We do not literally stitch our souls back together. The source of healing may be in transcendent hands. But if we resist psychological healing, refusing to give it permission, and instead nurture our broken state, then healing may well not come. When you discover your brokenness, seek your healing. Desire that you be whole. Give yourself permission to work on yourself, heal from your brokenness, and become new and whole inside. Otherwise, your broken state may persist. Indeed, your fault lines may grow.
Patient
Curiously, when recovering from psychological and spiritual brokenness, you are your own patient. You stand in both the position of healer and healed. You may get substantial guidance from professionals and other sources. Yet they are only guides, not the healing mechanism or balm. Psychological and spiritual recovery generally requires a change in mental stance or approach. Changes in mental stance generally require some directed thought, both seeking self-discovery and embracing the new framework and constructs. Psychological transformation won’t generally hit you over the head until you relent to it. Your recovery may instead be more like an invitation, one that you’ll need in some positive way to accept. If you are not actively involved in your recovery, you may not recover. Your dual role in your own recovery, as both patient and healer, is both the challenge of psychological recovery and its blessing. Consider the pain of your brokenness to be the spur toward your participation in recovery. The greater your pain, the greater your willingness to pursue recovery.
Causes
Psychological and spiritual recovery can benefit from some understanding of the causes for and nature of one’s brokenness. Here is the hard part. Psychological brokenness involves something caused, arranged, or formed deep within you. One supposes that the brokenness may have simply arisen within you unbidden, a malignancy having no traceable cause. If your brokenness is clear enough in its nature, but without traceable source, then at least you’ll know what you’re dealing with, even if you can’t blame it on a cause. Not everything has a cause. Yet other broken conditions may become apparent only when you are able to connect them with identifiable things in your past. Some combination of character, personality, events, relationships, and conditions have conspired to bring about your brokenness. A single, serious trauma, for instance, may have caused a deep insecurity in you, or a similar insecurity may have arisen from a long period of deprivation. A difficult relationship with someone close to you, whether for instance a parent, sibling, or spouse, may alternatively have formed a compensatory mechanism within you. Study the trauma or deprivation, and you may learn more about your broken condition and how to recover from it. Causes can matter to diagnosis and recovery.
Adaptations
Causes can supply clues to understanding your brokenness and pursuing your recovery, when you recognize your brokenness as an adaptation. If you can’t immediately discern a cause for your brokenness, consider from the nature of your brokenness how it may have enabled you to adapt. When you see your brokenness as an interior adaptation to some external circumstance, you may better discern the cause for and nature of your brokenness. If, for instance, your brokenness is an exhausting drive to constantly produce things, to the detriment of your relationships and health, then consider how that drive has helped you to adapt. It may, for instance, be filling an old hole left by a sense of worth tied to your production rather than you just being who you are. For another example, if you are a helpless procrastinator, unwilling to take risks and create, you may be trying to preserve your old family image as the perfect child. Brokenness can be compensatory. How is your brokenness compensating? You may find clues to your healing from how your brokenness enables you to adapt.
Conditions
Conditions under which you once lived may also have affected your internal construction in a way that has contributed to your brokenness. Study the environments that formed you for clues to your internal conflicts. For instance, a child who develops in a disordered environment that punishes initiative may as an adult exhibit a learned helplessness and protective indolence. Similarly, a child who develops under frequent deprivation may as an adult exhibit unreasonable insecurities compensated by hoarding. Brokenness doesn’t always depend on a traumatic event or relationship. Instead, the environment in which and conditions under which we develop can internalize protective and adaptive stances and attitudes that later become a sort of brokenness. Study your brokenness for clues as to how it may have once been a reasonable response to your developmental conditions or environment.
Conflicts
Brokenness also often reflects an internal conflict between what may once have been a useful adaptation but what may now be an unnecessary inhibition and inappropriate, even disruptive, behavior. The person we once were may not be the person we can and should be. Yet the person we were persists, ingrained in our persona and identity. Your family structure as you developed required one set of characteristics and behaviors, in one family role. But your school, marriage, and workplace may invite or require different characteristics, behaviors, and roles. Indeed, we should expect different circumstances demanding different personas at different stages of our lives. Brokenness may exhibit a conflict between old and new roles, where the ego insists on maintaining control and continuity by continuing with the old role. Watch for internal conflicts as clues to your brokenness and your need to adapt to new circumstances, seasons, relationships, and roles.
Conception
Your self-conception is also key to your psychological and spiritual brokenness and recovery. If you are still, as an adult, playing out your childhood role in relationship to your parents, siblings, or childhood environment, your brokenness may be largely or entirely due to the internal conflict that self-conception produces in your adult role. If you mistakenly see yourself as helpless, a victim, or a failure, when instead you have efficacy, responsibility, and opportunity, then your self-conception is your brokenness. Your path to psychological and spiritual healing may simply be to conceive of yourself properly. Mistaken, distorted, and compensatory self-images produce mistakes, distortions, and compensations. We act out our self-images, whether those images are sensitive, stable, and attuned or instead callous, unconscious, dark, and destructive. Study how you conceive of yourself, not just consciously but at the subconscious level, reflected in your behaviors and emotions. And then prepare to modify your self-conception.
Discernment
Discernment is indeed the path to psychological and spiritual healing. Becoming aware of how you perceive yourself and your role in the world is itself healing. You may not change simply through awareness, but you certainly set the stage for change. With awareness, you begin to construe your brokenness not as an innate and unresolvable defect in your personal character but instead as misplaced adaptation. With awareness, recovery becomes possible. Possibility brings hope, and hope brings energy and motivation. When we see how we are still responding to old relationships, conditions, events, and environments, in ways that we have failed to adapt to our new environment and possibilities, we can modify those old patterns into new forms fitting to our maturity.
Imagination
Imagination plays a surprising role in healing. One can do more than simply recall and analyze old events, relationships, and conditions that may have shaped our self-conception, persona, and identity. We can actively imagine reshaping our self-conception into a healthier and more whole and stable entity. Try, for instance, speaking with your old self, getting to know who you were so that you can discern who you can and should be. Treat your broken self as your own patient, due your compassion and empathy but responsible to your guidance. Give your broken self assignments, encouragement, and permission. Celebrate your broken self’s healing with each small step forward that you perceive. Reward your healing self with approbation, relaxation, and rest along the way. Bring alive your inner relationship of old persona to new, lightness to darkness, and healer to healed. Picture your healed self in a transcendent environment of your choosing. The psyche can do more than wound the soul. It can also heal the soul.
Integration
In your process of recovery from psychological and spiritual brokenness, focus on integrating everything you discover about yourself. Integration does not mean to accept all faults or indulge all desires. To the contrary, to become whole you must incorporate your most challenging dimensions in healthy ways, transforming their darkness into light. You don’t overcome anger, for instance, simply by holding it at arm’s length. You must instead find its conflicted root to unwind that root into the pure and powerful purpose for which we have the capacity for anger. Your unholy anger may simply be misdirected bravery. Likewise, you don’t overcome depression simply by adopting a cheerful attitude. You must instead find its root to resolve the gnawing internal conflict that fuels the depression. Your depression may simply be one powerful attribute turned directly against another powerful attribute, producing a deadly stalemate, when you could align the two attributes into an even more-powerful path forward. Don’t dwell in darkness, nor banish it. Shine light on the darkness to bring it into its proper place in your whole.
Narrative
Your brokenness and healing need to become a part of your story. Your healing depends on discerning and embracing that account. We live with a purpose, meaning that our lives form a narrative arc. When you tell a new acquaintance about yourself, you are describing your narrative arc. Brokenness and healing are a part of every narrative arc. No good story is a straight path upward. Every honest account includes the detours around and through fault lines, over rough and uncertain terrain. Allow yourself to see the recovery aspect of your narrative arc. Your old self will resist it, clinging instead to your brokenness. But in retrospect, when you’ve finally reached your point of recovery and your brokenness seems like old personal history, you’ll likely remember moments when you imagined the possibility of recovery, when you could see your narrative arc. Tell yourself your story, and make it a good story. Indeed, make it your best possible account.
Faith
To this point, the discussion has ignored the source of psychological and spiritual healing, which from the transcendent character of the psyche and spirit must be in the transcendent. The narrative arc of your brokenness and healing lies fractally within the grand narrative of cosmic recovery. That arc goes from the creation and fall of humankind into disorder, disarray, and death, through the creator’s entry into his creation for its demonstratory rescue, and to the creator’s own demise and transformational resurrection, in embrace of which we also ascend. The healing grand narrative is the account of faith in Jesus Christ. Discernment, rest, recovery, and new life lies within his embrace. Let his Spirit show you how to die to your own malformation and rise as a new person with new freedom and life.
Reflection
How badly, on a scale from one to ten, are you broken? Have you been broken before and recovered, or is this time your first big realization of your brokenness? Do you sense that your recovery is possible? Do you sense that your recovery could make you stronger than ever? Do you sense that your recovery could become a tool to help yourself and others in the future? Do you have a sense of the cause of your brokenness? If so, does its cause tell you something about its nature and the potential path for healing? Is your brokenness an adaptation to relationships or circumstances? If so, has the need for that adaptation passed? Is your brokenness a response to your environment or conditions? If so, has the need for that response passed, due to a change in your environment or conditions? Do you sense in your brokenness a conflict between your old self and a new self you need to recognize? If so, what is the nature of that conflict, and how could you resolve it? Can you have a helpful internal dialogue with your broken self? What would you name your broken old self? What would it tell you about its need? How could you supply that need in a new and healthier adaptation? Are you able to integrate something broken in you, in a way that makes that characteristic positive and whole? What narrative arc do you find yourself living within? Have you connected your narrative with the grand narrative of the cosmic rescue? Can you tell the story of your recovery yet?
Key Points
Brokenness is a disabling interior conflict that continually wounds.
Recovery from brokenness can be its own valuable process and tool.
You may need to give yourself permission to recover and heal.
In recovery, you are both your own patient and your own healer.
Causes of your brokenness can provide clues to its nature and healing.
Your brokenness may be an adaptation to your upbringing.
Your environment and its conditions shaped you to respond.
Your old persona may be producing an internal conflict in new roles.
Discerning the brokenness in your self-conception begins healing.
Active imagination can aid your discernment of your self-conception.
Integrating your brokenness into new self-conceptions offers healing.
Your ability to place yourself within a new narrative aids healing.
Faith in the risen Lord is the source of the healing grand narrative.