Beginning therapy with a wounded healer

Beginning the process of therapy or analysis is a daunting task with no guarantees. Entrusting your emotional self to a complete stranger can seem an odd thing to do, almost counter-intuitive. Many people find it hard to trust another so-called ‘expert’ especially if they know the therapist is likely to have their own struggles.

Therapy can sometimes feel like the blind leading the blind, will we both become stuck or lost? Perhaps both are inevitable especially if we have spent a lifetime struggling to feel in control. Being lost may be disorientating but is invaluable if both therapist and client can stay with the emotional experience long enough.

How we think about what has happened to us matters. Jung wrote about two types of thinking. One was undirected, deriving from infinite affect and operating outside space and time. The other was logical, autobiographical and directed (Jung, 1912/52) However, ‘directed thinking becomes absolutely impossible when the sensual has too high a threshold value. Because the sensual value is too high, it constantly intrudes into the psyche, where it disrupts and destroys the function of directed thinking which is based on the exclusion of everything incompatible with thought.’ (Jung, 1921: para. 38).

Jung was unique because he recognised that a key tool in the process of healing was the therapist’s own wounds. However, an important caveat is the fact that every wounding experience is different. Early responses to wounding experiences have their effect. Subsequent attitudes towards those wounds also vary. A change in attitude is literally life-changing. It sounds so simple and yet is not easily achieved. Training to be a therapist involves many hours of our own therapy or analysis for this reason.

The myth of the original ‘wounded healer’ shows the ripple effects of a traumatic start (Graves, 1955). Coronis became pregnant by Apollo but she was unfaithful to him. Apollo punished the pregnant woman by killing her. While she was burning on the funeral pyre, he relented and saved the baby Asclepius by caesarian section. Apollo sent him to Chiron, the centaur known for his healing arts, to bring him up. Eventually, Asclepius’s healing powers surpassed those of Chiron. The wounded came to temples to be cured by a healing dream where often the sick part of the patient was touched.

According to Groesbeck (1975), Asclepius has two sides, the rational side from Apollo and the dark, irrational from the chthonic Chiron. These opposite aspects of the Jungian Self, point to what the interplay between the two involves in an analysis or therapy. A dream is often the beginning of the two parts coming together, the bridging of opposite forces and is worth taking seriously. Instead of curing the symptom, Jungian therapists try to understand what is being expressed. This can lead to freer more creative ways of being in the world. 

Perhaps as Jung wrote in his commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower (1929), some wounds are incurable but are outgrown by larger perspectives and a new attitude. This outgrowing is the raising of consciousness, a waning of the wound’s legacy in contrast to a new and stronger life tendency.

Individuation or becoming more whole as a person entails Jung's two types of thinking working together. Jung likened this to watching a storm from a valley. He said we are both the watcher and watched. The aim is to be able to feel the effects of the storm without being destroyed by it. Do we dare to look in the eye of the storm?