Mental health challenges herald the wounded healer

You’re hardly qualified to help those who need help if you haven’t been helped yourself. When you’ve been helped you understand what helped and how much it helped. You’re then convinced of the value of that help, and you want to ‘pay it forward’.

The wounded healer is someone who not only journeys with the wounded in their healing, but who also is counted amongst the wounded.  They’re a brother or sister, and just perhaps a little older in life experience, a sojourner who has been to the sacred place of restoration.

I’m sure as I look at the craftwork of wounded healing that God has kept me close to brokenness for this very reason: to be able to empathise within the recency of my own personal experience for others who are challenged in regard to their mental health.

Those who are not challenged, and worse who have never been challenged, typically stand aloof from connecting with, answering, and addressing the maladies of soul that make of their conquest our mental health.

People certainly want and need a spiritual helper or guide who is trustworthy and reliable, someone who is well informed, who has successfully charted their own recovery.

This doesn’t mean they’ve mastered recovery.  There is no spiritual perfection.  Only progress.  They’ve made significant progress.  It keeps them humble.

It’s humility in a guide that makes them the asset a struggling person needs.

It’s also their innate interest in those who struggle that creates the conversations that need to occur for connections to be made.

Therefore, it’s important that wounded healers are on an ongoing journey with their own mental health challenges.  These don’t need to be sustained clinical depression or anxiety or trauma disorders.  But to have regular mental health challenges, like laments or anxiety, or the occasional reminder of the triggering of trauma; these serve to keep us connected to other sufferers.  Mental health challenges prove our humanity.  If we cannot always guarantee our physical health against illness and injury, why should we expect our mental and emotional health would be impenetrable?

And those occasional mental health days and experiences keep us grounded in the knowledge of where our strength is—i.e., in our vulnerability.