You May Need Healing, but You Don't Need to Be Fixed

Have you ever gotten a paper cut? A paper cut is a small, but often painful, breach of your body’s boundaries. Where you had skin before, now you have a wound, and when you have a wound you’re more vulnerable to losing vital fluids or contracting infection by viruses or bacteria. Sounds disastrous! Luckily, your body knows exactly what to do.

Immediately after you get that paper cut, your body sends highly specialized cells to the area. It increases inflammation, clots the blood, provides immune protection, eats the dead cells in the area, cleans up the germs, repairs broken blood vessels, and lays down new connective tissue. In a few weeks, you won’t even remember where you had the paper cut because your body is that capable of self-repair.

It’s true that sometimes larger things can go wrong which impact wound healing, such as immune dysfunction or blood clotting disorders, but that simply means you have a different “wound,” so to speak; your body needs healing at the level of immune or blood clotting support. It still doesn’t mean you’re broken.

Your car, on the other hand, has no capacity to heal itself. If you car gets a dent, it won’t send metal and paint repair cells and rust antibodies to the wound site and put itself back together, good as new. If its timing belt snaps it won’t get any better with rest, ice, and elevation. You car is broken. It needs to be fixed. It has no inherent self-healing capacity or regenerative wisdom embedded in its cells.

Like care, humans can get more extreme wounds than a simple paper cut. We break bones, tear ligaments, impact vital organs. Our bodies then require help to repair themselves. We may need a cast, stitches, surgery, or physical therapy. But the body is always doing everything it can to facilitate its own healing. When the body is injured on the most basic physical level, it is not the surgeon who does the healing for the patient. The surgeon provides the optimal conditions for the body to heal itself. The surgeon may set the bone and close the stitch, but the body’s innate intelligence does the rest. If you’re alive, your body is actively healing itself. In fact, our bodies require constant repair just to deal with the impacts of oxygen!

Bodies survive extraordinary things. I’ve worked with clients who’ve had metal pins driven through their femurs, who’ve had their faces blown off by bombs and sewn back on by surgeons, who’ve been in cars that were t-boned by trucks, and I’ve never once thought to myself, “This person is broken and needs to be fixed.” You probably wouldn’t think that, either, and yet people come to me all the time with emotional and psychological wounds who say to me, “I’m broken, I need to be fixed.”

You are not broken. You may feel broken, despondent, or hopeless. You may be in need of healing. You may need help closing the wound. But you are not broken and you do not need to be fixed. Your mental, emotional, and spiritual wounds work the same way as physical ones; you may need help setting up ideal healing conditions, but it’s your holistic, innate intelligence that does the rest. You are fully capable of healing yourself. That doesn’t mean you need to, should, or even can do it by yourself. It means that, with the right support, you’re capable of healing, which means you’re not broken and therefore you do not need to be fixed.

Healing doesn’t mean perfection. We all carry scars. Some bodies and souls have certain tendencies which will always be apparent, will always need tending and nourishment. We all need some kind of support. Some people require a wheelchair and a team of caretakers to get out of bed and move about their day. They are not broken. They do not need to be fixed. Some people need a support group to navigate lifelong addictions. They are not broken. They do not need to be fixed. We are all in an ongoing state of healing; that’s how we stay alive.

Mental, emotional, and spiritual wounds are often (dare I say always?) carried in the body at the level of the nervous system, the connective tissue, or the cells. The body is always involved in the mental, emotional, and spiritual healing process, and it can be your guide. You and your body are incredibly wise. You may have survived something on the mental, emotional, or spiritual level that feels inside like the physical injuries mentioned above, yet there's no physical evidence of what you went through. Typically, your body has made a brilliant survival decision at some point in your life to fight, flee, freeze, play dead, or be overly friendly in order to help you navigate something unnavigable.  You and your body learned a pattern that kept you alive, and then you got good at that pattern.

Now, that pattern isn’t helping you anymore. It’s getting in the way. It’s disturbing your relationships, disrupting your sleep, causing you too eat too much or too little, causing you pain, causing you to forget things. Now you need to know how to re-route that pattern. Now you need to learn a new pattern. That is not the same as being broken. You still do not need to be fixed.

Why am I caught up in the semantics of this? Because the story we tell ourselves matters. If you are walking around telling yourself—mostly unconsciously—that you need to be fixed, then you are telling yourself that something is wrong with you over which you have no control. In fact, I will be so bold as to say that you are telling yourself that you are dead. “I need to be fixed,” implies that, like the car, you can be broken without any innate healing capacity of your own.

Your body will hear that message and behave accordingly, causing spikes in adrenaline or waves of depression, causing pain, blood sugar changes, hormonal fluctuations, mood swings, or any manner of other symptoms which appear physically or emotionally to try to get your attention. These symptoms are not evidence that you’re broken, they’re evidence that your intelligent, living system can still alert you to the fact that something is wrong and it’s time to seek out support and focus on healing.

If you notice that you’re telling yourself you need to be fixed, try this instead: “As I listen to my body-mind’s innate, living intelligence, I hear that something needs attention and healing. I will give myself what support I can, and seek that support I need, to help myself heal so I can feel whole.” Let me know how it goes.