Many years ago, C. G. Jung talked about “the wounded healer” suggesting that someone who has suffered difficulty or trauma will be better placed at helping people in distress. It’s an open secret that many people who go into the field of mental health do so partly to work through their own difficult experiences. This may not be a conscious reason why someone feels attracted to the field but it is often true nonetheless.
However, we need to be clear that being wounded – that is, having suffered loss, abuse, neglect, emotionally distant caregivers, or violence – can be both an advantage or a hindrance. It’s an advantage if our own troubles make us more understanding, less judgmental, more compassionate and wiser in the affairs of life. As the Persian poet Rumi beautifully put it: “Keep your eye on the bandaged place – that is where the light enters you”.
This is what we refer to as post-traumatic growth.
But difficult experiences – if left unacknowledged or unprocessed – may also have a significant adverse effect on how we interact with other people. We now know that trauma can have an impact on how we process information. Trauma influences how and what we pay attention to and it can make us hypervigilant to perceived threat-related cues. We may be triggered into implicit memories and ourselves fall victim to the source attribution error (i.e., we don’t realise that we’re triggered into old, difficult memories and thus attribute our bad feelings to the patient). Furthermore, study after study have confirmed that trauma can have a significant effect on the brain. More specifically, trauma has been shown to lead to more right pre-frontal cortex and amygdala activation and less hippocampal activation, which will influence how we interact with the world.
The late psychiatrist John Warkentin wrote:”Good psychotherapists are people who respect emotional pain because they have had it. Pain can mellow and soften us. However, prolonged, severe pain degrades a person and after that he should not be a psychotherapist. To the degree that I have outlived my childhood bitterness and pouting, to that degree I am now valuable as a therapist”
So…how are you doing with your childhood bitterness and pouting?
🙂