The wounded healer
Kintsugi pottery - repaired with gold
(c) Steenaire 2019
There is a Japanese tradition that something can be more beautiful after it has been broken. The art of kintsugi means “golden repair” and involves the use of a gold lacquer to make a piece whole. I believe that this has considerable significance for counselling.
Being wounded in some way, as we all are, it’s easy to feel that we cannot ever be whole again. The pain of the wound is constant and nagging. Or it’s something that has been numbed out and hidden away from consciousness, making much of life feel grey and empty. Events that bring such wounds to mind can re-open them, so that the injuries seem as fresh as the day they happened.
Kintsugi suggests that a different story is possible: that we can be repaired in a way that does not require us to forget the injury. In the words of Kotsker Rebbe, the 19th Century Polish Rabbi, “there’s nothing so whole as a broken heart”. How is it that some people seem to find strength, meaning and beauty in their own suffering? Very often such people are able to draw on great reserves of compassion for others. “Compassion”, after all, means “to feel together”. That’s why it’s vitally important that counsellors go through a rigorous process of coming to know their own woundedness, which includes a lengthy period of individual therapy. To be of help, a counsellor has to be in contact with his or her own suffering. This is why we speak of a “wounded healer”.
The alternative is someone who pretends that he or she has never suffered in any way, who denies his or her pain and brokenness. Such a person cannot get better because they do not accept that they are hurt. And they will not be able to bear the company of another’s suffering, because it will remind them of their own pain. For this reason, many people in the caring professions – doctors, social workers, nurses, counsellors, therapists – come to resent those they care for, and become unwell. The National Health Service has huge levels of absence through sickness.
A counsellor must be conscious of his or her own wounds, so that they do not pretend to be above anyone’s suffering. Without needing to say anything, the client senses that is that it is not a shameful thing to be hurt, and that the challenging experiences of life can be a source of meaning. This changes the nature of the wound, and the sacred work of healing begins.
A person who has been deeply injured will always be someone who has been injured. The hurt cannot and need not be forgotten. But when it becomes a source of meaning, the injury changes its nature, with the sacred possibility of golden repair, stronger and more beautiful than before.
