Abuse Recovery: The Journey From Victim to Survivor

I deleted a thread in which I wrote about sexual abuse victims becoming survivors because I did not do full justice to this complex subject, and want to do that now.

In 21 years of successfully guiding sexual, emotional and physical abuse victims into healthy recovery, the word victim has always been a point of challenge. There is a strong movement to do away with the word, as many feel that the word itself is degrading and encourages a person to see themselves as weak. Others feel that the word can instill a sense of shame, deformity or stigma upon someone who needs more than anything to feel good about themselves.

I am deeply sensitive to this perspective. Indeed, I have engaged with many, many abuse clients who come in very unwilling to see themselves as victims even though they are in a lot of emotional pain and their lives and relationships are not working as well as they need to. Many have worked with therapists and counsellors who have discouraged them from seeing themselves this way in a well-intended effort to strengthen that person’s self-esteem, self-image and overall ability to function in their lives.

Yet they come to me because something is missing in their healing. They have heard from friends that I do a deeper level of work and that my clients achieve real healing. And what I am going to share with you is what I share with my clients.

None of us who have been abused want to see ourselves as victims. It is the nature of the human mind and will to want to get back to normal as soon as possible and especially in the case of abuse, where our power has been taken away from us at a certain level, it can seem counterproductive and perhaps even self-defeating to see ourselves as victims. The reality of being victimized however – and you can substitute such words as abused, betrayed, traumatized, violated, attacked, assaulted, raped, or degraded, and we’re still talking about the same thing – is that it is a complex emotional, neurological and cognitive alteration of our normal world, and that alteration and deep impact within us does not change simply because one chooses to not use the word victim or see themselves that way.

Believe me, I understand at a profound level the challenges of being forced into a state of emotional survival after being abused. The initial post-abuse days, weeks, months and years are often a very fragile, post-traumatic stage where the shock of having been abused takes root and various dysfunctions that come from a deep loss of boundaries begin to take over: triggered, reactive emotions and body states, hypervigilance about one’s environment, loss of trust, safety and purpose are all commons reactions to having been abused. I also understand from personal experience as a recovered abuse victim that using the word survivor to describe ourselves as we take action on our healing is a deep emotional anchor of intention as well as proactive choices. The word survivor allows us to begin separating ourselves from our abuser at a core level, and feeling our boundaries regrow.

In that state and those stages, we try to hold on to whatever is strong and good within us, to stay in control of our lives and to create as positive a narrative within us as we can about what has happened. The word victim can seem cold, absolute and entrapping, and part of our early post-abuse survival strategies is to minimize and compartmentalize the extent of the victimization within us. It is only when the pain in our lives reaches a certain point of intensity – and we have become inherently strong enough – that we seek out the healing that can begin to allow us to fully accept the experience of being an abuse victim, and to integrate that into our identities.

The initial healing stages can only be successful if a person receives the necessary level of empathy from their support people. Any abusive behavior comes from a breakdown of empathy inside the abuser, and the impact of that deep inability on the part of the abuser to have empathy for the impact they are having on the person they abuse is perhaps the most intense internal shock that gets created within us. How could you do that to me? Where was your conscience?

Abusers use the people they abuse. They force their own wounded energies and unprocessed grief into the body and psyche of the people they abuse against their will, even if the abuser seduces a person into letting them abuse them – and that is why I embrace the idea of victimization as being real, and essential to the understanding and experience of recovery. We are victimized when things are done to us against our will, even if we are not entirely aware of that at the time that the abuse is happening.

If we cannot emotionally, neurologically and cognitively grasp how we have been victimized by abuse, and that in being used by the abuser we were made a victim in those moments, our emotional ability to make healthy boundary assessments and choices becomes moderately to severely compromised. Our conscious ability to trust our own emotions and what they are telling us does not fully recover until we feel and process that shock and disruption to our lives that abuse creates. And the most important healing stage of all – doing the deep grief work that allows us to fully feel what we lost at the hands of the abuser – is nearly impossible if we are in some form of denial that a real victimization has occurred in our life.

This is the place where I meet many clients. They have been encouraged to “get over it – don’t see yourself as a victim” by well-meaning people. They tell me that they either don’t see themselves as victims, or don’t want to as a part of their healing experience. But when I take them into the cause and effect dynamics that the abuse has had in their lives – such as, your anger is an expression of the fear, confusion and grief caused by being abused, or, when you are yelling at your wife you are really confronting your abuser through her, or your depression is being anchored inside of you at a level of sustained shock that you have been carrying for years and didn’t know it  – the light bulbs begin to go on, and they begin to emotionally, neurologically and cognitively make the connection between the moment when they were made a victim, and the way they are behaving dysfunctionally or making bad choices in their life now.

And in making that connection, this is where new choices – conscious, self-empathetic, self-loving choices – begin to form. In this stage taking full responsibility for our triggered emotions and where some or all of those triggered emotions originate in our having been abused is the essential recovery work that moves us to the next level of being a more functional survivor.

Cause and effect: the impact of the abuse on your life at an earlier moment has surfaced in this breakdown, this rage, this acting out behavior, this choice of partners – the impact of abuse often damages our ability to even know what healthy boundaries, communication or self-expression looks like, much less to be able to make those healthy choices. This is a big part of what it means to be a victim – that the awareness of what is healthy, the confidence that you know what your emotional rights are,  and your ability to  safely confront dysfunction without feeling ashamed, wrong or scared have been taken away from you by another person’s abuse of you.

When what you have lost at the hands of an abuser controls your life, your choices, your ability to create healthy relationships and your self -love, that is when the word victim means something. Even though we have begun our healing work and can honestly say we are survivors, we still reveal to ourselves the fact that we are also recovering abuse victims when we act out the damage and impact of the abuse within ourselves or on each other through our triggered emotions without having conscious choices that heal that damage. We are recovering abuse victims when the impact of the abuse alters the directions of our lives in such a way that we do not have good, healthy control over our boundaries and lives.

Nowhere do we recover our choices more completely than when we can confront our abuser and regain full consciousness of our right to have our own boundaries. Typically, I guide my clients to confront their abuser through role-play exercises where they are safe, in control of the experience and able to monitor their emotions successfully through the fear and even terror of confronting that person. Sometimes confronting their abuser in person is the right thing to do, but even then I find it is better to do deep role play work first to get confident and grounded in all the emotional, neurological and cognitive dimensions of what always comes up in the act of confronting the abuser.

This works equally well whether the abuser is alive or dead. Our bodies, emotions, hearts and minds remain stuck and disempowered at a certain core level of self until we can reclaim our boundaries and our healthy control through the ritual of confrontation. When we do the confrontation work successfully together with the grief work that makes us conscious of what we have lost, we really do heal at the deepest levels within us. I have guided hundreds of clients through this successfully.

So my point about the semantics of the words victim and survivor is this: abuse victims are victims until they can begin their recovery work, and then they are in the first stage of being a survivor. Is it then helpful to use the word victim to refer to yourself when you begin to act on your own behalf in your recovery? Yes, when you are referring to the unhealed, not fully processed emotional and cognitive impact you are still carrying within you. Does it ultimately work to suppress the impact of the abuse and disassociate within one’s self from the deepest truth of having been rendered a victim? No. Is it a deep life challenge to get to the healing of that deepest place, which requires a well-structured healing that goes in stages of appropriate decompression and integration? Yes. And are there stages of being a survivor that can finally culminate in a fully functioning life, free from the grief of it all? Yes – if, as we gain our strength in being a survivor, we are willing at some point to embrace having been rendered a victim as we do our core grief work. Why? Because victim = many dimensions of loss, consciously grieving that loss = a core point of recovery.

One of my guiding principles in working with abuse and trauma recovery is decompression. Just as deep sea divers cannot come up too fast or they get the bends, likewise it is not healthy to attempt to heal too deeply, too quickly – we must decompress the deep impact of being victimized that is held deep in our psyches, our emotions, our bodies and our hearts.

When we can own the reality of having been victimized and allow the word victim to describe a real place and a time in our lives, and then do the confrontation work and grief work that rebuilds us so that we can love ourselves and be in good relationships, then we have reached an advanced stage of survival around the devastating losses that come with being abused. When we have done the core grief work that breaks the cycles of inherited generational dysfunction that is transmitted through abuse and then acts out through our own unhealed grief, we have truly taken our power back.  That is when the word survivor, both in my own personal experience and in the lives of my clients, takes on its fullest and most liberated meaning. And that is when another dimension of being fully alive in the present moment becomes possible.

When we can come out of the painful emotional survival and isolation in which abuse traps us, and move into creative interdependency with each other, possessing the emotional skills to be deeply empathetic to our own abuse experience as well as that of others in our lives, our hearts have recreated the world we lost in having been a victim of a heartless or unconscious person who needed to abuse someone just to find a connection in the world around them. Then we are well-balanced survivors, and can share that confidence with others in loving relationships.

That makes embracing the journey from being a victim to a strong and healthy survivor a very positive and healthy choice.

What Is Emotional Healing, Part 1

The need to find emotional healing awakens in a simple truth: I am in pain.

When I meet a new client, sometimes they will say exactly that to me. “I am in a lot of pain in my relationship and I can’t resolve it. I need some help.” As they speak, their body is usually animating the pain for me in gestures and movement. Other times, a new client might talk all around and over their pain because they haven’t yet allowed themselves to feel their emotions, usually out of self-protection, and when I guide them inward to see that they are in pain, their body connects with the feelings, and that person starts to come into focus inside of what is really happening in their life.

However someone begins to feel this awareness in themselves – whether they are a mentally focused, tightly controlled person just starting to allow vulnerable emotions to move inside of them, or they are a deeply expressive emotional person waking up to a new level of feelings they didn’t know were in them, or they’re a person somewhere in between those two ends of the spectrum of emotional self-expression – the emerging feeling that there is inner pain that needs relief is the place where everyone begins to seek healing.

What makes waking up to emotional pain so challenging for so many people is that it is right there inside of our body, in the present moment. But when we lack the ability to identify what the pain is, where it comes from, what it needs to heal and how to communicate it successfully, it just sits there inside of us like an unopened flower or a tightly coiled ball of energy. Or it may be fragmented into different layers of of pain that are heavy, tired and dense. It may be jumpy and nervous, or reactive and shut down.

There are many different ways that emotional pain lives inside of us and acts out – i.e., expresses itself – through us before we work with it. From a dull empty ache in the gut to a panic attack, from outbursts of rage to a fear of speaking up in a difficult situation, from paralyzed states of helpless abandonment to avoiding being open with another person, from a tight and disconnected heart to a busy, intensely anxious mind – all of these forms of pain and more are the starting points from which people become conscious that they need to find some form of healing.

No matter how our unprocessed pain is living inside of us, until we begin doing our emotional healing work, we’re only partially living in the present moment because we are not fully present within our emotional experience – and that feeling, being less than fully aware of what is happening in our emotional self, being less than fully alive in the present moment, is disorienting, frustrating and confusing.

Being in pain and not knowing what is really going on is what makes us act out in ourselves and with each other, because our pain needs to wake up and become conscious in the present moment. Until our minds and bodies are guided to allow unfocused feelings of pain to become deeper emotions, and then to connect those emotions with accurate words that describe the emotional dynamics in which our pain originated, we will not become fully conscious of what our pain is really trying to say when it acts out.

Nor will we be able to really begin healing our pain, because emotional healing takes place when we can come out of our non-verbal isolation and tell the truth about our emotional experience with another person, so that we can begin to honor our individual self-development and start to find real emotional solutions.

So what is acting out? Many people have learned that acting out is negative behavior in children that is disruptive, destructive or out of control. Adults however act out with each other (and their children) just as much as children do, and in order to make complete sense out of how our pain attempts to communicate through these actions, a more comprehensive definition of acting out will greatly assist us in understanding and accepting our own emotional experiences and expressions.

The term acting out really describes the entire range of triggered, unhealed and unconscious emotions that wake up inside of us and attempt to become conscious through some form of dynamic, animated expression that seeks a solution. The goal of recognizing acting out expressions is to translate the message being acted out into a coherent emotional communication and then take healthy action – it isn’t that much different than the game of charades where we attempt to act out a word or phrase or idea so that other people can guess what it is.

The difference is that these are our lives that are at stake, our emotional well being and health, and the intensity and urgency of acting out expressions is necessary to get our attention so we can respond appropriately and consciously. The evolution of emotional healing that this kind of healing work represents is driven by the need to respond to acting out expressions with a more appropriate, non-judgmental and heart-centered understanding of what the wounded language of acting out is trying to say.

Earlier authoritarian parenting strategies as well as clinical models of emotional disorder and pathology have left us with a gap in our ability to hear what acting out expressions are trying to say. Our goal isn’t to see what is “wrong” with a person – it is to discover and respond to what acted out pain and emotions are trying to tell us about our dysfunctional families and relationships, and the breakdown of love between us.

Spirituality, Emotional Healing and the Four Goals of Doing Your Work

Over the years, I have met many spiritual people who want so much to be whole and free in their souls, and hope that there is a simple and painless pathway to get there – that there can be a transcendent practice or process that simplifies the many pains that we experience, and can ideally keep us in a kind of constant emotional/spiritual orgasmic flow of energy and light.

In my experience however, attempting to bypass emotional pain and dysfunction through spiritual practices only delays what needs healing inside of us, at best, and at worst can actually become a force of denial and suppression that creates more dysfunction. For me, spirituality is a space of intention in which our heart succeeds in holding intact what is truly sacred in life, while seeking to bring wholeness to those places in our lives where love has broken down or failed. To do this, the heart commitment inside of healthy spirituality must embrace and engage with what is wounded inside of us rather than attempt to avoid, transcend or escape it; healthy spirituality loves the whole person and doesn’t see emotions as a lower or lesser aspect of our selves.

My experience is that the path of creating a healthy spiritual life is one of being here in the present moment, in a conscious relationship with the way things are for all of us – the challenges of emotional healing that we confront because of inherited generational dysfunction also give us the opportunity to engage in a daily practice of open-hearted acceptance of ourselves and others. Emotional healing is a life-long process and path unto itself, and when we focus our healing through our hearts into a spiritual commitment to create lasting change rooted in love, we are grounded in the real world of our relationships, families and communities as well as the greater spiritual dimensions.

The First Noble Truth of Buddhism is that all life is suffering – in Doing Your Work, I shift that truth into the emotional realm where we need to do our healing work: the root of all human dysfunction is rooted in grief, many different kinds of grief that we must respond to if our spiritual and heart-centered growth is to really be grounded in our ability to create lasting healing.

I am a deeply spiritual person, and have had contact with sacred and wise dimensions of spiritual energy since I was a child. And all of that contact kept guiding me back to the need to create healing and closure in the dimensions of grief I was initiated into growing up. From high school on, I dedicated my life to finding what it takes to create real, lasting emotional healing and closure with that grief. Left unidentified within us, unhealed grief blocks us from fully experiencing the expansive and even orgasmic spiritual dimensions of our souls, and deeply inhibits where we can be fully alive and creative.

I have had the orgasmic, peak experience of contact and presence with the expanded realms more than once: in places like magical childhood bliss, in a three-day adult spiritual vision, in sacred mountain areas, in sexual freedom, in successful relationships, and in deep rapport with loving spirits of tremendous compassion and empathy. And I have also seen what has shut down that contact and presence in my life, the forces of inherited dysfunction and spiritual sickness that were present in my family and that also came back later on and challenged me to confront them, not transcend them. I was born into them, and I had to learn what it takes to bring healing to those forces. And the grief that I acquired from being shut down eventually became my beautiful and profound inner guide through my whole healing process.

It was through doing my own personal grief work and learning the art of loving, healing confrontations with family dysfunction, deeply focused through my training in Integrative Breathwork, that I created the Doing Your Work program I am sharing with you. I am a very practical spiritualist – I deeply believe that our spiritual work, rooted in the emotional healing that allows us to open our hearts to ourselves and each other, needs to grow real results of compassion, empathy and love between us as well as ending dysfunctional family cycles so that we can clear the heart space we share with each other to resonate at higher and deeper levels of what is sacred.

But the emotional healing skills and tools that we need to know in order to reach these spiritual goals are still not well understood or represented in our culture. We need to explore a clear and well organized set of goals that integrates doing our own personal emotional work in service to the spiritual expansion of love and peaceful change in the world around us.

These are the four spiritual goals that the Doing Your Work program is committed to addressing in our personal lives, our relationships, our families and our culture:

1. Doing our work to become self-reliant, self-nurturing adults who can break through cycles of dependency and c0-dependency. In doing so, we can become as emotionally healthy in our relationships with our parents as possible, so that their death and crossing over is as free from such spiritual wounds as shame, judgement, failure or trauma for them as possible. This can be done for parents who have already died as well.

2. Breaking the cycles of inherited generational dysfunction that keep perpetrating ignorance, abuse, addiction, abandonment, betrayal and trauma, all of which are carried within us as a form of grief that we must process and bring closure to. Our relationships and friendships are the places where we can focus our commitment through learning how to communicate our emotions in a healthy way and creating successful boundaries and intimacy.

3. Ending the emotional and physical violence that permeates our lives in many forms. Grief that has been repressed, suppressed, judged or denied will often express itself in a variety of violent energies, and only by honoring grief can we heal the violence. Even self-judgement, self-denial and self-hatred are forms of emotional violence that can have life-long, devastating results.

4. Recognizing the existence of the heart trauma and heart/emotional shock that usually forms within us when love breaks down or fails completely in our families and relationships. It is the nature of shock that we don’t realise that we are in it, and our powers of rationalization, compartmentalization, suppression and denial keep the reality of being in shock from our conscious awareness. Some of the deepest spiritual work we need to do is in journeying into the heart shock we carry, and healing it.

Imagine your life, the life of others, and of humanity if we could really address and bring healing to these spiritual issues.

I have lived these spiritual commitments in my own life and have seen real results, and have seen the same results in my clients’ lives as they create their own new stages of spiritual balance and self-realization through opening their hearts through emotional healing. I created Doing Your Work so that we can look at the necessity of addressing these spiritual challenges, and begin to harness the tremendous spiritual power that comes from resolving grief and growing skillful, masterful love in its place.

The attainment of these goals is a lifelong path that each of us can achieve through doing our work. In doing so, we can bring that much more spiritual balance and integrated spiritual/emotional health into our lives and into the world around us.

Doing Your Work – Taking the First Steps

For many years I have relied on word of mouth to share my work in the community, and a friend sharing a positive healing experience with another friend is one of the best ways to introduce someone to taking the step of going on their own emotional healing journey. Though people know me as Geoff, Breathwork Therapist and Life Coach, and know the work I do through their sessions, there has always been a structured program underlying our work that has only been described on my website, and not really in full detail.

So in the near future I will be publishing my book, Doing Your Work – The Pathway of the Whole Person, and that will guide you through all the dimensions of healing work that I offer as well as being linked into an online emotional learning center. For now though, I want to being sharing introductory information about Doing Your Work and offer people another way to get to know my work through online publishing and social networking. And the best way to do that is to answer the most common questions I am asked, either by new clients or through my website.

The most common question is, what is Doing Your Work – or emotional healing work -and where do I begin?

The majority of people begin doing their emotional healing work for two reasons: one, they are challenged by the triggered emotions – primarily anger and/or depression – that make their life and their relationship(s) difficult, and two, there is something deeply incomplete in their own individual life that they feel stuck in moving forward with.

The core goal of emotional healing, which I learned deep inside my Integrative Breathwork training in 1990, is that emotions need to move. The source of all emotional  imbalance and wounding is suppressed, repressed, judged or stuck emotions which are held inside of our fear of confrontation. When our real emotional experience can’t move, express and speak, we go into our triggered emotions as a way to either confront and try to say what we are really feeling with anger, or we avoid confrontation through an isolating and implosive pathway that leads to depression.

As emotional strategies, they are rarely successful in communicating what is really happening inside of us. The explosive/angry or implosive/depressed movement that comes with triggered emotions is very challenging to respond to and relate to in ourselves and in our relationships. And when our real emotions that define our authentic, whole self are blocked within us, it is very difficult to move forward in creating the life we need to create to be successful.

My work is based on holding a deep and empathetic space for clients in which they can begin to identify where and when in their life their emotions got wounded or stuck. Through a rich set of tools and exercises such as breathing journeys, Reparenting, boundary mastery and emotional meditation, we begin to create the healing movement of becoming conscious of our real emotions, and the self-expression of our needs which grows a greater self-love and self-confidence.

As we learn to decompress our triggered emotions into a new and healthy language of fairness, safety and empathy, we open up an entirely new world of emotional growth and learning that creates successful confrontations that lead to love and greater intimacy.

Everyone’s needs and processes are different, yet all of my clients share the experience of learning the skills of opening, moving and communicating their emotions and needs successfully, and in doing so begin to live the pathway of becoming a whole person.

What Is Recovery

Over the last twenty years, I have assisted a number of people in getting off of anti-depression medications, and it is always a deeply moving experience when a person makes that transition successfully by doing their emotional recovery work and making real progress in healing the roots of their depression. And it always brings home the truth about recovery, which is that it is a humbling and liberating experience to allow yourself to go through the process.

A client recently completed a two week outpatient program to get off of medication and into a functioning emotional life. I assisted before and after those two weeks, and my client is doing well. Her success inspired me to share some thoughts with you about the challenges of recovery.

In looking at the process of emotional recovery that is the heart of any recovery – abandonment, abuse or addiction – the word recovery for me is literal: we need to recover the healthy choices that were lost in our families and relationships, like being able to feel our emotions and communicate them safely. Or the choice to not have to internalize other people’s emotions as a way to try to feel safe with them. We need to recover our personal space in which we can prioritize what we need and build our life around that freedom of choice.

Within all of those choices, the essential choice we need to recover is to be able to choose self-empathy. We need to be able to invest the time and conscious growth needed to journey into the heart trauma that comes from the way love fails in families and creates dysfunction and depression. Heart trauma is not well understood, yet it is very common, as is the emotional shock that lies underneath it.

Recovering from heart trauma and shock are deep processes that require us to make increasingly intelligent choices about how we honor ourselves, set our boundaries and allow the grief that lives inside of heart trauma to move within us.

The recovery of emotional choice, time and space is absolutely essential if we are to ever heal the grief that sits inside of depression. Once we make that commitment and do the emotional work to create a healthy, respectful relationship with our own grief, we have anchored our recovery process in a secure way that can liberate us from trauma and dysfunction safely.

2010 – The Year of Empathy – 2/1/10

It is the beginning of February, and I have had more than a few inquiries as to the progress of the book.

As mentioned in the last post, I completed the first draft at the end of November, and it is everything I intended it to be. And then, because this is real life, that success awakened a new and essential process for me to go through that has added a wonderful new dimension to the what the book is focused on, and breathed new life into the value of what the book will offer.

The entire month of December became a very focused and fairly intense journey into the healing power of empathy, as one client after another needed support in making a crucial shift in their lives by embracing a new depth of empathy for themselves, or for another.
It seems no accident that at the same time, various writers in different social spheres, especially politics, were focusing on empathy as the crucial human quality needed to transform the current polarized impasse in American culture.

The depth of the work I did with clients in December had a profound impact on me. Empathy is not a new idea or process for me – it is a core part of the healing pathways in the book, and has been the essential way in which I hold space for clients for over 20 years. What was new was the fact that while all this client work was taking place, we have a President who openly embraces empathy as an essential American value, and it was beginning to look like he was faltering. There was a sense of urgency that empathy cannot fail at this time in our lives, personally and culturally.

And then in the last few weeks, President Obama came through with two tremendously mature expressions of empathy in the State of the Union Address and the GOP Q&A. For the moment, he’s back, and empathy has spoken broadly and spoken well.

But there is a tremendous empathy deficiency in our culture. There are a number of ways that you can define family and relationship dysfunction, and one essential definition is that dysfunction develops out of the breakdown of empathy. Withholding empathy is a powerful old school parenting technique meant to break the will of children and “discipline” them. There is a lot of that unconscious patterning around, still.

So I lovingly challenge you to make 2010 the year that you explore your capacity to bring empathy to yourself, first and foremost, and then to the people in your life. Our ability to give empathy to others is only as good as our ability to give it to ourselves. And without it, we are simply not going to learn the essential human lessons on how to stop destroying each other.

A Book Excerpt 1/29/09

I have been making good progress in writing my book, “Doing Your Work” lately. Here is an excerpt from this morning’s writing:

What Does It Mean to Heal?

You are reading this book because you want to heal something in yourself and in your life. I want to discuss with you what the goals of personal healing mean to me, and how the holistic tools presented in this book will support you in that process.

The broadest and most useful definition of what it means to heal is: to become a whole person. Let’s play with language for a moment, because it’s important to understand the truths underlying the healing journey I am presenting you. The adjective whole is an absolute adjective, meaning that it cannot be modified into a lesser, relative state. So this means that you can’t be a basically whole person. A fairly whole person. A somewhat whole person. You can be in the process of becoming a whole person; still, you are either whole, or you’re not.

This may seem like a picky semantic distinction, but the state of wholeness I am going to model for you does indeed rest on clear, objective milestones, qualities and results in your skills and experience as a person. One of the greatest challenges in our work to become whole is that we not dilute or compromise what our wholeness requires. Holding on to that pure definition of wholeness is a way of maintaining a lifeline, a sane reference when confronting dysfunctional patterns in ourselves and others.

And when this undiluted model of wholeness becomes the shared goal in our relationships, we enter into an entirely new world of cooperative learning that makes the restoration of successful love possible.

And as you will see later in the book, the distinction of the idea of what the word whole means becomes profoundly important, because it defines the most challenging aspects of the healing journey on primal and cognitive levels. It clearly illuminates the places where most people get stuck or stop in their healing journey.

Learning and applying the language of healing is one of the essential tools in Doing Your Work.