'I have bad news for you..'

‘I have bad news for you. This is lifelong work’

These are the words of trauma expert and addiction expert and deeply compassionate healer, Gabor Maté.

He is standing, in his usual dishevelled attire at a speaking event in the States and he is addressing an audience who have come to hear him speak on trauma and addiction. His point is, there is no quick fix in unravelling the mystery and the pain of trauma, for some of his audience extreme trauma. But, he stated, there are ways to gradually move towards a more conscious, richer, less fearful life.

I hope very dearly that you are not a person who has suffered trauma, but most of us have in one way or another. The scale, of course, varies wildly.

I have become deeply fascinated by Maté’s work and I’m currently completing one of his online courses. This idea that there is no ‘fast-track’ solution to healing is a view I’ve held since I started working with human wellbeing 16 years ago.

It runs counter to how our world teaches us to be. It is not as appealing as a promised breakthrough or immediate results. Our societally conditioned brains have been told again and again that we can have it all, and have it now. We can have same-day delivery or shopping at our door within the hour. Faster the better. The reward circuits in our brain are stimulated so frequently, we don’t even know we have had a ‘reward’ so we need more. (I even find myself holding my breath and typing faster as I write this passage. Oh yes, that’s my sympathetic nervous (stress) system kicking in. How interesting..)

My point is, that although we might like the idea of immediate gratification, some things don’t work like that. If we were offered the chance to get to our destination in a tele-porter, we would know that that isn’t possible or even desirable for most of us, and yet it seems that our brains are re-wiring to expect that (They are by the way. Our brain is neuro-plastic so will literally change as our environment does) and to tar all of our experiences with the same brush. We want it now.

But what if our ultimate wellbeing was a journey? What if there isn’t ‘the thing’ that will fix it all? What if different people, moments, therapies or approaches were simply part of a picture or a tapestry that wove together to make something that made more sense? What if your physical injury or inner sense of stuckness needed to be chipped away at and revealed gradually so that you could heal it fully, understand it and learn from it?

This might be a long and rambling way of saying that I, in some ways defiantly, never promise breakthroughs to people who want to work with me either for physical pain or deeper energetic support. It’s not to say that they won’t appear - they very often do. It is simply that my deepest desire is not to ‘fix’ people and send them on their way until they break again. But to work with a person on a journey where I use what I know to help them to know themselves more deeply.

The only part of Gabor Mate’s statement that I disagree with is the use of the word ‘work’. Rather than this being another thing called ‘work’, I prefer to see this as lifelong growth or understanding or learning or unravelling or revealing or creating. And how different and more beautiful the world starts to looks when you embark on this path. There will, as in every life, be set-backs, pitfalls, moments of giving up or getting it wrong. But as you dust yourself off and step back onto a path of living and healing more consciously, you re-wire your brain again and again.

Yes, this is lifelong ******* (insert one of the above), but it is so very rewarding.

If you’d like to speak to me further about this, please get in touch.