How to Find Hope in Healing

The answers you seek to the questions you ask are inside you, you just have to find them.

Sometimes people wonder whether or not healing is possible after experiencing trauma and/or going through adversity. This is a great question! Let’s explore a little more about the healing process. Science says that our brains have neuroplasticity. What does that mean? It means that even if our brains wire a certain way over time (with certain beliefs and behaviors based on experiences that we have had) we can create new neural pathways and it is possible to grow, change, and heal.

Let’s go a little deeper here. In the context of therapy, the therapist does not heal people. People heal themselves, and the therapist provides clients with the space, tools, and relationship to do the work. Wisdom Within was born from my experience witnessing the healing work people have done over the years, and I think it is so important for the therapist not to take credit for the hard work that the client does.

Doing the work is hard, and requires trust, safety, and relationship. The healing process is sacred, and one person’s journey will not be the same as another. The client and therapist dive in to explore together verbally processing, getting curious, bouncing ideas off of each other, and experimenting with interventions along the way. I like to call this digging for gold!

Oftentimes through talking, I will discover that clients are using interventions that are supported by research even if they did not know they were doing so. These types of interventions and healthy coping skills are often found by listening to what feels like intuition about what they need. These instances, when reflected to the client can be very powerful in terms of creating hope for themselves. Additionally, even coping mechanisms that we don’t like hold wisdom, and when we get curious about them, we can find helpful information about what needs we are trying to meet or what purpose they are serving. That helps us not only with charting the psychological map, but also moving towards what new pathways we want to forge.

While we are all different, we can all make progress in healing in some way. What that progress looks like is personal. It may mean brushing your teeth every day when that has been a struggle or it could mean the extinction of panic attacks or traumatic intrusive thoughts and images. There are also lots of ways to do this work. (Think art therapy, music therapy, sand-tray, equine-assisted, EMDR, etc.)

When something difficult happens it imprints on us and in the brain those neural pathways form. The saying goes the neurons the fire together wire together. Think of it from an evolutionary standpoint, if I don’t remember there is a tiger at the watering hole that I drink at, there is a good chance that it might eat me the second time I go there for a drink. The mind imprints these kinds of things to try to protect us.

Over time, our internal landscape and psychological map develop based on the compendium of our experiences. Trauma manifests in different ways in both the body and mind, as we try to cope with experiences we have. (There is a powerful book called The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk that goes more into the intersection of the mind-body connection in psychology.) A holistic view of psychology employs the understanding that the body and mind go hand in hand together.

Charting and exploring the internal landscape and psychological map requires patience, lots of self-compassion, and unconditional positive regard. We explore the etiology of how people got to where they are when I meet them. Another great book called What Happened to You by Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah digs into understanding the development of the internal landscape and psychological through early developmental experiences and how they impact us long term. The purpose of the title is to capture the message that these things that happen to us when we are little are not within our control. Children are dependent on the adults around them to help them grow, develop, and keep them safe.

Our psychological map gives us the lay of the land of our internal landscape. An analogy that I think is helpful is to think of it like the OS (operating system) on your computer. Once the OS is set, it’s automatic. Computer turns on, it loads your programs automatically. However, just like an OS on your computer, it can be updated. We can identify old ways of being that we are ready to release and upgrade to a newer OS that we are intentional about creating.

Finding hope in neuroplasticity means that we are empowered to understand and trust that we can chart new neural pathways in our brains on our maps. It is a beautiful part of the therapeutic journey. It can support better relationships, healthier habits, more self-compassion, and gaining confidence.

Once we chart the map and explore our internal landscape we come away with a deeper knowing of ourselves, and also the understanding that can continue to grow and change, and as we do, so does our map. We can find hope in healing.

Later, I will write more on self-inquiry, which helps us to answer the question of what do I want to do instead of going down those old pathways?

The wisdom within tells us that the answers you seek to the questions you ask are inside you, you just have to find them. External experiences can be a catalyst for this, too. For me, it is how I learned that being with horses was good for my soul. Your wisdom is always there inside you, and the quest to healing is to find it.

I will also write more later about the experimentation process that goes along with self-inquiry. I think that deserves a separate post. It is an important part of charting new pathways on the psychological map. It can also be comforting to know that the experimentation process can be fun. I also like to remind people that therapy can be fun, and it does not always have to be so serious. Humor can be healing, too.

Suffice it to say, we can find hope for healing in neuroscience and our capacity to forge new neural pathways, and if I did not have hope or believe in our capacity for healing as humans, I wouldn’t have made this my life’s work.