Term Paper on "Why People Don't Heal"

Term Paper 5 pages (1590 words) Sources: 1 Style: APA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

People Don't Heal

Audio book review

Myss, Catherine. (1998). Why People Don't Heal. Three Rivers Press.

It's an all-too familiar scenario. You meet someone, and almost immediately they tell you sordid personal details about their past and private life. You feel uncomfortable because of the intimate nature of their confession, so you draw away. It has become almost inevitable in our culture of Oprah and celebrity confessions to encounter people who are willing to tell everyone why they are so 'screwed up,' and how much suffering they have endured in their past. Rather than seeing this as a potentially positive development, and an example of greater openness in our society, Catherine Myss views this as a symptom of what is wrong with the world, something she calls "woundology." "Woundology" is a refusal to heal, a refusal to seek health. It is wallowing in illness and negative emotions. Myss' book Why People Don't Heal attempts to provide a more positive vision of forgiveness, emotional healing, and moving on from past troubles than is offered by today's culture of victimology and "woundology."

Woundology," according to Myss, is not a new phenomenon, although our culture may unintentionally encourage it more so than other cultures. It reflects the human tendency to hold onto negative emotions, sickness, and old slights, rather than to progress. In our personal narratives, the stories we tell about ourselves and how we have 'become' ourselves is written into our biology and our body. Often, we end up holding onto negative things rather than accentuating the positive. It is our choice, Myss states, whether we become defined by trauma or chose to heal. There is a danger that experiencing trauma can become part of our identity. It can even become a way of manipulating others. Talking about the past can be a way of saying 'look at me,' like the overly familiar individual who tells a stranger more than the stranger cares to know about his or her sad childhood, in explanation of his or her current bad behavior.

Instead, Myss says, people need to let go of wounds, internal and external, to heal. In short, people do not heal, because they unconsciously refuse to heal, because they have made their wounds and sicknesses part of their identity. They have made their wounds 'work' for them in a negative fashion. People grow comfortable in their identity as a wronged child. They fear change and true self-empowerment. For someone who has been sick and wounded for most of the duration of his or her life, health seems like a scary prospect. Healing and change are synonymous for Myss. This does not mean society should show disrespect to those who have been injured and the injured should ignore the past. But society needs to respect the person, not the trauma. Living in the past takes away the necessary energy people need to dwell in the present, and to live in a positive fashion.

I have seen an example of what Myss is talking in my real-life encounter with someone who continually made excuses for his verbally abusive behavior to loved ones, because he was abused as a child. Child abuse is a tragedy, of course, but using this as a rationalization for cruelty ultimately allows him to not take responsibility for his mistakes. His pain is perpetuated and inflicted upon others, causing further wounds. This shows how no one is healed by a fixation on the past. A fixation on bad memories also renders the abuser of the past abuser an important figure in the former victim's life, haunting every present action, and blocking forward movement that could result in a more positive view of the future.

Myss asks: how can someone be 'whole,' if they always see themselves as labeled as a former victim? Being a victim is not shameful but it is not an honor, nor does it make someone special and unique, as everyone is sick or a victim at some point in his or her life. The one who has suffered the most should not 'win' some special status; rather the true strength is moving on from suffering. By holding onto old wounds, people cannot forgive, and it is necessary to forgive to make positive sense of the past, because if we are still rehashing old events, we are still 'living' the story of abuse, over and over again.

Myss presents her philosophy as a kind of how-to guide for mental and physical healing, not simply as a polemic against the self-indulgent culture of self-help in modern society. Her perspective is unusual in that she sees physical and emotional suffering as the same thing. The inability to overcome past traumas can actually result in physical illnesses. In her words, "your biography becomes your biology," or how you remember your personal story influences your ability to heal from a physical aliment. With this knowledge about the danger of "woundology," people can instead explore how to heal the mind and spirit which also leads to healing of the body.

By changing the mind, someone who is sick can change the state of homeostasis in their body. Past traumas create the body's current state of physical health. By changing our perspective on our personal history, we can change the present state of our bodies. Myss admits that simply healing the spirit will not automatically, for example, cause every case of cancer to go into remission, but she does suggest that a sick soul can result in a sick, or at least, sicker body. Changing the mind does not erase the damage done to the body through trauma, but it is the critical step forward all sufferers must take to heal.

This raises a rather troubling question for people suffering from a terminal illness. Does Myss mean that the currently suffering individual should see his or her physical complaint as evidence that he or she has not been trying hard enough to recover, or has been overly self-indulgent and wallowing in the past? Myss does not say outright that sickness is the sick person's fault, but at times her philosophy seems to be dangerously close to seeing physical sickness a mark against the moral character of the sufferer. Particularly problematic is Myss use of the terms of "wound" and "sickness" to cover the physical and emotional complaint of an individual interchangeably. Although the mind may affect the body, surely the effects and healing of a physical wound are somewhat different than the treatment of an emotional ailment, although counseling and chemotherapy can certainly be complementary. Both treatments may be necessary for someone suffering from cancer but the two are not interchangeable.

Myss does not explore how the body can affect the mind, perhaps the most serious failing of her work. What about someone who has a traumatic brain injury that wipes out his or her memory, or a stroke victim who has lost the power of speech? Such tragic cases show that injuries to the body affect one's mental capacity, even in an individual not harboring a "woundology" complex. To take a less extreme example, it has been shown that individuals suffering certain diseases often experience depression more so than others with chronic conditions, because of the physiological and biochemical reactions that occur. And perhaps consider the most mundane example of all -- imagine a healthy athlete who cannot play in a 'big game' because of an injury. This may cause him to feel depressed, but it is the body affecting his mind, it is not that he is refusing to heal because of an emotional state of stasis.

Myss' perspective comes from her self-identified role as a therapist unaffiliated with any physical or psychoanalytic training. She calls herself a medical intuitive, and believes she has the ability to know the… READ MORE

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