Chapter 18 in my book talks about how healing is hard work. You can find more of the discussion in my book, Overcoming A Mysterious Condition.
One of the reasons that healing doesn’t go far enough with most people, I believe, is that it is hard work. You’d rather do other things than dig around in the skeletons of your life’s closet.
I often find myself wishing for anything that would be better than going through the healing stuff. It is hard work and requires commitment and courage. In order to heal, it requires that you don’t give up.
You didn’t ask for it. You didn’t ask to have to deal with all of this in life, or at least I don’t recall that I did. It is something we were often forced into that made us into who we are at this moment. Well, okay, it is not necessarily the complete picture of who we are or all that we can be.
I Didn’t Have A Choice
At times when I think back to the early days of healing, I can barely believe I made it this far. I didn’t have a choice unless I wanted to stay paralyzed and struggling to do basic things for the rest of my life. I had to go into the healing to survive and get my life back. After all, the conversion disorder had robbed me of so much and had almost taken the last breath from me. There was no choosing to heal or not in my life, only how far I wanted to go. Conversion disorder and paralysis were big motivators for me.
I didn’t even know in those early days what healing meant or where it would take me. I didn’t know there was a journey or a path I would walk down into my own healing. It didn’t dawn on me that healing was possible. In the early days, I didn’t know if I wanted it or if I could even begin to do it.
Hard Work Of Getting My Life Back
I had no clue how to heal or get my life back. It was all too confusing and mind-boggling. I felt like someone who had no functioning brain who was somehow supposed to find their way back into life again. The first step to healing evaded me, and I was nothing more than a deer frozen in the headlights. No one gave me an instruction manual on how to heal my life or where to begin.
All I knew was I wanted to walk normally again. I wanted to move my hands and take care of myself again. I wanted to get my memory back, my speech back, and everything that I used to do. The odds were against me. The medical staff was not sure that I could return to normal. I badly wanted to prove them wrong! It was another powerful motivator in my life.
My energy level at the time stayed maxed out in exhaustion. My brain looked at things very slowly, and even that was a struggle of epic proportions. I understood very little. I didn’t feel much physically. It was all a mystery that left me feeling like little more than roadkill along life’s journey.
The Hard Work Of Healing
Back in 1991, there were no internet message boards and no social media to connect with other people struggling with the same thing. You were pretty much on your own, and while that was difficult, I didn’t get indoctrinated into things that served very little usefulness. I had to sort through what I could find and understand in the limited resources I could access. More importantly, I had to listen to my body, my mind, and my gut reactions to things.
It turned out to be one of the best things, I believe, that helped me heal because it set me on the path where I needed to go. I could have easily stayed stuck in what my current situation was, and no one would have questioned me. People would have understood.
The Greater Journey Within
By not having the connection to other people who were suffering, it helped me turn inward to find where I needed to go. When I did that, I discovered that the healing I needed had to come from within my mind and my body. No, I wasn’t aware of all of this at that moment, and I had no idea what I needed to do, but now as I look back, my life was directed in the right direction. Far too often, we see the limits of our current moment, rather than what is beckoning us to a greater journey.
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