The Wounded Healer: When Suffering Becomes Redemptive

The Wounded Healer: When Suffering Becomes Redemptive

Lawrence R. Taylor, M.Div., Ph.D.

“Only the wounded physician heals.” – Carl Jung^[1]

Unlike some of his less desirable kin, Chiron the wise centaur of Greek mythology

, was civilized, learned, and associated with medicine, music, prophecy, and education. He became teacher to several Greek heroes, including Achilles and Asclepius, the great physician. Ah, but poor Chiron was accidentally wounded by one of Heracles' arrows, poisoned with the incurable venom of the Hydra. Because Chiron was immortal, he could neither heal his wound nor escape it through death. The great healer himself remained wounded.

A rather radical distinction between Freud and Jung lies in their opinions of themselves. Freud, not unlike many contemporary physicians, surgeons, therapists, and clergy, saw himself as whole and his patients as wounded. Carl Jung, on the other hand, connected the physician-healer with the Chiron myth and argued that psychotherapy involves an encounter between two wounded human beings, rather than an aloof expert repairing a defective patient.

“… only what he can put right in himself can he hope to put right in the patient.… it is his own hurt that gives the measure of his power to heal.”^[2]

In Fundamental Questions of Psychotherapy (1951), Jung writes: “A good half of every treatment that probes at all deeply consists in the doctor’s examining himself.”

The principle of the wounded healer applies not only in psychotherapy, but in every area of counseling, pastoral ministry, and spiritual direction. Life coaching may involve the input of an expert. Spiritual direction and pastoral care never do. Pastor and parishioner, spiritual director and directee, therapist and client, are on equal footing.

This does not imply, however, that simply being wounded makes you a good spiritual director, pastoral counselor, or psychotherapist. To practice the helping arts effectively, a wound must be owned and owned redemptively.

We are wounded in many ways. Here, I am focusing on spiritual directors with similar implications for pastoral care, hospital and hospice chaplaincy, and therapy.

Spiritual direction can be inherently lonely. We may be wounded by loneliness because we hold stories of pain and hurt confidentially in our hearts. Other than with our supervisors, we have no place to take vicarious suffering. We may be subtly expected by our faith tradition structures to maintain appearances of having it all together, being in control, being super-spiritual.

Beyond the snares of the calling, we are humans who may have been wounded by life – neglect or abuse in dysfunctional families of origin, severe health traumas, bouts with depression or anxiety, domestic violence, poverty, prejudice, rejection, divorce, loss, or grief.

Occidental society encourages us to move on, get over it, buck-up, keep a stiff upper lip, deny the pain, minimize the wound. Or, if you can’t, take a pill. Denial is elevated to a virtue. Every cure is in a bottle.

At my son’s funeral there were people who remarked that I obviously lacked faith because I was crying. Others encouraged medication. One of the funeral directors told me to control myself.

Denial, however, doesn’t rid us of the wound. It simply pushes the pain and grief into the shadows of the unconscious. They don’t stay there. They split off into projection and rescuing. We project our unconscious pain onto the directee. We imagine ourselves as spiritual lifeguards saving the day. We do more harm than good.

The healer must own personal pain, own the loss, own the suffering and the sorrow. It must be deeply felt – faced head-on, brought into consciousness and integrated into the personality. This is the essential work of depth psychology. Is it not remarkable how reluctant many of us are to buy our own services?

There is more. Not only must the pain and grief be owned, acknowledged, and integrated, it must be owned, acknowledged, and integrated redemptively. No longer victims, no longer in denial projecting our own stuff onto others, we are redeemed, transformed.

YHWH, the God of Judaism and Christianity, is a suffering God. God is the suffering servant of Isaiah 53, the wounded resurrected Messiah of John 20. The imagery reaches an extraordinary culmination in Revelation 5:6: “I saw … a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered.” The victorious Christ remains the slain Lamb. John the revelator expects to see a mighty lion enthroned in heaven. But there is no lion; only a slaughtered lamb.

This is essential to pastoral care and more generally to spiritual formation and discipleship. We have come to expect leaders to be people of force and power. Ballistic missiles, bombs, strong-arm diplomacy, coercion. That concept is so deeply implanted that theologians invented an unbiblical eschatology that depicts Jesus as returning in fury and hatred, full of violence and vengeance. Jesus is not schizophrenic. He is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The way of the cross, the way of self-sacrificial, other-oriented, cruciform love was his method then and is his method now.

The very essence of the Christian faith is that of a God who cares, who feels pain, knows suffering. The divine heart is wounded. God can therefore empathize with us, carry our sorrows, walk with us through the agonies of loss and grief.

The health and wealth prosperity preacher would have us believe we can escape pain – that God will, if we have the right kind of faith – not allow it to touch us. That is a false god. The living God doesn’t take us around pain; instead, God walks with us through the pain, not by feeling sorry for us, but by feeling the pain we are feeling. An empathetic God who knows suffering because Godself suffered. 

Owning our pain and suffering redemptively involves facing it, feeling it, emoting it, working through it with the God of pure love at our side. Most often, God uses a spiritually mature elder or spiritual director to accompany us. Our pain becomes redeemed when it no longer controls us; conversely, it has taken us to a new level of compassion and nonjudgmentalism. The wound becomes a doorway into depth.

God transforms us. Christianity does not necessarily imagine redemption as returning us to the condition we occupied before being wounded. The wound remains, at least in the form of an oozing scar, but its meaning changes. Chiron’s wound is incurable; Christ's wounds are manifestations of self-giving love and resurrection.

In his 1972 book The Wounded Healer, the late Dutch priest Henri Nouwen, insists that the minister, pastoral counselor or spiritual director cannot stand outside the human condition dispensing religious solutions. The spiritual director shares loneliness, mortality, anxiety, doubt, and brokenness with directees. Ministry becomes possible when one's own suffering becomes a source of hospitality rather than self-absorption.

The mature, wounded healer says, “I know this territory. I can remain here with you without needing to flee from it.”

Suggested Bibliography for Further Study

·      Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison. Edited by Eberhard Bethge. New York: Macmillan, 1972.

·      Frankl, Viktor E. Man’s Search for Meaning. Boston: Beacon Press, 2006

·      Groeschel, Benedict J. Spiritual Passages: The Psychology of Spiritual Development. New York: Crossroad, 1983.

·      Hillman, James. Healing Fiction. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1983.

·      Jung, C. G. “Fundamental Questions of Psychotherapy.” In The Practice of Psychotherapy. Collected Works, vol. 16. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966. — The essential Jungian source for your argument and the “wounded physician” concept.

·      Jung, C. G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Vintage, 1989.

·      Jung, C. G. The Practice of Psychotherapy: Essays on the Psychology of the Transference and Other Subjects. Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 16. 2nd ed. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966.

·      Kelsey, Morton T. Companions on the Inner Way: The Art of Spiritual Guidance. New York: Crossroad, 1983.

·      Kerenyi, C. Asklepios: Archetypal Image of the Physician's Existence. Translated by Ralph Manheim. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959.

·      Kerenyi, C. The Heroes of the Greeks. London: Thames & Hudson, 1959.

·      May, Gerald G. Care of Mind/Care of Spirit: A Psychiatrist Explores Spiritual Direction. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982.

·      Moltmann, Jürgen. The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology. Translated by R. A. Wilson and John Bowden. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993.

·      Nouwen, Henri J. M. Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life. New York: Doubleday, 1975.

·      Nouwen, Henri J. M. The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom. New York: Doubleday, 1996.

·      Nouwen, Henri J. M. The Wounded Healer: Ministry in Contemporary Society. New York: Doubleday, 1972.

·      Sanford, John A. The Man Who Wrestled with God: Light from the Old Testament on the Psychology of Individuation. New York: Paulist Press, 1974.

^[1] Carl G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963), 134.

^[2] Carl G. Jung, “Fundamental Questions of Psychotherapy,” in The Practice of Psychotherapy: Essays on the Psychology of the Transference and Other Subjects, Collected Works, vol. 16, 2nd ed., trans. R. F. C. Hull, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 116, §239.