You know you have healed when something comes along, something that once triggered your deepest hurt, and it does not bother you at all.  I owe much of my healing to people who offered emotional support in ways that were empowering rather than disempowering.  Only through empowerment can one experience the fundamental transformation necessary to see the world and oneself in a new way and regain a sense of wholeness.  Healing is a paradigm shift.  New light shines into your world, and things never again look the same.  Even in the dark, you know nothing can harm you.

Healing is like learning to ride a bike.  When healing is passionately sought, the universe responds with a sequence of life experiences that transform the self.  One day, you move through life, and you begin to notice that you carry yourself differently, strength comes without effort, and the dramas that once pulled you in are silly and unattractive.

Effective and empowering emotional support honors this process.  Faith and trust in another person’s path are highly potent catalysts for healing.

Many triggers have arisen in my life lately, and instead of injuring me, they passed through me.  Yesterday, I was exposed to materials that should have left my psyche in rubble.  I am a teaching assistant for a course on human sexuality, and that morning, the professor played a video about the pornography industry, The Price of Pleasure, which depicted numerous graphic scenes of rape, humiliation, simulated child pornography, and violent sexual torture.  Many students, trapped in the long rows of the auditorium, walked away shaken, complaining that they had seen things they never wanted to see.

Ordinarily, I would have averted my eyes or fled the room, but the images did not evoke pain.  They evoked  compassion.  There was an ineffable wisdom encompassing the experience, an understanding that I could not hope to articulate.  I felt compassion for both the women in the scenes as well as the troubled men who abused them.  My heart was swelling, and afterwards, I found a quiet place and cried with gratitude.

I am different.

Healing is not primarily a matter of facing and removing pain and darkness but of discovering love and light. During my discussion groups following the horrific video, I invented an exercise to help the students heal.  I asked them to take out a sheet of paper and describe a positive portrayal of sex.  “Imagine a sexual encounter that is beautiful and sacred.  What would that look like?” I asked them.  Their responses, handed in anonymously, were lovely.  I think it helped to return them to a place of wholeness.

Despite my sense of wholeness, or perhaps because of it, I needed to process what I saw in class.  I have been blessed to have a healer as my romantic partner.  Samuel Johnson said, “The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good.”  He is without a doubt a good man.  He was evicted from his home by his jealous roommate simply for befriending me, but he soon found a lovelier place to live, and our bond deepened.

Last night, he listened while I described the horrific video.  He wrapped his arms around me and surrounded me with love, understanding, and appreciation, but importantly, he let me choose my own experience.  He recognized and honored that sensitivity and strength can coexist.  Pain is not a sign that you are broken.  Less than an hour later, the experience was behind me.  My heart felt light, and we laughed and spoke of other things, like my upcoming birthday.

Not all forms of emotional support are healthy, however. Some forms of comfort are actually disempowering.  When someone offers comfort in a way that reifies the apparent injury, rather than healing you, they actually recreate the injury.  Someone who pushes you to dig deep into your darkness and submerge yourself in traumas you have already faced, for instance, has mistaken the recurrence of pain for the persistence of an injury.  Such forms of support, rather than building trust, slowly erode it.

Empowering comfort and healthy emotional support have the following qualities:

• Your inner wisdom is recognized and honored.
• Your choice of one path of healing rather than another is respected, and your reasons are heard.
• Your friend understands that you know yourself better than they know you.
• You are able to confide in your friend without being judged for it.
• Your friend acknowledges the ways in which you have already healed and sees your fundamental wholeness.
• You are given time and space in which to address past traumas, and if you choose not to relive certain past events, that is okay.

And most importantly:

• The friendship is still there even if you make choices regarding your healing that disagree with the opinions of your friend.

Ultimately, you find a place of healing so deep, you no longer need comfort or support.  Adyashanti wrote:

If you are a true seeker of liberation you’ve got to be willing to stand alone.  At the moment of Liberation everything falls away… everything.  Suddenly the ground beneath your feet is gone, and you are alone.  You are alone because you have directly realized that there is no other, there is no separation.  There is only you, only Self, only limitless emptiness, pure consciousness.

To the mind, the ego, this appears terrifying.  When the mind looks at limitlessness and infinity, it projects meaninglessness and despair.  To the ego Absolute Freedom can look terrifying.  But when the mind is let go of, the view changes from meaningless despair and fear to the unending joy and wonder of Liberation.

In Liberation, you stand alone. You stand alone because you need no supports of any kind. You need no supports because you have realized that the very notion of a separate you no longer exists; that there is nothing to support; that the whole ego experience was a flimsy illusion.  So you stand alone but never, never lonely because everywhere you look, all you see is That, and You are That.

Source: Actually One Being, by Adyashanti