The Wounded Healer Grows Up

The cat I live with (who I sometimes mess up and call “my cat”) is named Chiron. If you know your Greek mythology, you already see where this is going.

Chiron was the original wounded healer. He was an immortal centaur, the greatest teacher and healer in the ancient world, who suffered a wound that couldn't be healed. He spent his life tending to others even as he carried his own unrelenting pain. The story eventually ends with him surrendering his immortality to be released from it.

Chiron the cat showed up on my fence about 7 weeks after the death of my beloved canine companion, Prior. After a week or two of admiring him, the name just came out of my mouth, and he didn’t protest. It did seem like he was bringing healing energy my way. (He also bit and scratched the shit out of me until we could converge my understanding of his boundaries and his growing trust in me, but that’s a different story…) I've been thinking about that myth a lot lately — about what it means for those of us who came to healing work through our own hard stories, and about what it looks like when we can allow ourselves to grow beyond the wound, even as we continue to honor it.

This is something I'm in the middle of, not something I've figured out. Trust that this isn't coming from a place of having it all sorted. It's coming from the same place most of my writing comes from…sitting with a question long enough that I have to find a place to put it.

Chiron, resident wounded healer, fully integrated.

The Archetype Is Real

The wounded healer is one of the most enduring archetypes in human history because it points to something true. Our suffering can give us access to compassion, to presence, to a particular kind of understanding that you simply can't get from a textbook.

So many of us came to this work exactly that way. We experienced great pain and needed healing. We found it, at least in part. And then we wanted to offer service to others.

I am no exception. My years as a survivor of suicide loss are woven into every part of my Befriend Your Grief program. My life in a dysfunctional and alcoholic family has everything to do with my own path of trial and error healing. Not because I perform this grief, but because I know what it feels like to carry it and try to figure out who I am inside and beyond it. That lived experience isn't incidental — it's the marrow of the work.

I love this about our community of healers. I love that so many of us chose this path because something in us was cracked open and we found, in the breaking apart of it all, a calling. And. And.

I think there's a conversation worth having about what comes next.

What Happens After the Wound?

Is the goal to stay in relationship with the wound, or to integrate it? Those aren't the same thing.

Integration doesn't mean the wound disappears. It doesn't mean you stop being moved by hard things, or that your history becomes irrelevant. Integration means you've metabolized enough of it that it's no longer running the show.

When the wounding is running the show — and again, talking about patterns I've seen in myself, not pointing fingers — it can look like a few things. It can look like sharing your story in sessions in ways that, just slightly, shift the focus to you. It can look like unconsciously needing your clients' healing to confirm your own. It can look like staying tethered to certain painful identities because stepping out of them feels like a kind of betrayal.

It can also look like skipping out on your own support. Because if you get too healed, you wonder — will I still be able to relate? Will I lose the very thing that makes me good at this?

I think about this not just in terms of our own health and wellbeing. It connects to all kinds of things going on inside us and around us. Like individual health and public health. Or the stories we have about money and our larger understanding of economic justice or climate justice. (Working on an article about this…more later.)

That fear is worth naming, because I think a lot of us carry it quietly.

Who is it For?

In my most recent spiritual guidance education, we talked a lot about self-disclosure and using it very sparingly, if at all. We looked more at this question, "When we share our story with a client — who is it for?"

It isn’t even a trick question or a gotcha; it’s just an honest self-inquiry.

Sometimes the answer is clearly: them. It normalizes their experience. It builds trust. It says, in a real way, “you are not alone in this room with someone untouched by hard things.”

But sometimes, something is truly being asked of us. The answer is more complicated. We share, at times, because we haven't fully processed something and talking about it still brings relief. Sometimes it's for connection, or reassurance, or because the silence feels uncomfortable and our story is what we reach for.

None of that makes us bad or wrong. It makes us human practitioners. But it does mean that some of what we're carrying belongs in our own therapy, our own peer support, our own supervision, and not in the session of the person who came to us for help.

Knowing the difference is ongoing work. It doesn't end.

You Are Encouraged to Heal

I want to say this as clearly as I can, and I want to say it with as much warmth as I have:

You are allowed to grow and to become someone for whom the worst chapters are genuinely behind you — not forgotten, not pretended away, but actually integrated. You are allowed to build a professional identity rooted in your gifts, your training, your love for this work, your values — not just in what you survived. As practitioners, we want to keep at it. If our goal is service, it allows us to continue to grow what we offer to others. And your own level of healing does not diminish your capacity to serve others. It expands it! (Who would’ve thunk it?)

The more we've genuinely metabolized our own grief and trauma, the more room we have to hold someone else's. That means it doesn’t activate us unexpectedly like it has in the past. We can hold another person’s story without needing something from them and without us steering the work toward what's familiar to us rather than what they actually need.

Our clients deserve the versions of us that get their own Reiki. The ones that have a therapist, or a peer group, or a supervisor. We need this tending in an ongoing and serious way, which is not a luxury but a major part of the job itself.

Growing Up Alongside Chiron

I am moved most by the ending of Chiron’s story. He doesn't stay wounded forever. He finds a way through! And it isn’t by healing the wound, but by releasing what was keeping him bound to it.

I think that's what growing up looks like for those of us in healing work. We aren’t abandoning the wound or pretending it didn't happen. But slowly and imperfectly, we are releasing our grip on it as the primary thing that defines us. And we let go of thinking we are going to forget how hard that part was because that is so unlikely.

We get to be more than our hardest chapters. And when we let ourselves be more, we bring something even richer to those we serve.

Chiron the cat, for his part, seems completely unbothered by any of this. He's napping in a sunbeam, periodically looking over to magically endear me to him even more, and he has no notes.

As it should be.

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Rev. Marshall K Hammer is a Reiki Practitioner (Master Level), ordained minister, Animal Chaplain, and grief facilitator based in Western North Carolina. She is the creator of Befriend Your Grief, a structured companioning program for survivors of suicide loss. Learn more at reikifortoday.com.