January 2018
Chiron, Wounded Healer by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M.Couns., PhD
Once upon a mythic
time, a long time ago, a little immortal centaur with a horse’s head and a male
human body was born. His mother was the nymph Philyra
and his father Kronos (the half brother of Zeus). His mother took one look at
the infant and rejected him. This little boy, named Chiron, was taken and cared
for and educated by Apollo and Artemis and he grew up wise and with psychic
vision. When he was much older, he was wounded by an arrow dipped in the poison
of a hydra fired by Herakles. This wound would not heal and gave him tremendous
and inescapable pain. With such came deep compassion for others and healing
powers, as well as an exquisite capacity to teach. His pain was so excruciating
that Zeus took away his immortality and made him a star in the constellation
Sagittarius or Centaurus.
Chiron is known as the wounded healer. I
write of him because he experienced rejection and injury and yet became is a
fine model for healers. Many of us in the healing professions know full well
that our own experience of pain gives us the ability to sit, in focused
awareness, with the troubles of others and begin a collaborative process of
healing.
We are relational
beings that contribute to how we negotiate the greater world and understand
ourselves. How we do this
originates in our very first relationships and continues throughout life. What
was writ in early childhood, though, does not make us who we are now, unless
all we have known is the same kind of thing. Depending on the other later
experiences and whether those undo the damage of early infant rejection (as
with Chiron), we can generally move on and find some happiness elsewhere. Sometimes however, the old relational patterns
are replicated over and over and psychotherapy then becomes a very useful tool
in breaking this iterative pattern.
It shouldn’t be
thought that iterative patterns of internalized belief systems are all
negative. In fact, the person with such patterns have learned capacities for
dealing with issues that show rather amazing strengths, albeit often out of
proportion to the situations at hand. The human organism knows its
vulnerabilities and seeks to protect them. It’s when such protective mechanisms
prevent interactions that are nourishing. All of us have unspoken self-protective strategies that guide our experience within
relationships, so therapy isn’t about destroying those strategies, but
loosening our dependence on them as well as introducing new strategies that
free up our life experiences in healthier ways.
Patterns of
relationships evolve from the primary relationship of infant and primary care
giver, as noted above. These are called attachment styles.
The secure bond
between caregiver and child is emotionally charged: there is eye contact,
touching, proximal seeking, vocalizations (and later linguistic exchange), etc
along with an increasing courage and capacity for the child to explore their
environment. So emotional closeness is paradoxically associated with a growing
independence and capacity for curiosity, exploring, experimenting, testing other
interests and developing self reliance and independence.
How a person relates
is intergenerational, unless some intervention has occurred. Lack of emotional
closeness tends to be passed on from generation to generation. It is
significant fact that many of my patients come because of lack of a secure
sense they experienced in their family of origin. A quick exploration usually
shows that this experience was shared down the generations. The wars also
contributed to lack of any sense of safety.
Attachment is a basic human process for a
close and intimate relationship between infants and their caregivers.
Without a secure base, where the primary caregiver is always anxious, the child tends to
develop problems with relating to other people, lack of confidence and
distrust. This is not writ in
stone and can be transformed and when transformed can become the tools for
budding healers and teachers, as the archetype of Chiron shows us. The work of
self awareness, however, is, I believe, necessary for the development of such
skills and thus I recommend psychotherapy for healers as well as those we heal.
