I took this photo many years ago and I’ve shown it to many patients. I call it “the wounded rock”. Something struck this rock, probably a long, long time ago. It almost split it in two. Clearly, it was a heavy blow. It has left a clear wound.
Life is often like this. Something happens, something traumatic, which inflicts a wound on us, a wound which never completely heals. Powerful events change us. They might be violent events, either accidental, or malicious. They might be physical, or emotional. They might be serious illnesses. Or they might be big changes in life – loss of a loved one, loss of a job, moving house….
Life goes on, like the water continuing to flow around and over this rock. But the wound leaves us changed.
But, actually, this tree in my garden, is a better metaphor, or, should I say, a better example. It would seem that one day, long, long ago, a storm blew through and felled this tree. It uprooted it. Its roots have been torn out of the ground, and we found them, standing upright, embedded with stones, and covered in ivy.
You’d expect that would be the end of the tree, but, no. It continued to grow, now turning its branches at ninety degrees to the fallen trunk. It started to reach for the sunlight again.
It’s a better example, because the rock is not a living organism. Having been struck, it can’t adapt. It can’t change. The tree, on the other hand, is more like us. Having been struck, it adapts.
Self-healing is an adaptive phenomenon. It is the basis of all cures, and, even, of all recovery. There is no healing without it. And yet, it has its limits. In both the case of the rock and the tree, there can be no going back. There can be no restoration to a “time before”, much as we might wish there was. In both cases, the flow of life carries on, shaping, and adapting, in surprising, fundamentally unpredictable, ways.
Heroes Not Zombies 