The Wounded Healer
On acceptance, letting go and hidden lessons
As 2024 comes to an end and I reflect on the major lessons I have learned, I want to share with you my biggest lesson of all. An elixir I found hidden in the story of Chiron and my sweet puppy, who is his namesake. Happy 2025! May it bring nourishment, joy and living from the heart!
I sobbed. Wails emerged from the pit of my belly like a woman whose child had just been ripped from her arms. My forehead was pressed hard into the steering wheel of my car as the tears poured out. A dam in my heart had broken open. I had just left my sweet puppy Chiron with his new family. I had actually rehomed my dog. I let the grief come, in waves, in torrents and in rivulets. It finally subsided and as I began to back out the driveway, I could see his sweet brown eyes peering out the glass pane of the front door. I felt that tug that I always feel when I leave him but this time it ripped a dark hard stone of grief from my heart and laid it bare for me to see in the broad daylight — the sobbing began all over again.
I don’t know how long I sat in the driveway but the rapids of my river of grief eventually carried me home. For the first time in my life, I allowed myself to cry to the point of exhaustion, until I couldn’t cry anymore. He had been my only comfort and touch for the last three years. He had laid next to me for days on end as I struggled with being so ill I couldn’t get up off the couch. He absorbed every bit of my anxiety, my fear, my depression, my pain and he held it with me. Chiron became a reflection of my own illness with his own anxiety and reactivity. He became my wounded healer.
The asteroid, Chiron, sits in a very intense position in my astrological chart — barely in Aries, conjunct my descendent on the cusp of Pisces and knocking boots in the 8th house with my north node and Saturn. I have spent the last 13 years grappling with this astrology and what it means to be the wounded healer. I had accepted it as my role and path in life, to help others heal through the experiences of my own pain. I thought I had figured it out. But my return of Chiron was going to show me otherwise.
Chiron began its return just before my 51st birthday. I was feeling on top of the world. I was dating a new person, I was successful in my career as a trauma therapist and I was pointing my sights toward public speaking and starting a group practice. Three months after Chiron slid back into Aries, my ex-husband was diagnosed with a terminal glioblastoma on the right side of his brain and the next 5 months of my life were pure hell. I learned what self denial and self sacrifice were on a whole other level. When he passed, something cracked deep inside me and a cosmic size fault line formed in my psyche. And all at once, the cosmic ocean of consciousness began to bubble up through the cracks and who I though I was, my front, my masks, began to swirl down the drain.
The devestation of my ex-husbands death rolled right into pandemic, one death becoming lost in the death of thousands. And it devastated me even more, which I didn’t think was possible. The deep seeds of my ancestral trauma began to sprout to life — the seeds of hiding, of the constant threat of death, of being powerless, of following the rules or dying. They quickly sprouted into wild brambling vines bursting through the concrete, tearing apart what I had spent lifetimes building over, under and around the trauma and murdered parts of myself. The concrete was decades thick, a new layer being poured every time something from the past dared to find its way through a crack. But now it was crumbling and all hell was breaking loose, literally. As each day passed I found myself drowning more and more until I was completely under water and trapped in a tangle web of ghost selves and ancestral pain.
Just months after pandemic began, I found myself in the emergency room, my body racked in pain and reliving medical trauma of the past. I stopped sleeping completely. My complex-PTSD joined hands with my mast cell disorder and together, they took over. I could not eat or drink without having a histamine reaction. I woke up crying, a small voice in my head saying “I told you the world was a bad place. I don’t want to be here any more”. Every cell in my body was sounding the alarm and screaming danger. I spent my days in a dissociative haze, fragmented parts of me emerging like whack-a-mole — bringing with them darkness and loathing. I watched in horror as the race wars unfolded in Seattle and the sky was yellow with wildfire smoke. I was sick, really sick and the world was on fire and it was mirroring what was happening inside me. Yet, somehow I carried on, I continued to see clients and managed to mask the fact that I was dying inside and out. I kept pouring out what miniscule particles I had left to give.
The whole while, my closest intimate relationship was dying the same slow painful death. I was struggling to accept the loss of the romance in the relationship, questioning if it had ever been there to begin with. I just couldn’t bring myself to admit that I did not want to live together anymore because that meant being alone in my illness and in the dark terrifying water world I found myself in. So I did what I always do, I brought something into my life to care for outside myself. I got my dog Chiron. I needed something to anchor me in this world, to keep me from drowning and to build an illusory bridge across the chasm in my crumbling relationship.
I did what I have always done to tolerate being here on this planet. I found something outside myself to care for and to give my life purpose. Not necessarily a bad thing — a coping skill I have leaned on in the past with my depression. Getting outside myself has often helped but this time it brought with it a lesson that I had been waiting lifetimes to learn. One I simply had refused to look at or accept about myself. A hidden lesson in Chiron, the wounded healer.
The debridement of the martyrism and toxic heroism from the wound of over giving, over responsibility and over sacrificing. Perhaps this is the wound that Chiron suffered from, not the piercing of a poisoned Hydra arrow. It is the wound of the human giver and I have it in spades.
Chiron has always been a mythological character that I love and am fascinated by (thus my dog’s name). He was wounded by a poisoned arrow that left him trapped in perpetual agony due to his immortality and inability to cure himself. Yet he lived his life teaching and healing others. He was a respected and revered mentor, a skilled healer for the Gods/Goddesses, and renowned for his wisdom. Eventually he sacrificed his immortal life for the freedom of Prometheus, a heroic and selfless act, which earned him a place in the stars (the Gods hall of fame) and, at the same time, put him out of his misery. He is described as cultured and restrained unlike his other centaur counterparts. He embodies the archetypes of the wounded healer, the hero, the wise teacher, the medicine man, the musician, the poet, and the martyr — all rolled into one.
Many interpret the lesson of Chiron as being about the wounds of life being what makes for an empathic and powerful healer, walking a mile in your brothers shoes and all that. Jung himself stated that having a disease was the best training for being a physician. The ailment, if you will, helps us grow and deepen our understanding of the world and of ourselves. It brings us alongside the one we are helping in a parallel process. All true and very much my initial understanding of the wounded healer.
While I don’t disagree with these front-facing, easy to see, archetypal brush strokes in the story of Chiron, for me there was a much deeper soul learning that needed to be excavated. One that I have never heard anyone talk of. The ability to stop pouring yourself out into others and care for yourself. The strength to say no, I can’t help you. The audacity to say, I cannot save you. The bravery to not sacrifice yourself just one more time for someone else hoping it will end your misery. The debridement of the martyrism and toxic heroism from the wound of over giving, over responsibility and over sacrificing. Perhaps this is the wound that Chiron suffered from, not the piercing of a poisoned Hydra arrow. It is the wound of the human giver and I have it in spades.
I chose to rehome Chiron because I can now see this gaping, oozing wound that had been uncovered by the last 5 years. I can see myself sacrificing myself one more time for others only to find myself scattered in the stars. I have to stop. Stop pouring myself into anything else, anyone else, so that I can patch the holes — so that I can stop leaking my energy, my nurturing, my caring out onto anything and everything around me. To stop and turn it toward myself. For years my body has tried to tell me this and it became unavoidable as I cared for Chiron each day. I woke up daily dreading having to go outside in the rainy dark to potty him. My nervous system jumped into over drive with every sharp warning bark he gave. I felt deep anxiety at leaving him and in worrying about him being a bother to others. All my wounds around caregiving and responsibility for others came into full bloom and I could see them clearly.
The truth is, my dog, my sweet Chiron, being the wise teacher that he is, taught me the most profound lesson — that I need to say no, that I need to care for myself and that until I tend to these wounds I will continue to leak out all of the goodness that I need to care for my Self. I need every last resource I have in my mind, body, heart and bank account to do that. I finally came to acceptance and I let go. And, as hard as it is to say, I did the right thing. I found the most amazing family to shower him with love. I found a home where he gets to share his sweet healing medicine of wet kisses and soft cuddles with five other humans.
The dark stone pit that was ripped from my heart when I saw him watching me through the glass was the wound of an ever present double bind — abandoning myself or abandoning another — and it had always been an all or nothing survival proposition. The grief that had been stored in my broken heart every time I abandoned myself, every time I was in the double bind of choosing self or choosing other, poured out of me as I left him. I saw in his soft brown eyes the pain that I felt each time I had done this to myself. Chiron will be okay. He is loved. He is cared for. He is safe. The question is, am I?
I honestly don’t think we would know much about Chiron, mythologically speaking, if he had chosen himself over others — if he had said no to the Gods and cared for himself, he would just be a “barely mentionable” in the annals of mythology. Actually, he probably would have been portrayed like the rest of the centaurs — selfish, wild, uncultured. But he wasn’t like them, he was different. He loved music, poetry, philosophy and the arts. He would have actually been the lonely, crazy, medicine man wandering in the woods, playing his flute, writing poetry and making magical balms for no one but himself.
So I choose that. I choose to fade into the background of life, finding a way to nurture myself, know myself and listen to my body. I denounce my constant need to care for others, to find my value in healing and nurturing outside myself and my need for something external to anchor me in this world. I choose me. I rescind my lifetimes of membership in the human giver club and claim my birthright as a human being. I choose to find a way to plug the holes, kintsugi all the cracks and anchor into my own heart. You’ll find me wandering in the wild making soothing salves of poetry, song and dance for the wounds of my soul. Come find me!