From a Healing Path to a Healer's Path

Five years ago, I was a hot mess. My intricately crafted life – marked by accomplishments and a façade of perfection – crumbled rather suddenly around me. It shouldn’t have been sudden, really. In hindsight, signs of trouble had been brewing all the way along. But I had an IDEA of what my life was, and I was living according to that idea. Sure there were moments – many moments – when I peaked around the curtain and felt a wash of dread and discontent. I felt frustrated, angry, and powerless much of the time. But I always tucked those feelings away and got up to live another day according to the script. Don’t get me wrong – there was also great joy in my life. There just wasn’t any tolerance for the troubled bits to come out into the light.

Running through the river of my life, all those years, was chronic pain, fatigue, anxiety and depression. They called it Fibromyalgia, Chronic Myofascial Pain Syndrome, Degenerative Disk Disease. I suffered a back injury at age 19 and though it healed initially, the pain returned and gradually grew in my early 20’s. I was in graduate school at the time, and it got harder and harder to sit or stand without disabling pain. So I was convinced by “one of the best” neurosurgeons that he could make it all go away with a lumbar laminectomy surgery. He said to me, “in six weeks you will forget that you ever had back pain.”

Yup, you guessed it. He was wrong. He never should have made such an outrageous promise, of course, but I was 24 years old and suffering profoundly. My parents had chosen the doctor and taken me in to see him. I was led. After recovering from the surgery – which took longer and was infinitely more painful than I’d been led to believe – the pain resumed pretty much status quo ante. I did rehab, took medications, and got to a place where I could live with the pain and the limitations it placed upon me. I got married, finished my PhD, began a full-time career, had two kids, and enjoyed a wonderful community of neighbors and friends. Time went on and so did I. An energizer bunny who would go go go and then crash crash crash. Rest, adjust meds and activity, and then go right back to the relentless pace that is the life of most modern working mothers. It was NORMAL. It was what everyone else was doing. And I was determined to do it with grace and the appearance of ease, despite the pain, fear, and trauma that were my constant companions. Very few people – even my closest friends – really had any idea what I was going through.

Then a series of events led me to hit the wall – and I hit it HARD. It was sudden and yet utterly predictable, even overdetermined – based on what had REALLY been going on. But from inside the IDEA of my perfect life, I hadn’t seen the signs, so I, and my then husband, experienced it as a tsunami. I couldn’t stand to live this life for another minute. But I couldn’t imagine dropping a bomb into my family either. The kids were 9 & 12. I'd been married 18 years. I knew I would never heal from where I was, and yet to change it meant unthinkable pain for them. It took a long time and a lot of agony, but ultimately I moved out. We divorced and established equal custody of our son and daughter.

But I had also reinjured my back – a fainting spell had caused a fall which resulted in a severely herniated disk. So in the midst of struggling with the decision to move out, there was a second back surgery. Again, I recovered enough to go back to full time work, and I began crafting a life post-divorce. Things held together pretty well for a year. Then I fell again (yes, really – it would be a ridiculous plot development if it were fiction, but it’s true). I tripped over a dog bone and went down. This time I was unable to get up – and for the next 10 weeks I could only lay on my stomach. Any other position sent excruciating pain shooting down my entire leg.

Much medical drama (maybe to be told another time) led me to a remarkable neurosurgeon (and wonderful human being) who said he could help me. Another lumbar laminectomy – number three. The excruciating pain was gone as soon as I awoke from surgery, and I was pain-free 8 weeks later. But then I went back to my full-time jobs - running a non-profit agency and being a mom. And within a week I was again taken down by pain – filling my whole body and literally forcing me to STOP. I had ignored my body's wispers. Now it was screaming bloody murder.

So began a phase of “disability” with no job other than to try to heal. I think of that – more than two years ago now - as the time when I first stepped foot on my healing path – a process of putting one foot in front of the other with no idea where it would lead. Hope and despair took their turns with me, back and forth. But the old idea that accomplishment and appearance were the drivers of my life – that was dead. I had taken a permanent exit off the achievement superhighway. I was…”recalculating.”

Now I have been reborn as a healer. The healing path led me to a healer’s path, as has been the case for countless others. The wounded healer, as Carl Jung would have it. That’s what this blog is really about. How do we find a healing path? How do we guide others to find theirs? This is my life’s calling. This is what I will share with you here, if you’re willing to ride along with me.

For more information feel free to email me at danabarron.healthcoach@gmail.com