Aion Farvahar  0:13
Wounded Healer
When the Wounded becomes the Healer
By Aion Farvahar
"When you heal yourself, you become a wounded healer. If you are destined to be a wounded healer, your life experiences bring you emotional pain, because only through healing your pain, you become a wounded healer."
Hi, this is Aion Farvahar. I am glad you are here.
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Aion Farvahar  1:15
Today, we want to focus on the idea of Wounded Healer, and why the best healers are those who were able to heal themselves. If you are a psychologist, counselor, caregiver, empath, or are someone who has a calling to be a healer, you may find the information provided here useful. 
There are much emotional pain in this world, because we humans are emotional beings and can be negatively affected by our setbacks and difficult experiences. We have the need to be seen, validated, valued, and loved, but not all of our life experiences satisfy this need, making us shy away from life, not realize our value, and not to love or trust ourselves. When our needs are not met, we experience emotional pain, the pain that lingers deep within us. In response to this pain, we humans have three options: 

We can choose to succumb to our pain and let it define us, making us feel defeated and depressed. 

We can otherwise choose to distract ourselves from our pain, suppress it, and become emotionally numb, so we don't feel that pain.    

Or, we can choose to become curious about our pain, to find out why it is there, and find a way to heal it. 

Without exception, everyone experiences emotional pain in this life and has to make one of these choices, either to succumb to the pain and become its victim, learn to suppress and cope with the pain, or choose to become curious about and heal the pain. Those who choose to become curios and heal their pain are meant to become wounded healers. 

Aion Farvahar  3:25
Your capacity as a healer is limited by your own emotional wounds and the degree they are healed within you. A mother that does not love herself cannot teach her children how to love themselves. Or a father who is not confident cannot show his children how to trust themselves. Similarly, a healer cannot heal a wounded person beyond what the healer herself has yet not healed within. So, your capacity for healing others is not bounded by your empathic gifts, but by the emotional wounds from your past that prevent you from fully actualizing these gifts. If you are or have a calling to become a healer, you need to do your own inner work to heal yourself first. You need to become curious about any unhealed trauma and emotional wounds still within you, find the parts of you that are wounded and trapped in the past, and help those parts heal and reclaim their vitality. 
 
The term wounded healer is attributed to C.G. Jung, who became a healer through noticing and healing his own sufferings. In one of his quotes, inspired by the Greek myth of "Wounded Physician", Jung states:

"The doctor is effective only when he himself is affected. Only the Wounded Physician heals."  

The Wounded Healer is a paradoxical term, because it contains two polar opposite meanings, namely "being wounded" and "being a healer". This raises the question of "How one who is wounded can ever become a healer?" Because of this contradiction, the term Wounded Healer implicitly implies a transformation, the transformation from a "wounded individual" to a "wounded healer". This presentation is meant to shine light on this transformation and the process that transforms a wounded individual to a wounded healer. More specifically, we cover the following topics:

How to know if you are meant to be a Wounded Healer? 

The Origin of Trauma and Emotional Wounds

The Fundamental Needs of Humans (Inner Child Needs)

And, why you need to become a Wounded Healer

Let's go over these. Please note that the ideas presented here are based on my personal experience and understanding, and are not meant to reflect an academic perspective. 

Aion Farvahar  6:28
How to know if you are meant to be a Wounded Healer?

Every individual who has experienced trauma and emotional wounds has the capacity to become a wounded healer, but not every wounded individual ends up becoming a wounded healer. If you still carry emotional wounds and experience the following conditions, you are meant to become a wounded healer:

You've had many adverse and emotionally painful experiences in your life.

You have a wounded inner child, because you grew up with parents or guardians, who were either emotionally unavailable, numb, intense, or unpredictable, or parents who were not as caring or loving, maybe overly anxious, over prescriptive, or overcritical. 

You are compelled and curious about yourself and the pain you experience, as if you are a puzzle you need to solve.   

And, you have an empathic nature, can sense the pain of people around you, and have a genuine desire to help others. It is as if there is an inner healer within you that wants to break through. 

Most individuals who are empathic or gravitate toward healing professions have these personal characteristics. 
                
Aion Farvahar  8:03
The Origin of Trauma and Emotional Wounds

Our trauma and emotional wounds are caused by negatively-charged events in the course of our life, especially going back to our early childhood, when we were most vulnerable to be affected by adverse events. The term Wounded Child is used in Depth Psychology to reflect this observation. Overwhelming majority of psychological issues are related to our Wounded Child and requires Inner Child work. 

Unhealed childhood traumas limit our capacity to have emotional vitality or feel truly alive. In shamanism, having vitality and feeling alive reflects the full embodiment of one's Soul. Negatively-charged events or traumas lead to fragmentation of the Soul, and what in shamanism is referred to as Soul Loss, and the loss of aliveness and emotional vitality. 

When we come to this world, experiencing life as children, we have a set fundamental needs. When these needs are met, we grow up feeling alive, soulful, and have emotional vitality. But when these needs are denied and not met, we feel emotionally wounded. So, to heal our trauma and emotional wounds, we must understand their origin and how they came about. And to do that, we need to understand our fundamental needs as humans. Only through this understanding, we notice what has been wounded, and can make efforts to heal it. 

Aion Farvahar  10:00
The Fundamental Needs of Humans (Inner Child Needs)

As indicated, traumas and emotional wounds are caused by negatively-charged experiences, during which one or more of our fundamental needs as a child were denied or not met. But what are these needs? Let's list some of them here. 

As children, we need to feel safe and protected, because we are vulnerable and dependent on others. Feeling safe and protected is an existential need, and is the core of many attachment wounds and traumas.  

As children, we need to be seen and feel connected, because only then we know that "we exist". If no one sees us, connected to us, or emotionally tuned to us, how can we know we exist?
This is important because an inner child that is neglected and not emotionally tuned to, often lacks a true sense of selfhood and can experience a sense of void inside, even when becoming an adult.    

As children, we need to feel unconditionally loved, because being loved reaffirms our sense of value or self-worth. When not loved, children believe they are not valued, otherwise they would have been loved.  

As children, we need to feel validated and understood, because how we can learn to trust ourselves, if what we do or experience is not being validated by adults around us.  

And, as children we need to feel a sense of belonging through peer binding, because otherwise how can we operate as an active member of society as adults, if we don't feel connected to others or a community.

And, this list can continue further. Hope you can see what makes these needs so fundamental to our emotional health later in life as adults. An inner child whose fundamental needs are denied or not met becomes a wounded child. And wounded healers are adults who have found and healed their wounded child.   

Aion Farvahar  12:37
Why you need to become a Wounded Healer

Mental and emotional health of individuals, especially those living in urban areas and western societies is in dire situation. Depression, anxiety, and suicides are on the rise, even in adolescence and young adults who should be otherwise inspired and filled with life energy. The condition of the world today is what it is, because majority of adults have unhealed inner child wounds. Many parents, as caring or loving as they may believe they are, unknowingly project their inner child wounds to their children, and pass their unhealed emotional wounds to the next generation. Because of this, our society suffers from our collective wounds that are continually growing. The number of empathic individuals and healing professionals is increasing, but many of them also carry unhealed emotional wounds and can get burned out, or unknowingly project their emotional wounds on the people they are trying to help. 

It seems the world has a desperate need for more compassionate individuals and healers. Fortunately, there are also many empathic individuals and wounded healers out there doing their best to help others, but the world seems to need far more. If you are an empath and resonate with this, maybe it's time for you to transform your empathic gifts and become a wounded healer. 

To become a wounded healer, you need to notice and heal your inner child. You need to become compassionately curious about the parts of you that carry emotional wounds, understand how they came about, and what they need to let go of the pain they may still carry. You need to awaken the inner healer within you, so it can help your emotionally wounded parts to set free from the burdens they carry. When you heal yourself, you become a wounded healer, and start loving and trusting yourself unconditionally. And through that, your inner healer can redirect its compassion and healing energy to others around you. 

In closing, remember that all true healers are wounded healers, and all wounded individuals have the capacity to be a healer. Your unhealed or suppressed emotional wounds limit your capacity as a healer, and if you wish to remove that limit, you need to heal your wounds. So, doing your inner work and healing your inner child is the best gift you can ever give to yourself, to people around you, and to the world that desperately needs healing.  

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Blessings.