The Wounded Healer

“Only the wounded physician heals... and then only to the extent he has healed himself.”

Carl Jung

The wounded healer is one of the primary human archetypes, and the phrase was coined by Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung. This concept has also been written about by Caroline Myss and mythologist Joseph Campbell and is a fundamental aspect of the Shamanic path.

The wounded healer is not necessarily a “healer” in profession, although they may be. Wounded healers are frequently found in helping professions, and may be doctors, nurses, energy healers, coaches, and the like or they may offer their healing insight to others through writing, poetry, art, teaching, parenting, or other forms of caregiving. Wounded healers are usually empathetic, caring, compassionate, accepting, non-judgmental, and frequently highly sensitive.

The main thing that makes one a wounded healer is the path they have walked in life. Wounded healers (or wounded physicians, as Jung called them) are those who have known suffering. This suffering may have come from childhood trauma, abuse, neglect, abandonment, a near-death experience, long illness, or other struggles in life that they had to work to overcome. One must, in some way, be wounded to truly become a healer, as it is only through overcoming suffering that one is initiated into becoming a healer. 

Healers do not heal those who come to them for help. This is an important distinction, as the client must be willing to look within themselves to face what they may have not felt able or willing to face in the past to truly heal. Instead, the healer is more of a guide. If the wounded healer has traversed the path out of suffering into wholeness and healing, they know the way and can be an adept guide to those who reach out for help. Jung himself knew that he was not responsible for the healing of his patients, and knew that a patient’s healing had to emerge from their own psyche. Shadow work is a key component of this healing process, with the client being willing to traverse their inner darkness to find the light hidden there. 

As long as we avoid our pain and still feel controlled and victimized by our wounding, and continue to attempt to escape from it, we will remain tied to it. To truly heal, we must first accept where we are, and then we can become free, but only then. Our wounds can either wake us up or destroy us, and while the work is challenging, it is a choice we must be willing to make. 

The Wound From a Shamanic Perspective

In our Western culture, high sensitivity and mental and emotional challenges are usually viewed as weaknesses.

In Shamanic cultures, they are viewed as gifts and indicate that the person may be a healer.

Image By Susan Seddon Boulet

“The primitive magician, the medicine man or shaman is not only a sick man, he is above all,

a sick man who has been cured, who has succeeded in curing himself.”

Mircea Eliade

Writer Mircea Eliade describes trauma, illnesses, ecstacies, and struggles as shamanic initiations, or portals to power. It is through the pain and the suffering that the wounded healer is initiated, and the profane is made sacred. Initiation, in the shamanic view, is understood as being times of challenge where old systems or ways of being no longer work, and we move through challenges or fear to “move to the next level” of power. Initiation is a key aspect of growth, transformation, and individuation.

The shamanic path of healing is nearly as old as human consciousness itself, predating the earliest recorded civilizations by thousands of years, and comes from every culture around the globe. What connects all shamanic practitioners across the planet is an awakening to other orders of reality, the experience of ecstasy, and an opening up of visionary realms. The entrance to the other realms occurs through the action of total disruption, which is some type of crisis that leads to psychological and spiritual death. There are many similarities between these archaic rituals and the experience people undergo in psychotherapy or plant medicine ceremonies.

Essentially, what is viewed in Western cultures as pathology is viewed in Shamanic cultures as the birth of a healer. This is a very different framework for understanding what brings us to the healing path…the effects of things such as mental illness, trauma, abuse, addiction, and neglect. The wounding gives us access to something bigger, something more universal, and with it brings vision, inspiration, hope, and faith that a different life is possible.

In his book Psychology of the Future, Stanislav Grof tells us that shamans “typically undergo a journey into the underworld, the realm of the dead, where they are attacked by demons and exposed to horrendous tortures and ordeals." In discussing novice shamans who are healers, Grof writes that they develop deep contact with the forces of nature and with animals, both in their natural form and their archetypal versions—“animal spirits” or “power animals." These visionary journeys tend to be healing because those who were traumatized become liberated from emotional, psychosomatic, and physical diseases. This is one reason shamans have often been called wounded healers.

“Trauma represents a profound compression of “survival” energy…

these same energies…can also open feelings of heightened focus, ecstasy, and bliss…

it appears that the very brain structures central to the resolution of trauma are also pivotal in various mystical and spiritual states.”

Peter Levine

The Hero’s Journey

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”

Joseph Campbell

Mythologist Joseph Campbell expanded on Jung’s ideas with his teachings about the Hero’s Journey, which is a template of the human experience of growth and individuation.

The call to adventure is the first stage of the Hero’s Journey occurs when we are called to adventure and are separated from our ordinary world of comfort to tread into unknown and dangerous territory. Since it is a call to the unknown, it often leads to refusal, which stunts our growth and healing, thereby deteriorating one’s being, life, and relationships. However, at some point, the pain of the untended, unhealed wound becomes untenable, and we must do what is being called for to heal our lives.

On the Heor’s Journey, we will encounter helpers and mentors, and challenges as well, including being forced to confront and “slay” our dragons. (We see this myth in many movies, especially fantasy, where actual knights are slaying real dragons, but this is all symbolic.) Our dragons are our fears that we must face and transform our relationship to so that we can complete our journey.

Going through our wound is a genuine death experience, as our old self “dies” in the process, while a new, more expansive, and empowered self is born. This is the process of individuation, the place where we find and connect with our true selves.

Chiron: The Wounded Healer

Artist Unknown

“Chiron reminds us that only through recognizing and accepting our inner wounds can we find true healing.”

Lisa Tenzin-Dolma

Chiron rules themes of abandonment, shame, and rejection - because of his differences

Chiron symbolizes our karmic wounds that are buried in the unconscious mind and our energy bodies. Chiron helps us to remember what we have come into this life to heal. Living as human beings, we experience suffering on many levels and it is Chiron who can guide us towards a deep reconciliation, healing, and transformation.

In Greek myth and astrology, Chiron symbolizes the wounded healer. A wise and noble centaur, who was abandoned by his mother, Chiron suffered a painful, incurable wound. He closed his heart in response to the rejection of his mother and the shame of being different.

Chiron was adopted by Apollo, who taught the young centaur everything he knew from poetry and herbalism to medicine and astrology. In addition to the knowledge from his adopted father Chiron had exceptional gifts and qualities. For being half-man and half-horse not only was he able to access divine insight thanks to his half-godly nature, but he was also very much connected to the Earth and Mother Nature Herself, which was a result of being half horse.

Chiron was unintentionally injured by Hercules, one of his students. To be released from suffering, Chiron chose to relinquish his immortality and with Hercules at his side, both master and student journeyed to Mount Elbrus where they found Prometheus held captive on a cliff face, facing pain and torture day after day. Prometheus, the Titan God of Fire had defied the gods and stolen fire to help humanity.

His punishment was severe. Zeus, king of the Olympian gods sentenced Prometheus to eternal torment for his transgression. Prometheus was bound to a rock, and an eagle was sent each day to eat his liver (in ancient Greece, the liver was thought to be the seat of human emotions). His liver would then grow back overnight, only to be eaten again the next day in an ongoing cycle. Following a long journey Chiron, filled with compassion, stood before Prometheus, and witnessed by Hercules, the centaur relinquished his immortality. Suddenly, the ropes and chains that bound Prometheus dissolved, and Chiron was transformed into the beautiful constellation of Centaurus, one of the biggest constellations in the sky.

Not only was there nothing wrong with Chiron, but it was his uniqueness, his half-animal, half-divine dual nature that allowed him to become a great healer.

The lesson in this is that it is our deepest, most painful, darkest wounds are often our gifts in disguise. Those parts of us that are unusual, odd, or different allow us to be creative, and find healing or solutions where traditional methods fail. Chiron symbolizes the deep karmic wounds within the unconscious mind and psyche. Chiron helps us to remember that which we have come into this life to heal.

The Path Of The Wounded Healer

The pain caused by our greatest wounds leads us on the journey back to our true selves. The work we engage in to heal our fragmented selves opens the door to the archetypal, the magical, the transpersonal, the mythological, the intuitive, the creative, and the shamanic. The doorway of our pain is a direct route to our power and our authenticity and to our power as healers.

In truth, we are not broken, nor can we be in the most important way. We are indestructible in the ways that matter, and yet, we can certainly feel as if we are broken, and our fragile psyches can become fragmented. While our society may view this as a fundamental and even unhealable flaw, it is in a very real way necessary for the process of individuation to occur, for who, without a sound reason such as untenable pain would set out on an adventure such as this where we encounter and must slay our dragons? I say none of us.