So what do you folks think about healing? I've been wondering a lot about this lately . . . Used to be, when I was much younger, I assumed that people heal from emotional traumas in much the same way they heal from a cold or the flu - time passes, you get better, and you return pretty much to 'normal', ie, the way you were before the illness.

But now I'm starting to wonder. I think about, for instance, my dad dying when I was 14 (easily the most traumatic thing ever to have happened to me). True, I'm 'over' that, in the sense that I don't cry about it any more (and haven't for years). But the older I get, the more I realize that the shock waves from that event have rocked and then rippled my life in countless ways. I don't remember my father with the knowledge and understanding of an adult; I only have a child's memories, and even they are growing hazy now. For several years after my father's death, at a very important growth time in my life, I lived with my emotions stuffed under a bell jar. The effects and ramifications of that continue to reverberate, too. (There's a line in a Gordon Bok song that sums this condition up perfectly, I think: "Grief within my heart is nesting.")

So maybe healing is more like recovering from, say, a broken bone than from the flu. Sometimes physical wounds leave scars; sometimes they continue to ache long after the injury has occurred (I fell and hurt my thumb cross-country skiing several years ago and it still hurts sometimes); sometimes you're just never back to 'normal.' Sometimes you have to accept impaired functioning, loss of ability, partial recovery. And maybe that's just life . . .

Sorry this is so dismal . . . Anyone have a less-dismal view? A better perspective on healing?