A Journey of Healing

It began long before I was defeated enough to make a blind cry for help, but that is where I will start. At the time, for the very first time, I committed to try anything at all to gain some measure of healing. I was in more pain than I had ever remembered. The pain of despair was chronic but it was also escalating rapidly. What had once been like a nagging always-there non-localised ache, had now grown into an unbearable agony. My wife had left me. I was allowed to see my two daughters only 3 days a week and I was terrified I would lose contact with them totally. In my ‘successful’ family medical practice I was feeling more part of the problem of people’s illnesses rather than their solution. That internal sense that something was terribly wrong with my life was growing, demanding urgent attention and resolution. I had always felt this derangement, like I was a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing leaving a yawning hole in the centre of my being, but this feeling had now refused all my known attempts to eliminate it, even transiently. I had begun to entertain suicidal thoughts - the idea of driving over the hill on the way from work was, at one moment, a more attractive alternative to continuing my journey home. Life had become little more than a struggle.

For many years I had tried every conceivable psychological therapy (self-administered of course) to gain a measure of peace in my life, all to little avail. I believed that if I read enough literature about healing somehow some of that information would infuse itself into me to effect a change. It hadn’t worked. My last desperate attempt at self-help was coming to the end - a 4-year part-time philosophy course, a last determined attempt to retrieve control of an uncontrollable life by trying to further hone my thinking skills.

One day while in an innocuous newsagency/book store in the suburbs I noticed displayed neatly behind the woman serving me, a stack of books with the intriguing title, “Beyond Therapy, Beyond Science” written by Anne Wilson-Schaef PhD. I was in the process of writing a philosophy paper entitled “Medicine in a Holistic World” and this book seemed to promise useful research information. I quickly scanned the blurb on the cover, glanced through some of the early pages on the philosophy of healing and interconnection and bought it.

I finally read the book 6 months later while in the grip of depression and loneliness. I enjoyed the theory and understood nothing about the addictions with which most of the people described were afflicted. What I really loved were the patients’ stories described by Anne Wilson-Schaef. What caught my attention about them was the idea that these people were actually healing. They seemed to be doing more than just tinkering around the edges of their problems. They were transforming their lives through the methods of healing that Anne Wilson-Schaef was describing. I wanted that sort of healing. I had reached a stage both personally and professionally where I believed that people could not change – not fundamentally anyway. The best that people sick with emotional problems could hope for, I reasoned, was to adjust some psychological window dressing in their lives but no more than that. This book however, described people doing much more than that!

I wrote to Anne Wilson-Schaef telling her a little of my life story and she replied promptly telling me she would be in Australia in a few months to conduct an intensive. “Come along”, was her invitation. So I went. And what an experience that turned out to be! I was in awe at the honesty with which people shared their innermost feelings to each other in the group– mostly total strangers! I was attracted to Elizabeth Anne’s gentle, yet direct wisdom, and the presence of a male facilitator showed me that men could do this work too. On the second night of the intensive, I woke from sleep in process, crying. I finally allowed this process to lead me through some of my childhood traumas – and working through the process was met with some feelings of peace, like something had shifted inside of me, something that years of reasoning had failed to budge. I shared this process with the group and lay open to them some of the fears that I had always hidden away from public view.

This led to another revolutionary discovery for me. I discovered that when I was willing to share myself openly with others, giving them the opportunity to really see me as I am, they then have the opportunity to support and love me. I had never dared such intimacy before and had therefore denied myself the possibility of the love that can flow from taking the risk. I began identifying some addictions in myself and I knew I would go on and join the training. I ended that intensive feeling hope and feeling excited that healing was on offer here. I was not about to let that go!

I joined the Australian Living in Process® training for the first session in March 1994 and have continued to participate in the community ever since. Over the years I have travelled to the US and Europe to participate in their training sessions. I have worked 12-step programs designed to address addictions I have gratefully discovered. I have received enormous support to continue to travel my healing journey, and I have often been unaware of where that journey was leading. Yet with the support available to me from a community committed to their recovery too, I have been willing to trust the process. On occasions recovery has felt like walking a tightrope wrapped in a straight jacket, on one side of me lies my disease inviting me into its seduction, and on the other lies the insanity and despair I have experienced as I have indulged my cravings. Recovery feels tenuous and extremely difficult during these times. However, every now and then after walking cautiously this way for a while, I am given a glimpse of the abundance available to me and the possibilities on offer from living a whole and healthy life. These moments, now growing more continuous, have provided the impetus to keep me walking the tightrope when I have felt discouraged and in danger of jumping off.

Today I live a life totally different from that before recovery. I left my practice 3 years ago to live with Anne Wilson-Schaef and her family. I had developed a health problem that I feared would be lethal if I didn’t make further drastic changes to the way I was living. Recovery had always been about letting go of my attachments - firstly to addictive substances and processes I have used for many years; then to my children; then to my work; then to a notion of home as being a specific place in a specific country. Finally my process encouraged me to let go my attachment to life itself. Today, for 6 months of the year, I live in the US learning how to live in process and how to move into another paradigm. I travel with Anne Wilson Schaef and her family to trainings and to many other exciting and healing adventures. The time I spend with people committed to their healing and the time I spend with Anne, basking in the warmth and excitement of her eagle view, have been keys to profound and much needed healing in my life. I feel nurtured by living with people who know better than me that there is a way to live that is so much more fulfilling than that we have developed in western culture.

The rest of the year I spend working with Aboriginal people in remote parts of Australia, experiencing country I have come to love and enjoying a re-invigorated enthusiasm for working in my profession. I have written a book about western medicine and my experiences in it, a direct consequence of participating in writer’s retreats held by Anne Wilson-Schaef. She has introduced me to my Muse. These retreats have been profoundly spiritual experiences for me and writing continues to nurture my soul and help heal my wounds. I have new relationships with people that are intimate and sustaining. I experience relationships of unconditional love that are new to me and have been enormously healing. I have experienced healing in old relationships that I had all but destroyed by my acting out my addictions. I have a relationship with a power greater than myself that I had spent so many years trying to deny and I feel sustained and nurtured in this relationship too.

In short, my life is totally different now. If I had written down all the things I would have wanted for myself when I came to Living in Process® work more than10 years ago, I would have short-changed myself drastically. My HP has given me so much more than I could ever have imagined. I am deeply grateful for the support and inspiration I have received from Anne Wilson-Schaef and the international Living in Process® community for supporting me in a healing beyond my imagination only a few years ago.