Living With and Above

On a great many occasions I have written about the effects of Real Love in our early lives—depending on whether we had a sufficient supply, or we did not. The simple absence of sufficient Real Love is unbearably painful to a child, and causes wounds that affect perception, thinking, feelings, and behavior for a lifetime. It turns out that it’s mostly irrelevant whether overt trauma of any kind accompanied the insufficiency of love.

How many of us were traumatized by the lack of love in our childhood? Essentially all of us. The exceptions are so few that they’re almost anomalies, of no statistical significance.

Many times people have asked me, “Do we ever fully heal all our wounds?”

Yes, and no.

I have observed many severely wounded people whose lives were miserable because of pain, fear, anger, victimhood, terrible relationships, and more. Often they can describe specific traumatic events that might have caused wounds, but just as often they cannot.

As many people heal, a large proportion of their wounds seem actually to disappear. Where there was pain, there is peace; where there was confusion, there is clarity; where there was fear, there is confidence; and more. But the effects of some wounds would be impossible to identify or calculate. Altering a single thing in nature—only a couple of degrees of air temperature, for example—can initiate an astonishing cascade of subtle or obvious changes in a wide array of species and physical circumstances. So also can a given wound early in childhood change the entire tapestry of judgments, feelings, and behaviors that follow for a lifetime, or even for generations.

So can all our wounds heal? Maybe, but the answer to this question is really unknowable, and it’s also not that important. What matters more is that we can heal ENOUGH to create loving choices that give us the power to thrive WITH our wounds, and even to live ABOVE them.

I’m getting up there in years now—well past middle age—and I’ve experienced a great deal of living. I wasn’t especially careful about taking care of my body, one of my mistakes being the over-vigorous forms of exercise I enjoyed. Without realizing it, I was hurting my joints, which has necessitated multiple surgeries on the joints of my knees, shoulders, and back. Both knees have been replaced, and although by definition my knees are not normal—they are not without wounds—they have healed enough that I live quite well with them. On occasion I even live above the wounds, engaging in physical activities that most men my age would not attempt.

So what does this mean for us? We can find all the love available to us and incorporate it into our lives such that great healing can happen. If all our wounds heal, how lovely, but if not, we can live with them, and by making conscious choices we can rise above them and achieve great happiness while still being wounded to some degree.