Wounded Child to Wounded Healer
Lift Off!, by Christy Higgins, Mixed-media collage on wood box panel 11” x 14”, 2023. Original artwork and prints available.
Writing about The Stone Witch was a very cathartic experience for me. I’ve lived with my stories my whole life (I invented them!), but writing about them, especially publicly, has brought them into a new light.
Endeavoring to be an artist and writer has been an important transformational mid-life process for me that essentially began in earnest at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. These emergent aspirations seem like lofty goals on most days, but on others, I start to feel into something that seems like a different me, and I’ve come to relate to that energy as my potential future self.
That “different me” is the one that compels me to explore unrealized potential. It poses questions like, “What’s possible?” and “What’s a creative solution to this challenge?” and its energy is expansive. Whereas my past self yearns for my attention in a needy way and asks questions, like “Why am I such a reject?” and “Why did this happen to me?” and its energy is contractive.
Buddhism holds that we’re always in a transitional phase of becoming, moment by moment— which makes us transitional beings rather than fixed objects with stable identities (quantum physics expounds on this idea). We are eternally in the process of becoming, making us more like spirals than perfect circles.
Another metaphor I like is that of being weavers of our past deeds and future potentials; like two threads from which we derive a wholly new pattern. The horizontal woof thread is the storyline of our past, whereas the vertical warp thread is something that comes down from a higher plane into our storyline to connect it with our future and higher purpose. Both our past narratives and our future potential are ultimately woven into one fabric.
We’re always standing between the two poles of our past and future; and what lies in between the old stories and untapped potentials is us, the navigator, the one making the choices. As I demonstrated in The Stone Witch Series, I’m not always facing the direction of my future; to my detriment, I have very often been reliving the past.
The Stone Witch is about looking backward. It’s about the narrative I created around things that happened very early in my life, then played out, mostly unconsciously, over and over again through my mind-body.
I’m an insightful and intelligent woman, but that doesn’t mean that I’m necessarily conscious of what’s driving me, or disciplined enough to do what would be in the best interest of my highest aspirations. We have to work with intention to bring about a change to our basic attitudes, perceptions, and behavior.
Our memories are the only place where the past exists, and when I look back through mine, I no longer completely identify with the person I see. The People Pleaser is still within me, but she now pauses before inserting herself into my relationships. Something has shifted and I now feel stronger and less afraid to be open and honest about who I am, what I value, and where my boundaries lie.
I’ve essentially been removing my mask one lie at a time since I started making and sharing my collage art, and more recently, writing in a way that reveals myself; primarily to myself, but also to others. I feel as though I’ve been emerging from some dank, fortified closet, or a cocoon not yet completely loosed from my still-wet, unusable wings.
Exposing your vulnerability can be richly rewarding to those who are willing to risk it, but it also comes with a cost to the ego.
Why is it so hard for our egos to embrace change? I have come to understand that our egos are created by and thrive on stories. It is our stories about ourselves that give us our sense of identity, our idea of who and what we are. When we begin to challenge those narratives, we are essentially challenging our ego’s very existence. Naturally, as our ego becomes mortally threatened, it throws all of its defenses at the threat. We resist change because something has to die before something else can be born, and death is always difficult. (But it is the way of nature.) Dismantling old narratives is a kind of death to who the ego thought it was.
Letting go of an old story about me and my parents has been a long, slow goodbye; one that has at times felt like a bad kind of "Never-Ending Story,” as I tried navigating the adult world from a wounded child’s perspective.
The Wounded Child is an archetype that has been reflected through my personality for most of my life; however, by challenging these life-long narratives and being willing to risk exposing myself more authentically, it feels at mid-life that I’m right on schedule for shifting my identity from that of a Wounded Child to that of an empowered Wounded Healer. I believe this is what the so-called mid-life crisis is really about; it’s an initiation into a different phase of life whereby we are challenged to transform the dragons in our shadow to the gold in our light; a kind of psychological alchemy.
The Wounded Healer becomes more visible in the new light resulting from having told the story of the Wounded Child. Our stories need to be told; not necessarily to the whole world, but at the very least to our familiars (or an empathetic listener). There’s power in sharing our stories because in their telling, we claim those lost parts of ourselves. Those parts are then seen in the light of day, and once they have been reintegrated into our conscious awareness we can shift from telling our stories from the point-of-view of the Wounded Child to the point-of-view of the Wounded Healer. In other words, we learn how to make choices that align with our future potential rather than reinforcing the disempowering stories of our past.
This process of transformation may leave you trembling on a leaf while your wings dry in the process, but if you keep facing the direction of your potential future, you’ll get glimpses of yourself in full flight, wings spread, with all of your beauty on display for the world to marvel at yet another one of nature’s miracles.
Prepare for lift-off!
FROM THE ARCHIVES OF THE SEEKER’S NOTEBOOK:
Relevant to the above featured image, Lift Off!, which for me is a meditation on the themes presented in this writing — themes of being and becoming, transforming pain into power, learning to fly — here’s an unedited dream log from my August 2011 journal that I recently came across:
I was standing outside looking at a beautiful blue sky with white clouds and I jumped and started going straight up towards the sky and at some point I let go of my fear and let myself go higher and higher…it felt so good. I was smiling…maybe laughing…and when I started falling back to earth I put my body in a horizontal position with my back to the ground. I was using my hands to resist the wind and soften my landing, which was gentle and soft. I landed right next to three people on a blanket. I started telling them about my experience. I don’t remember too much about that conversation but they were interested insomuch as it was about my experience…they didn’t seem interested for themselves. I believe it was one man and two women.
I tried it a second time…I went high, but not as high and my landing was good but not so smooth. The next time I tried I didn’t get very high. It was as if I had exhausted the grace that had allowed me to do it in the first place. This tells me that it is not a trivial thing to fly. One must be in the proper state of mind and in a state of grace — you can’t think your way into flight. It’s like a presence…you ride it…you experience it…it comes to you and you allow it and enjoy it…but you don’t control it.
NOTES & RESOURCES:
The Stone Witch - Part I, The Seeker’s Notebook by Christy Higgins
The Stone Witch - Part II, The Seeker’s Notebook by Christy Higgins
The Stone Witch - Part III, The Seeker’s Notebook by Christy Higgins
The Stone Witch - Part IV, The Seeker’s Notebook by Christy Higgins
The Stone Witch - Part V, The Seeker’s Notebook by Christy Higgins