Healing work vs Growth work
A great question that I heard from Iyanla Vanzant was:
When you’re working with a coach or therapist, or anyone of that nature - ask them - are you doing healing work, or growth work with me?
What’s the difference?
Well, for starters, both are important.
But to draw a clear distinction, as it applies to coaching, healing work focuses on uncovering, understanding, and releasing any fears, hurts or negative beliefs that are lurking in our system.
Growth work on the other hand involves creating new, consciously chosen habits, patterns and beliefs that will help us to achieve meaningful goals. One can of course reinforce the other, and to evolve towards our full potential, we all need both at varying times.
Healing work deals with our emotions and energy. Sometimes, the healing we need may not have an obvious correlation with our current experience, or may not seem ‘proportionate’ to our past. For example, there’s a common myth that if we didn't suffer any measurable harm in childhood, or because others have it worse, we don’t really have any legitimate issues to deal with.
Now of course, anyone who endured genuine harm as a child is faced with more serious obstacles - the ACE scale maps the impact that adverse childhood experiences can have on us in later life - but equally it’s not a sentence. Humans have an incredible capacity for change, and many factors influence our real outcomes. Our own resilience, relationships, and specialised professional help where we need it all can all have huge impact.
However, the main point here is that all of us - even if we had a secure childhood - pick up a little damage. Nobody gets through life without stepping on the occasional rake.
This is where healing work comes in.
Healing work requires that we take stock and (ideally with some help) try to map the sources of our fears, emotional bruises, and beliefs. Often, our sore points manifest outwardly in ways that are socially rewarded. For example - perfectionism, which is valued by those who benefit from the labour of the perfectionist - is a heavy burden to bear, and is fundamentally a fear-based attempt to manage other people’s opinions of us. As Elizabeth Gilbert put it, “Perfectionism is just fear in really good shoes”.
Our work here would be to trace the source of this impulse - which may go right back to trying to impress an unresponsive parent - and now, as an adult, work through the emotions that we couldn't express at the time. There may be sadness at not being accepted exactly as we were. Maybe some anger at the injustice of unreasonable expectations. And most likely, a deep-running fear of what would happen if we now stopped hustling for praise.
Our work here would be on tracing our patterns back to where they started, taking a clear-eyed look at them, and allowing ourselves to feel the feelings we were unwilling or unable to feel at the time.
Our ignored, repressed or unfelt feelings are debts that come due someday, often with interest. The sooner we get to them the better.
Growth work on the other hand involves conscious efforts towards evolving our daily habits, patterns, beliefs, and outcomes. It is about defining and working towards goals - internal or external - that have real significance for us.
What I’ve seen - in both myself and others - is that without adequate healing - basically without having your legs under you - you can’t even define, never mind work towards, meaningful goals. You can't create from survival mode. Any goals you create from scarcity will be infected with fear, anxiety and desperation.
If you’re in need of healing, then your job is to heal. That might mean spending significant time on therapy, physical activities like yoga, walking or exercise, therapeutic practices like breathwork or kinesiology, talking with trusted people, journaling etc.
You might need to coast, under-function, or even not function at all for a while, if you can. Placing the burden of another goal onto the bucking shoulders of a stressed organism will not work.
I once heard that the Dali Lama was asked what his favourite meditation is, and he said that it's the image of a wounded animal, retreating to lick its wounds. At a time when I needed to do that myself, I found it oddly comforting. The reason, I think, is that an animal in that state is obeying the unbending wisdom of nature. Under stress, we might tell ourselves that we need to double down, hustle, work harder - but nature would not. When we are tired, we need to rest. When we are hurt, we need to heal. When it comes down to the fundamentals, we can’t break the law. We can only break ourselves against the law.
Once we’ve done that - or done just enough of it, because we’re never fully cooked - we’re in a much better place to pause and plan the future. We’re also in a better position to take a more wide-angle view of the different parts of our lives. A narrow focus on growth work alone could have us double down compulsively on a career goal, for example, that could come at a questionable cost to our health or family.
A more integrated approach incorporates healing if and when we need it, and growth to compound it all. The one reinforces the other. When done consciously, healing engenders growth, and growth enables healing. When we finally treat an old wound, our behaviour can’t help but reflect our new insight. And equally, when we make a conscious decision to grow a new habit, healing takes place in us observing ourselves following through.
In periods of growth, we need restorative breaks. And in periods of deep healing, we occasionally need to come up for air and just do something enjoyable.
We’re conditioned to be driven, motivated, and growth-oriented. We’re more comfortable in that paradigm - it’s the socially acceptable one, and one that’s embraced in a lot of typical coaching. However there are times in life when what we really need to do is curl up under a pile of towels and hide out for a while. The main thing to discern what it is that we need most at any given time, and to focus on that. And, as the best advice I’ve ever heard instructs, “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing”.
