You Can’t Heal What Nothing Touches

The healing everybody yearns for—self-actualization, enlightenment, the becoming whole that everyone claims to want—doesn't happen only when you are in hermit mode. Much of it can only happen within relationship to others.

It is very easy to be single, isolated, or emotionally unavailable and think that you are healed when nothing is happening. Nothing is triggering you. Nobody is disappointing you. No one is getting close enough to activate your fear of abandonment, rejection, engulfment, betrayal, inadequacy, or loss. Of course you feel "peaceful". This is like saying you have an incredibly strong immune system when you never leave your house. Maybe you do, or maybe nothing has had the opportunity to test you. You don't know how strong your immune system is because nothing is coming into contact with it.

Relationships are contact.

And contact reveals things.

Most of the wounds we carry were not created in a vacuum. They were birthed in relationship—to parents, siblings, friends, lovers, teachers, caregivers, communities. We learned who we had to become in order to be loved. We learned what happened when we needed too much, trusted too much, spoke too loudly, became vulnerable, asked for something, said no, or let somebody matter to us.

It stands to reason that some of our deepest healing has to happen within relationship to others as well. You can understand your abandonment wound intellectually while sitting alone in your house. Then somebody you actually care about doesn't text you back, and suddenly there it is. You can journal about boundaries for years, then someone you love asks you for something you don't want to give. You can meditate on non-attachment every morning, then something you desperately want begins slipping through your fingers.

You can believe you have healed rejection until someone you genuinely desire doesn't choose you. You can believe you trust yourself until loving someone requires you to listen to your own knowing instead of their reassurance. You can believe you have healed your fear of intimacy until someone comes close enough to actually see you.

This doesn't mean we should stay in harmful relationships because they're "healing us." It doesn't mean suffering is inherently spiritual. And it certainly doesn't mean we need another person to complete us. It means relationship is one of the places where our inner work becomes embodied. Solitude can teach you how to hear yourself, but relationship shows you whether you can still listen to yourself when someone else is in the room. That's different.

There are things you can heal alone. There are things you must heal alone.

But there are also wounds that remain theoretical until another human being touches the place where they live.

And I think this is one of the great paradoxes of "healing".

We are wounded in relationships. We retreat to understand the wound. And eventually, we return to relationships to discover whether it has actually healed.

There is no wholeness in becoming so healed that nobody can ever reach you. That's not enlightenment, that's isolation. Real inner resilience isn't becoming untouchable.

Resilience is allowing yourself to be moved by life—deeply—without abandoning yourself, closing your heart, or losing your capacity to love.

with LOVE, Aja