When two things happen together, we sometimes conclude that one caused the other. I had made such an assumption about time and healing. In something I wrote, I mentioned the idiom, “Time heals all wounds”. That was spotted by Dr. Valson Thampu, who kindly mentors me, and he gave me the example of Miss Havisham, in Charles Dicken’s book, Great Expectations, to invite me to think if my assumption were true.1
Miss Havisham has decades of time to heal from the wound of being jilted by her fiancé. Yet, she doesn’t recover from it. Rather, she is stuck – like the clock on her wall – at the moment when she was abandoned by the man she hoped would love her till death tore them apart. If time could truly heal all wounds, why didn’t she heal?
When Dr. Thampu shared this, examples of people I knew came to my mind. My friends who were still hurting from the way they were treated at home or work. Some of them were juggling the aftermath of their childhood trauma. Others I knew were living with chronic illnesses that needed daily medication. Another person, rather than healing, was moving closer and closer to death with every hour that passed. If time was the great healer of all wounds, why didn’t these people get better?
Chronic and episodic diseases, both physical and psychological, suggest that healing is neither linear nor guaranteed just because of the passing of time. Perhaps in the way we phrase that statement, “Time heals all wounds,” we give time more credit than it is due. Rather than time itself, it might be the things that happen, and require time, which are what contributes to healing.
For instance, whenever I am hurting emotionally, I look for a new perspective on what happened. It’s probably a human drive to do so. Ruiz and Mills, in The Four Agreements, say, “Humans are storytellers. It is our nature to make up stories, to interpret everything we perceive.”2 We look for narratives that can help us make meaning.
However, we might not find one narrative that adequately explains everything. As a result, we may choose to change the stories we believe. This is what Noelia Bueno-Gómez refers to in the paper, Conceptualizing suffering and pain. Life is not one single narrative from birth to death, she says: “Different versions and interpretations about the life of a person are continuously written from different points of view; there is never a definitive history. Stories about life are always fragmentary, partial, and they cannot be told but from a certain perspective, depending on the intended emphasis.” 3 We are continually telling and retelling our tales.
Perhaps we heal from emotional and spiritual wounds as we gain a deeper understanding of ourselves, our experiences and the world. The new perspectives allow us to view what transpired from a slightly different vantage point. We can then attribute new meaning to our hurt and expand our assessments of our experiences. Our narratives help determine how we see what happened to us or what we lived through.
Sometimes, these perspectives come to us quickly and without effort. At other times, we might have to actively search for them. We may even need assistance from outside sources. I have experienced this on several occasions. When I am hurting, and my thoughts are playing in a loop in my mind, I may need to reach out to friends who I know will help me see things differently. Something one of them says is bound to get the cogs moving, enabling me to make better sense of my experience. And when I do, my hurt doesn’t feel so pointless anymore. In effect, they help me expand my understanding and grow. This expansion in thought or internal growth may be what takes time.
As it is with the mind, growth plays an important role in physical healing as well. When we are hurt physically, tissues in our bodies may get damaged or be ripped away. The body responds by trying to repair it. It removes what is dead, revives what is faint, reconstructs what is disfigured, and attempts to regenerate what is lost. New cells are produced. Some of them come together to form new tissues. The body rebuilds itself. Rather than time, it’s these processes that contribute to healing. It’s just that they take time to come to completion.
If we challenge the idiom “Time heals all wounds,” and understand that giving things time may not be enough for healing to happen, we can take a more active role in the process of healing. We understand that it’s possible that time may move on and that we could be left behind, aching within. This knowledge may motivate us to move away, when possible, from what harms us. We may make room and gather resources to enable internal growth to happen. And when we see that we aren’t healing, we may feel encouraged to ask for help rather than keep waiting.
By asking me if what I had written was true, Dr. Thampu invited me to think. He called into question the idiom and helped me see that it is not time that heals wounds. Rather, it is what can happen with time that contributes to healing. In calling me to think, he brought a new perspective. One that nudged me to grow and heal further.
I’ve learnt through this that it’s natural to make associations when we see two things happening together. But we might want to be careful about what sort of relationship we think those occurrences have to each other. It is possible that the things we think cause something to happen may, in fact, be results of the latter. Or perhaps the two happen together because they are caused by a third independent factor.
In any case, I pass on to you the invitation to think that came to me from Dr. Thampu: What have you told yourself about the healing process that may not be completely true?
Endnotes
- Charles Dickens. Great Expectations.
- Don Miguel Ruiz and Janet Mills, The Four Agreements. (San Rafeal: Amber-Allen Publishing, 2023)
- Noelia Bueno-Gómez, “Conceptualizing suffering and pain,” Philosophy, Ethics and Humanities in Medicine 12 (September 2017): 7.
