For the Healer Who Loves the Broken

And the Broken Longing to Be Saved

When we’re young, and for good reason, we see our parents and the adults around us as the authority over our lives. This structure is obviously implied when we’re young, but it can continue as we age to look and sound like: “They must know better than me! They’re adults! They’re my parents! They sound like they know what is best for me… they’re sure of it! They have lived more years than I! I need to seek their guidance and counsel, and listen to their directions… because I’m young, and/or incompetent...”

The natural maturation process is to become the authority of your own life… that through good parenting and guidance, you are empowered to trust yourself, take calculated risks, and learn that you know what is best for you.

Some of us get stuck, however, in the developmental process. We stay perceivably helpless to continue to create space for people to tell us what we need to do — essentially, we stay in our wound of incompetence to accommodate their need to be seen as “knowing.” Notice how we have to trade our own confidence in ourselves so that they feel in “control” and seen as “competent”?

We spend our lives looking to everyone but ourselves for what we should do. This externalization of our authority is often also part of the fawning response… pretending you’re small and helpless to create perceived safety.

I say “perceived” because any relationship dynamic that requires you to play small isn’t actually safe… because if you step into your power, you threaten both the familiarity of your own wound, and their ability to maintain control.

This is a codependent dynamic, and might be more recognized as the “addict” and the “enabler,” or the person who’s trying to get the addict sober.

But this dynamic sneaks up on us when it’s more about these subtleties of presenting as “helpless.” Or the one who “knows” and uses their knowledge and intelligence to educate and support the people around them.

These relationship dynamics are very fragile because the person presenting as “knowing more” is terrified of losing control. They learned to live in their heads and to build so much “knowledge” to make sure they could manage all the potential dysfunction in those around them…

This is what often shapes the therapist, coach, doctor, nurse, social worker, dietician, physio, contractor, etc. (Name the job that is about making sure we support, heal, and help others.)

Look, this is a beautiful thing on one level, because you have someone who has over-developed a skillset to make sure they can be valuable and supportive to those around them… BUT, until the wound is made explicit, and the survival strategy is revealed, it will operate from the shadow and look like “goodness,” “support,” “loving all out,” “only wanting the best for others,” etc… and in the context of living it in our work — we are monetizing our survival strategy — so to free ourselves from the hook of it, we have to see that we’re being paid to stay in it.

This is why some care providers need their clients/patients to need them. They don’t actually want them (unconsciously) to heal because it would mean losing the evidence of their value in another’s brokenness.