Interesting Quotes, Vol. 15

Healing wounds with John Welwood

To kick off Interesting Quotes in 2024, it’s time to share from John Welwood because, at least for me, the holidays are always a time of recognizing and healing grief and wounds from the past. January is a fresh start for returning to such work.

I started reading Dr. John Welwood’s books in March 2021, and they’ve made a significant difference for me on my healing journey. Welwood was a clinical psychologist, psychotherapist, author, and leader in the field of transpersonal psychology. He wrote eight books, and today’s excerpts come from a few of them.

In Toward a Psychology of Awakening, I learned that Welwood coined the term “spiritual bypassing” in 1984, which is noteworthy. Spiritual bypassing is “the use of spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with our painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs.”

Unresolved Wounds

The first book I read by Welwood was Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships: Healing the Wound of the Heart¹ (2005).

In Overcoming the Self-Stigma of Mental Illness, Part 3, I mentioned my father’s death from alcohol and making peace with not addressing my trauma in that series of posts. Last month, he would have turned 67 years old, and he has been dead for more than 14 years already.

Each time I’ve tried to share about my father, I’ve ended up cutting what I’ve written and saving it in a separate document. At this point, I’ve got enough cut from other posts to write one all about the trauma of having a father who drinks too much.

Healing the wounds from my father has been hard work, and it’s ongoing. For many years, all I could feel was anger. It’s been interesting to see over the past few years that I can finally feel the loss and grief from his death. I credit Welwood’s work for helping me gain insights into these experiences like nothing else.

When I started working with autoethnography in 2014, I was still angry with my father, and I remembered him poorly.

“At every moment we have the choice of either feeling gratitude for what life has given us or indulging in grievance about what is missing.” (Welwood, 2005, p.94)

I don’t know about you, but I’m the kind of person who is sensitive to what’s missing; I notice right away what’s different or incorrect and have had to actively fight against feeling something is missing or broken within myself. Until my late 40s, these natural propensities caused many problems in my close relationships. This is where Welwood’s work has been invaluable.

“Human relationships often seem utterly impossible because they never seem to fit our ideals and expectations. Again and again they force us to face heartbreak and defeat, until finally the only alternative is to let ourselves be broken up, so that we may remain more open and loving in the face of life as it is.” (Welwood, 2005, p. 54)

When I read this first book, I was amazed by how well the wounds from my childhood were captured in Welwood’s words. Growing up feeling ignored or rejected by a parent is a devastating experience, and when I was young, I took it very personally. Learning about “the wound of the heart” from my childhood helped me begin the healing process, which is ongoing.

At 15 years old, I had my first psychiatric evaluation by a social worker from the Clifford Beers Clinic in New Haven, Connecticut. At the time, I was suicidal and admitted that I felt like “I wasn’t a real person.” She gave me my first diagnoses: depression and depersonalization disorder. From Welwood:

“Children naturally try to protect themselves from the pain of inadequate love as best they can. They learn to separate and distance themselves from what causes them pain by contracting or shutting down. The technical term for this is dissociation.

Dissociation is our mind’s way of saying no to and turning away from our pain, our sensitivity, our need for love, our grief and anger about not getting enough of it, and from our body as well, where these feelings reside. This is one of the most basic and effective of all the defensive strategies in the child’s repertoire. Yet… in saying no to the pain of unlove, we block the pathways through which love flows in the body and thus deprive ourselves of the very nutrient that would allow our whole life to flourish. And so we wind up severing our connection to life itself.” (p. 10)

Dissociation is one of the processes that allow positive disintegration to take place—the loosening and fragmentation of the psyche, in Dabrowski’s terms.

For instance, from Mental Growth Through Positive Disintegration:

“Disintegration involves loosening, dissociation, and even breakdown of the structure and organization of psychic functions. The notion of disintegration is in fundamental opposition to the concept integration which implies unification, organization and coordination.” (Dabrowski, 1970)

We haven’t talked enough about the impact of relationships on the process of positive disintegration and the development of dynamisms, but that’s on my to-do list this year.

A year after my evaluation, at age 16, I was still struggling with dissociation, as seen in this journal entry from December 28, 1989:

“I would be happy if I was an unfeeling, apathetic person. No one understands me. I don’t even understand me. I feel like someone else is living my life and I’m just watching. It’s like I have no part in this—I’m just an observer.”

The experience of dissociation can feel very unsettling. To say, “It’s like I have no part in this,” shows that I didn’t feel I was in control of my own life.

When did the feeling of being an observer end for me? It would be many more years before I felt “like a real person.” In my writing from 1997, I still described myself as detached and not feeling real. I have a whole retrieval document from my journals called “Feelings of unreality,” which is considered a manifestation of emotional overexcitability.

In the next section of his book, Welwood describes a problem it would take me years to understand and work through:

“On one hand we hunger for love—we cannot help that. Yet at the same time, we also deflect it and refuse to fully open to it because we don’t trust in it.

This whole pattern—not knowing we’re loved as we are, then numbing our heart to ward off this pain, thereby shutting down the pathways through which love can flow into and through us—is the wound of the heart. Although this love-wound grows out of childhood conditioning, it becomes in time a much larger spiritual problem—a disconnection from the loving openness that is our very nature.” (Welwood, 2005, p. 11)