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)

Healing Wounds of the Heart

This excerpt from Welwood blew me away when I first read it because I recognized myself clearly in what he describes here:

“As long as you still hold onto the childhood fixation on not being loved, then no matter how much others love you, it will never be enough. The wound will operate like a hole in you: No matter how much love someone pours in, it will always leak out the bottom. And you will continue focusing on the love that’s not there rather than the love that is.” (2005, p. 147)

Whew. When I read that, I knew I still had work to do on healing my wounds. No one else could plug that hole. It had to come from within.

It took years to resolve my anger and learn how to forgive, but it did happen. It began with learning to take an objective view of my father’s history during my first year living the autoethnographic life. From my journal:

“My father died nearly five years ago, and I haven’t missed him. I don’t yearn to see him again, and his death brought me great relief. But this project has allowed me to view my story through a methodological framework, using autoethnography, to see past my own truth and reveal layers that complete the big picture, bringing a deeper understanding.” (Journal entry, August 2014)

With my father on the monorail at Walt Disney World, 1975

Learning how to parent, after being the child of an alcoholic who I perceived as rejecting, was a huge learning curve for me and emotionally challenging. Over time, I learned to be aware of the positive feelings about my father and hold on to them more than the bad memories. Here’s an example from when my son was 12:

“I am so proud of Jack. It’s amazing. I remember that I could always tell when my father was proud of me, and I can feel it in myself. I’m tearful writing about it… It’s true, though. Sometimes, I am aware of reacting like my father would have, and it’s nice to welcome such a feeling.” (Journal entry, September 2018)

Even though I don’t think of Michael as a father, I’m sure many readers won’t be surprised to learn that my relationship with him helped heal some of these wounds from my past. More than once, I’ve been in Madison visiting Michael on my father’s death anniversary in late October. There have been times when I’ve felt emotionally triggered by Michael for various reasons and had to dig deep to figure out where the hurt was coming from. There have also been plenty of unexpected moments like this one:

“I just clicked on an article about “How to stay sharp in old age,” thinking of Michael and his sharpness. But it made me a little tearful because the description of dementia reminded me of my father. It's just crazy to recall that he had issues with dementia in his early 40s. He got progressively less able to function, think, and reason. Or remember. It was traumatic for my mother and me… My journals contain so much of my parents’ stories, too… In some families, alcohol is simply devastating.” (Journal entry, March 2019)

Of course, my husband was also a major part of my healing process. It was Jason’s idea to have my mom live with us when we decided to sell our house and move in 2015. At the time, I wasn’t sure how that would work out, but it’s been very healing for me and my mom to live together. It took work and patience on both of our parts. She’s very close with my son, and their relationship reminds me of the special connection I had with my paternal grandparents. Like my mom and Jack, I was their only grandchild.

High school graduation with my father and his parents, June 19, 1991

Autoethnography provided me with a way into healing that I hadn’t found from therapy or writing in my journal. Part of that came from talking with others about the past and being willing to rethink my memories and perceptions of events.

“I’m glad that the autoethnography helped me learn to forgive my father. That’s a big deal. I told Michael that when I was faced with evidence, it became clear that Tom had become who he was because of the things he’d been through. I was able to see that there had been good times. My hypothesis that there had been child abuse or neglect wasn’t really accurate. I do not see it that way now. Part of it is that I’ve consciously changed my story.” (Journal entry, June 2020)

Words from Welwood

Now, I will lean into the Welwood excerpts, which don’t even require more commentary from me because they speak for themselves.

“Real, embodied spiritual development happens through a relentless process of self-confrontation that requires us to move through all our fears and resistances. This involves the purification of obstacles—all the old wounds, defenses, pretenses, demands, fixations, addictions, and denials we carry with us from the past.” John Welwood (foreword to Eyes Wide Open by Caplan)

That reminds me of multilevel positive disintegration, which involves a similar process of facing oneself and affirming and rejecting aspects of ourselves based on how well (or not) they serve us in our development. Dąbrowski called these inner processes dynamisms.

In my life, I’ve found that relationships provide the ground for these dynamisms to develop. Welwood’s work provides insights here:

“Our longing to taste life fully is what sets us on a path. This longing arises from a larger intelligence operating within us, which leads us toward those qualities we most need to realize. Thus we are often most strongly attracted to people who manifest qualities we lack or who challenge us to develop them. We feel excitement and passion when we sense that such a person could help us realize a greater fullness and depth of being than we have yet discovered.” (Welwood, 1990, p. 16)²

Another thing I’ve found is that some relationships are more challenging than others, and while we naturally feel drawn toward some people, sometimes we’re repelled by them:

“Though we cannot see people’s subtle energies in the same way that we perceive their gross bodies, we can, if we are sensitive, feel them—in colloquial terms, as the “vibrations” that people give off. Someone with a heavy, dark presence, for instance, conveys a very different feeling from someone who is nervous and excitable. Indeed, every person we know has a somewhat distinct “feeling tone” that interacts with our own subtle energy field in a unique way, generating attraction, interest, or indifference. In the presence of some people, we feel a natural desire to open, while in the presence of others, we want to contract, pull back, or protect ourselves.” (Welwood, 1990, p. 176)

As an empathic person, I could tell many stories about how my energy has interacted with others. When I was young and didn’t realize how easily I absorbed energy and emotion from other people, I was regularly overwhelmed and suffered from a lack of personal boundaries. This is something I’ve learned to develop as a skill, and it opened new horizons of self-understanding for me. It also helped me find more compassion for others and the patience to be with them on their journeys.

“Love has sacred power not because it makes us high, allowing us to rise above ordinary life on clouds of blissful glory, but because it helps us relax the struggle between self and other that is at the root of human suffering. Love is profound because it roots us in the earth, shining its light on all the different sides of who we are, including those we would rather not have to look at.” (Welwood, p. 139)

In our relationships, we can help each other grow, develop, and even activate dynamisms. The following excerpt reminded me of my marriage and a book I read, thanks to a recommendation from Paula Prober, called Evolutionary Relationships. Helping each other in our personal evolutions can be a beautiful and joyful process:

Welwood says that bringing love into form “involves taking each other on, no holds barred, in the spirit of “I accept you and am willing to bring my intelligence and heart to bear on all your rough edges; and I want you to do the same for me. Let us work on these things, and help each other realize the full range of our powers and responsibility.” (1990, p. 199)

It’s also important to remember to allow others to be different from us and honor their unique developmental paths:

“One of the most loving things you can do is to let others be different from you and to free them from your demands and expectations. When you kindly understand that others have their own laws and must follow their own way, just as you do, the need to control them or make yourself more important than them starts to fall away.” (Welwood, 2005, p. 119)

I highly recommend reading Welwood yourself for more insights like this one, which aligns so well with multilevel development:

“All the great spiritual traditions teach that single-minded pursuit of one’s own happiness cannot lead to true satisfaction, for personal desires multiply endlessly, forever creating new dissatisfaction. Real happiness, which no one can ever take away, comes from breaking our heart open, feeling it radiating toward the world around us, and rejoicing in the well-being of others. Cherishing the growth of those we love exercises the larger capacities of our being and helps us open. Since their unfolding calls on us to develop all our finest qualities, we know that we are being fully used.” (Welwood, 1990, p. 206)

You’ll find insights from Welwood on other areas of interest as well, such as the creative process:

“The easy part of creative work is feeling inspired. The hard part is putting our inspiration into practice, embodying it in earthly form, for this brings us up against the limitations of the materials we are working with. A writer may have a grand vision of a book he wants to write, but finding the right words and format is always exacting and difficult…Dealing with practical necessities and limitations is humbling. Yet it also gives birth to a richer kind of inspiration—which grows out of bringing vision into form.” (Welwood, 1990, p. 198)

I’ve been hoping to bring Welwood’s words to you for months, but the challenge was describing how he impacted my healing process. I’ve only scratched the surface in this post, and there’s more to come this winter as I celebrate the tenth anniversary of discovering autoethnography.

1. I’m sharing page numbers from the Kindle version of this book, which is dated 2005.

2. Welwood, J. (1990). Journey of the heart: The path of conscious love. Harper.