The Myth of the “Healer”

We are all healers, but healing is an internal job. It’s a solo journey, taken in the company of others, or with a particular guide.

I share these personal observations as someone who has navigated spiritual and healing communities, as someone who has to confront my own spiritual ego, shadows and reflections. It is something I regularly check in with, because the ego has a clever way of adapting.

For context, the role of the ego or “lower” personality is to protect our sense of “I”. And it does this exceptionally well, what with years and years of human evolution. When you start a spiritual journey, your old “I” (the victim, the worker, the stressed person) might start to fall away. Instead of letting that space stay empty, the ego rushes in to fill it with a new label. A Healer, a Lightworker, a Theosophist, a Druid, etc, etc.

Anyone who believes they can ‘heal’ others is at best misinformed with a deep misunderstanding of the work, or at worst, spiritually egotistical. It may be a passage that some of us must walk through.

When we claim to heal another, we risk projecting our own unhealed wounds onto them, using the person in front of us as a mirror whilst firmly closing our eyes to the reflection. This isn’t service; it’s an avoidance of our own shadows.

These beliefs around being able to heal others are damaging in a healing context. When a practitioner believes they are healing others, it causes or creates:

• Disempowerment – it makes the client dependent on the “healer” rather than their own inner strength
• Spiritual bypassing – this is when someone uses spiritual concepts or “ancient truths” to avoid dealing with real-world psychological issues, trauma, or boundaries. This is common in spiritual, philosophical and healing communities.
• It prevents growth in the practitioner – if you believe you have arrived, or that you are above the common struggle, you stop looking in the mirror. You begin to see everyone else as something to be fixed, which is a very clever way for the spiritual ego to avoid being the one who needs to do the work.
• A narcissistic bubble that is very hard to burst
• Gurus and cult-like dynamics in spiritual, philosophical or healing communities
• The beautiful act of connection turns into a performance of superiority

True empowerment comes from realising we cannot rely on others to heal us, nor can we take on the burden of healing someone else. We cannot protect people from the very experiences of this life that demand their growth.

We are all healers, but we can only ever truly heal ourselves.

Alongside our own internal work, our role in the lives of others and my role in the work that I do is to guide, nurture, support, and witness others. People who work in this space may provide the safe sanctuary in which others can grow, we may help to remove obstacles or anything unhelpful in the energy field of someone else, but we cannot do the integration work and the growing for them.

The responsibility to truly heal remains, as it must, with the individual. To believe otherwise is to disempower the very people we seek to serve.