Tammie: Would you consider pain to be a teacher? If so, what are some of the lessons your own pain has taught you?

Linda: Pain is. Pain is a teacher.

In one of her poems, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, a powerful healer whom I revere, says "A wound is a door. Open the door." It's an opening to understanding. If we pass up the opportunity to learn its lessons, whatever they may be, then suffering becomes meaningless and loses its transformative potential. And life becomes flattened out and dried up somehow.

An important lesson for survivors, however, is that pain need not be the only teacher. You don't have to be in pain to learn and grow. It certainly commands our attention when it happens, however, and we might as well use it, for what it's worth.

Tammie: Can you talk a little about your own healing journey?

Linda: It's an ongoing process. I conceptualize the healing journey as circular, like the rings on a tree, because many times when I think I have dealt with an issue, I find myself facing it again from yet another perspective. My journey has had many stops and starts, lapses, undoings and "do-overs". It's turned me every which way but loose. I've often said that it feels like it has a life of its own, and I am just along for the ride!

The hardest part of my journey has been the experience of re-traumatization by a therapist who had cultivated my trust for several years, then betrayed it. That's why I believe that it's so vitally important that therapists practice ethically (especially in terms of honoring therapeutic boundaries); that we seek psychotherapy, and that we avail ourselves of skilled consultation on a regular basis to deal with transference and countertransference issues, which are the at the core of the therapeutic relationship.

It's a sacred privilege to be invited into a client's world. Some people abuse this power. They shouldn't be practicing. And some people, like my childhood art teacher, are not therapists at all but can exert a tremendous therapeutic power in relationship. Remembering the force of good she had in my life helps me heal from my experience of re-traumatization, and inspires me to be the kind of healer she was in my life.

Tammie: What do you consider to be the most important step in healing?

Linda: The most important step in healing is always the next step. The step up out of despair and into hope. The step into the abyss, with a wild prayer that somehow I can find a hand-hold. So far, I have. Or it has found me.

Tammie: Thanks so much Linda.... Appreciate your wonderful wisdom

Linda: Thank-you, Tammie, for the chance to speak these things. Thank-you for asking, and for hearing me out. I so appreciate your thoughtful questions.

interviews index

next: Interviews: An Interview with Dru Hamilton at "Book Talk" with Tammie Fowles