Some Thoughts on Emotional Healing

Often, what people refer to as emotional healing is the experience of having their pain lessened. But pain reduction is not equal to healing. True healing does involve a reduction in pain, but not all reductions in pain are an indication of healing. This is why discerning actual emotional healing can be challenging.

“It was just so healing for me.” This is something I often hear from people, especially when they have faced a difficult season emotionally. Maybe they got away to be alone for a weekend and felt their anxiety levels go down. Or maybe they had someone listen to them and affirm what they were feeling, which gave them a sense of comfort and confidence.

Often, what people refer to as emotional healing is the experience of having their pain lessened. But pain reduction is not equal to healing.

These experiences of reprieve in a season of sorrow are (generally) gifts from the Lord, and I hope that people experience them often in the church. But I also think we have to be very careful about what we call “healing.” Often, what people refer to as emotional healing is the experience of having their pain lessened. But pain reduction is not equal to healing. True healing does involve a reduction in pain, but not all reductions in pain are an indication of healing. This is why discerning actual emotional healing can be challenging.

Consider this parallel with physical healing. If someone severed your arm with a knife and you were in serious pain, but then the ER gave you lidocaine to block any sensation in your arm, you would experience serious pain reduction—but the lidocaine would have done nothing by way of facilitating actual healing. If the wound were stitched up and eventually scarred over, the pain would be gone, which would be evidence of actual healing. Pain relievers alone, though, simply address symptoms and do nothing for the root cause.

Sin offers us short-term pain relief in disobedience to God.

My sense is that what people often refer to as “emotional healing” is actually just pain relief. When in a conflict that causes significant emotional heartache, it could be that the greatest facilitator of real healing is engaging the conflict instead of running away. Running away would provide pain relief, but what if the conflict is the true path to healing? Often, healing involves suffering more pain in order to achieve healing, similar to when a surgery helps facilitate healing.

Now, I am not saying that finding pain relief is necessarily wrong. It could be wrong, as that is what sin does: sin offers us short-term pain relief in disobedience to God. But there are non-sinful pain relievers as well that, if used properly, can facilitate healing. For example, my mom just had a knee replacement. Doing the work of physical therapy is by far the most important thing she can do to encourage healing. So, taking Tylenol, while it won’t do anything for healing, will give her enough pain relief to do the work she does need to do.

Emotional healing can be similar. Perhaps you are in a conflict that is causing significant emotional pain. While it may be that true healing will only come through a hard conversation, you may first take a day alone to calm your anxieties, to prepare to re-engage the conflict. While the time away is not necessarily healing you, it may give you enough pain relief (like Tylenol) to do the work (the physical therapy) of going and having the hard conversation.

The reason this distinction is important is that if you call “getting away to be alone” healing, then you might actually avoid the hard conversation—the actual source of healing—in order to maintain the pseudo-healing you experienced by getting away. This would be like taking Tylenol for the surgery, thinking it is healing you, without doing the hard work of physical therapy. When people call any kind of pain relief “healing,” often they are actually becoming more emotionally unhealthy because they have deceived themselves into thinking less pain equals more health. That can be true, but it often isn’t.

So, how do I discern if my pain relief is real or pseudo-healing? Well, in order to understand healing in the body, you have to understand the proper functioning of human emotions; and this, I believe, centers largely around the question of trust. People who are emotionally broken tend to not trust God. Instead, they tend to trust people they shouldn’t, and to not trust people they should. Emotional healing means coming to a place where I relate to God and people in the way that is appropriate to their trustworthiness. 

In the medical field, you have trusted authorities (doctors) who understand proper function and healing of the body to help you avoid pseudo-healing. Often doctors tell you things you don’t want to hear. It is the same with emotional healing. We need wise people, people who show emotional integrity and loving relationships in their own lives, to help us to know whether we are pursuing real healing or not.

This is why communal life is such a key part of Christian living. When we are at church every Sunday, join a Home Group or Discipleship Group, seek out pastoral counseling or shepherding from an older man or woman in the church—all of these are ways that God helps cultivate wholeness in us. In this way, the Lord makes the church, the community of his people, a place of true, deep, lasting emotional healing.