Healing

FOREWORD

Life, let alone medicine, healthcare and well-being, is changing. Individuals in every civilization from ancient to modern have understood the Earth’s ability to provide the necessities of life and humans’ innate ability to heal from illness or injury, but it feels like the march of progress now is very different compared to other times and places. Nonetheless, the ways in which we humans feel about and respond to change remains remarkably consistent. One common theme is that – whether or not we recognize it in ourselves – we seek out and search for an effective, meaningful and fulfilling understanding of the world, of the new and the old. Yet so often the answers we seek are right there in front of or within us.

The discoveries in medicine over the last 100 years or so have been breathtaking. From the advent of Germ Theory and the antibiotic era onwards, we’ve benefited from treatments borne out of ever increasing knowledge. Alongside the well-established scientific and technological development, I think there’s been a deeper change that’s a genuinely “new thing” – well at least new in the modern age. That change is the de-paternalisation of medicine in which we’ve seen the balance of authority move from “You suffer disease and you shall receive this treatment” to “Here’s the options, how do you want to treat this condition that’s affecting you?” The patient is now encouraged, expected to be an active participant in their healthcare decisions rather than being told what has to be done.

The same shift is seen across many areas of life and I believe the biggest factors contributing to it are the ease of access to the large body of information people now have on almost any subject and the ease of access to the tools and resources of specialisation that were only available to the privileged chosen few. Across almost every human endeavour we see personalisation and customisation replacing pre-set, one-size-fits-all approaches.

So alongside the progress of science, technology and treatment there’s more personalised medicine, choice and patient autonomy. We see conventional medicine being asked questions it wasn’t ever designed to answer and so we see ourselves turned towards “unconventional” approaches to find answers to the questions that people ask about themselves and their well-being. In this setting we can see the importance of complementary or alternative therapies, ancient and modern approaches combining to give patients the best outcome possible.

Shane’s book serves to remind us that along with great choice comes great responsibility and ultimately, we’re each responsible for our own health and have the power to change our circumstances. It provides a clear explanation of a connection between body and mind from a newer and more in-depth understanding of the fascial system and suggests some simple tools and techniques people can use to begin to regain control of their health. Along the way she introduces important diet, exercise, lifestyle and environmental factors that affect us all and have to be considered if we want to improve our sense of well-being.

Dr. Atul Kumar-Beurg London, UK

What I remember most is what happened after.

I’m sitting in my car, staring out the windshield. It’s raining, and it’s late, maybe 3 or 4 in the morning. The wipers are on but the car is not. I watch them spread the rain across the windshield (badly on the right side, that wiper has been broken for years). I listen to the rhythmic squee for a while, staring, not quite able to turn the car on and drive myself home. My thoughts don’t seem to want to take an order. I’m not physically hurt, I’m fine. I’m fine. I think I’m fine. But I left my best friend’s house at 3 or 4 in the morning in the rain because I needed to get the hell out of there. And now I’m sitting here across from his apartment, listening to a broken windshield wiper, not getting the hell out.

I don’t know how long I sat there before I finally figured out I could turn the car on and go home. Sometimes I try to remember, really get the details in order, sort out what happened, go back to the beginning and think it through til the end, but it’s difficult, like trying to get ants to walk in a straight line. It gets mixed up with other memories—the other times he’d tried to touch me when I didn’t want him to. Or when pushed me into a dark room and locked the door behind him. Or trying to leave earlier that same night, sitting on the stairs, my coat half on, him pleading with me to stay, me making him promise nothing would happen. I remember enough, anyway.

When a bad thing happens, you have to survive twice. First you have to survive the thing itself. You have to be physically alive after the thing has happened. That’s certainly key to the whole process. But then you have to survive again, to get through the consequences of the thing that didn’t kill you. You have to figure out how to be a person in a world where your trust in people or your faith in what you think the world is has been shattered. Survival is a gift, but not always the kind you want. Sometimes it’s like the worst of Grandma’s Christmas sweaters, because still existing after a terrible thing happened is confusing and painful and sometimes itchy and definitely comes back every Christmas.

So survive we must. However long it takes, we need to create a container of safety before we can start dealing with the devastation of sexual assault. We need to see that whatever we had to do to survive at the time was what we had to do, and we survived, goddammit. It doesn’t matter if we smoked ten thousand cigarettes or dated all the wrong people or pushed away everyone we cared about or drank ourselves to the bottom of the ocean. Your desire, your will to power, your creativity, your ability to love and connect and fuck and feel don’t completely die unless you completely die. Whatever happened, if you’re still alive, you can heal.