Overview

There was a time when “healing” was something people did as their physical wounds were nursed back to health. Today the word healing is applied to seemingly every esoteric ailment; people are healing from epigenetic trauma, healing from internalized whiteness, healing from their chronic deficits in attention and energy. Everyone you know is now healing from something. There’s a pervasive belief that everyone was born sick and must “do the work” to heal ourselves for the rest of our lives, even though we’re told a full recovery may never be possible. How did we come to view ourselves so antagonistically? Why does everyone now look in the mirror and see a person who’s inherently and irreparably disordered? How exactly does the healing process work? And to what degree do these disorders come from within us as we’ve been told, or are they the result of influences outside our control?