How the One Thing You’re Trying to Avoid Is the Key to Your Healing
Updated: Aug 10
Written by Guy Van de Putte, Spiritual Guide & Mentor
Guy Van de Putte works as a guide for those looking for help navigating life's challenges or finding themselves at a crossroads. Blending shamanism, breathwork and constellation therapy with the non-dual and yogic traditions, he has a wide toolkit to support the power of presence and the healing words to accommodate lasting change.
All healing is self-healing. This might not be what you want to hear, especially coming from someone offering healings to his clients. But the role of a healer is not to “fix” you, as if you were a car or a washing machine. The healer will provide a space for you to start healing yourself. I know we all long for someone to do it for us, and I myself have travelled the world in search of that one teacher, healer, or technique that would finally retrieve the dark veil that had been covering me for most of my time on this planet. I had beautiful experiences, temporary relief, and the idea that I was on the right track. But that true, lasting happiness? I never found it out there.
Isn’t that what we’re all looking for? To feel better. To be happy. To find inner peace. What use is it, though, to search high and low for what’s already inside you? Every true teaching, healer, or technique is nothing but a signpost leading you back inwards. That’s where the source of your happiness is, and that’s also where you have been stuffing all those things you couldn’t handle when they were happening to you. All the things you wanted to avoid. Those are exactly what’s holding you back. In life, on your spiritual journey, in your relationships.
We all still carry the wounds from the past within us. Unseen and unheard parts of us that dominate our lives in many aspects. We have all experienced painful, sometimes downright traumatic, events. Matters that leave an imprint on our subconscious. It has all led to who we are now, how we approach life, and how we think about everything happening around us. These experiences have shaped the beliefs we carry with us now, or rather, the lies we still believe about ourselves. Often deeply hidden, but always present. Just like a computer program running in the background, imperceptible to us, those ingrained patterns create our experiences on the big projection screen of life. Time and again, we run into the same events. Time and again, we relive the same emotions, the same rejection, whether or not with different protagonists.
The pain of the past is still there, we feel it rearing its head now and then. Over the years, we have learned to “deal with it.” Not thinking about it, repressing or drowning it, fleeing into addictions, you name it. We welcome everything that can distract our focus from the pain, even for a little while. Because we don’t want to feel that pain anymore. The only way is forward, but we are still carrying that backpack. Every step makes it heavier. With every setback, it is torn open again. Sometimes it becomes too much, and we have no choice but to let the anger or sadness out. Uncontrolled, an explosion, with which we often do more harm than good to ourselves and those around us. Perhaps it’s even a panic attack that completely paralyzes us for a moment.
That wounded part of you, the wounded inner child, as we call it, is crying out. It’s crying out for attention, for help, for you. It needs you. Your sadness needs you. Your anger needs you. Your fear needs you. It wants to be seen. It wants to be felt. It wants to know that it is allowed to exist. That it is completely okay. Maybe you couldn’t deal with it when you were younger, but you can now. You can be there for it now and give it what it needs most of all, your loving awareness.
Our backpack grows bigger and bigger with every new event, every rejection, every loss. Stumbling, we barely make any progress until we can’t anymore. We fall to our knees and reach a new low point. We see the shadow of that ever-growing burden towering above us, daring not to look back. Afraid of the immense mess we might see there. But what if? What if we dare to look? What if we dared to look back? What you would see then is not a big dark monster with fangs and claws, ready to tear you apart. It is a small child, crying, begging, shouting, "Look at me! Hold me! Love me!"
“No tree can grow to Heaven unless its roots reach down to Hell.” – C. Jung
We have to face that shadow at some point in our lives, or it will consume us. We have to allow the pain to come out, to finally give space for it. Not to suffer, that’s what you’re familiar with already. Not to wallow in it and lie in bed all depressed. Feel it, but don’t become it. As weird as it may sound, you can feel the sadness without having to be sad. It’s just an emotion, energy in motion, moving through your body. The moment you let it do just that, it will ease, because you’re allowing it. You stopped fighting it. You stopped running away from it. Be there for yourself, for that wounded part of you, like you would for a child who is crying and looking for someone to comfort them.
Despite a wish and a desire that it comes from someone else, no one will do it better than you yourself. It’s not the duty of a partner or a healer to give you something you missed in the past, something your parents or caregivers could not offer you. They were too busy hauling their own backpack up the mountain, a backpack filled with the pain of their past. So do it for yourself. Take it out of the shadow and bring it into the light. It’s not about getting rid of the pain or the past. It’s about integrating it, making it a part of your experiences without it running your present and your future. So you can finally be free to lead your own life. With all parts of yourself held closely and lovingly in your arms, knowing they are safe.
Read more from Guy Van de Putte
Guy Van de Putte, Spiritual Guide & Mentor
Guy Van de Putte works as a guide for all those looking for help navigating life's challenges or finding themselves at a crossroads. His passion is helping people who are ready to wake up go beyond the stories and patterns that unconsciously run their lives. Thereby helping them to debunk the lies they told themselves, that are at the root of all the drama in their life, and take back the power over their own lives. So the old wounds from the past can be permanently healed and a new life of true freedom can emerge out of that. A fulfilled life in service of and in harmony with their true calling.
