The Wounding Healer

Or the Parasitical Scab-Picker

There is a type of person that I like to call a Wounding Healer. That’s a play on the title of a famous book, *The Wounded Healer*. I’ve only read small sections of the book. Not my sort of thing. But I ran into a lot of these types during my short time in the emerging church, and I saw a lot of them in the house church movement as well. They are all around, but there was an exceptional concentration of them in those circles, which led me to kind of develop this profile and think about them.

These people tended to be good listeners and did well at projecting sympathy. They usually leaned left, but not always. And when that showed itself, it showed itself in their particular concern for single mothers, immigrants (legal & illegal), or the perpetually doubting. Again, that wasn’t always true, just often. But what was always true is that they seemed drawn to people who were in pain.

Sometimes that pain came to them through some tragedy, whether sickness, death, or a nasty divorce they didn’t desire. Many times, in my judgment, it was self-inflicted pain. But it was pain they were drawn to, and it was stories about pain that they liked to listen to.

And the reason I say they projected sympathy is because I really think it was more of a parasitical empathy. They were drawn to pain because it set the stage for them to talk about their own pain, but under the guise of being a loving listener who’s just there to help someone else.

The reason I call them a Wounding Healer is because they like to wallow in pain, in doubt, in angst. Their focus is not coming to terms with it in the sense that you move past it. And I understand that there are sorts of pain that never fully go away. The death of my daughter left an ache. It’s just part of my life. But I did learn how to think about it biblically and how to deal with it in a way that it’s not all-defining.

These people like to pick at the scabs of others. I think primarily so they can pick at their own scabs. But they also just like thinking of themselves as a person acquainted with pain, who’s moving through life with doubts but somehow is courageous simply by bearing them.

So they keep people stuck with them because they love being stuck. It gives them an identity, one that you’re not allowed to challenge. After all, you have to treat people going through pain with kid gloves, right? You can’t rebuke them, right? So you can see how living in perpetual pain is one way to avoid rebuke and to control others.

The Wounding Healer is the enemy of the true friend. In one sense, the true friend doesn’t care about pain. He cares about you. Therefore, he’s willing to deal with you in your pain for your own good. And sometimes that means telling you that you’re becoming self-consumed and self-focused, that you’re becoming whiny, that you’re using this tragedy that’s been foisted upon you as an excuse to be unfaithful elsewhere.

Or the exceptionally good friend reminds you that you must rebuke the person who caused the pain, which in many cases is just yourself. And you need to take responsibility for your self-induced pain and stop making excuses. That’s what a good friend does.

The good friend is a good doctor, because a good doctor deals with you as a whole person. They’re not there to use you as a prop for their fake righteousness, but to get you up and running with the rest of the tribe.

Wounding Healers despise the true friend because the true friend gets in the way of using people to stay angsty and self-consumed. They’ll say the true friend isn’t sensitive, or is judgmental, or lacks patience, or is rushing things. And to some degree, those things may be true. But the real problem here is that the true friend is healing the very wound that this false healer picks at, like a vampire at someone’s throat.