What I Learned About Healing Before I Became a Therapist

By Donna Marie Marino, LMFT

Healing is a word we use a lot.

We talk about healing from grief, healing after divorce, healing from trauma, healing a relationship, healing ourselves. We tend to imagine that if healing is happening, we should feel increasingly certain, peaceful and whole.

I’m not sure it works that way.

When I left a corporate career that had defined a significant part of my adult life, I felt clear about the decision. I also felt afraid. When I finally decided to leave my marriage, I knew deeply that it was what my soul required of me, for myself and for my children. That didn’t make the uncertainty disappear.

Fear and clarity lived together. So did excitement and nervousness. I could be afraid and still feel confident I would figure it out. I could have absolutely no idea what was going to happen and still know something needed to change.

Over the past few months, I’ve written about closing chapters and about the liminal space between “no longer” and “not yet.” I think healing happens in that space, too. It’s part of how we move from one version of our lives into another.

And sometimes, while we’re living through it, it doesn’t feel much like healing at all.

A Message I Didn’t Fully Understand Yet

A couple of years after leaving corporate, I attended a week-long coaching training program in Connecticut.

This was around 2008. I had begun consulting and was exploring coaching because I kept feeling drawn toward work that involved sitting with people, listening, mentoring and guiding. But I was still very much figuring things out. I certainly wasn’t sitting there thinking I had discovered my life’s purpose.

During the training, we participated in a guided meditation.

I don’t remember every prompt anymore, but I remember where my mind took me. At one point, I was high in the Smoky Mountains, surrounded by this incredible sense of peace and calm.

Then I found myself somewhere completely different.

The Vatican.

More specifically, in front of Michelangelo’s Pietà, the sculpture of Mary holding Jesus after he has been taken down from the cross.

In the meditation, I was kneeling there, crying. I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked over, and it was Jesus.

Believe me, I know how that sentence sounds.

I’m not sharing this because I think Jesus singled me out for some grand assignment, or because I believe I have access to answers other people don’t. If anything, I spent years afterward wondering what I was supposed to do with the experience. I was still just me, trying to figure out my own life.

But I heard words that have stayed with me ever since:

“Compassionately hold others in their suffering and let them know they’ll be okay.”

I don’t need anyone else to interpret that experience the way I do. I only know that those words became something I carried with me, long before I understood how closely they would eventually describe the work I do today.

Sometimes Meaning Arrives Years Later

There was another layer to that experience that didn’t occur to me until afterward.

I had been to the Vatican as a teenager on a school trip.

One of our chaperones was a petite woman with strawberry-blonde hair. I don’t remember whose mother she was. I don’t remember much about her at all.

But I remember seeing her in front of the Pietà.

She was kneeling and sobbing.

I remember standing some distance away, transfixed by her. Even as a teenager, I could sense the depth of whatever she was experiencing. I just didn’t understand it.

That image stayed somewhere inside me for decades.

Then, years later, I was a mother myself. I had loved children deeply enough to understand something I simply could not have understood as a teenager. And there I was in that meditation, kneeling in the same place.

Was I being prepared all those years before? Was it simply a memory that took on new meaning once I had enough life behind me to understand it differently?

I don’t know.

And I think I’m more comfortable now with not needing to know.

Sometimes we return to an old experience with a different version of ourselves, and suddenly we can see something that wasn’t available to us the first time.

The memory hasn’t changed.

We have.

Healing Is Not the Same as Fixing

Something strikes me now about the message I received that day.

I wasn’t told to fix anyone’s suffering.

I was told to compassionately hold them in it.

There are things we simply cannot fix for one another. I cannot undo someone’s childhood. I cannot erase a betrayal or make a death unhappen. I cannot remove every painful consequence of a divorce, a diagnosis, an abusive relationship or a decision someone wishes they had made differently.

And as a therapist, I cannot hand someone a perfectly mapped route from pain to healing.

I can sit beside them.

I can help them understand what is happening inside their mind and body. I can ask questions and reflect what I see. I can help them notice what feels aligned and what no longer does. Sometimes I can hold hope for them during a period when hope is difficult for them to access themselves.

That feels very different to me than positioning myself as the person with the answers.

When someone allows me into one of the hardest chapters of their life, we are partners in the room. Their life remains theirs. Their choices remain theirs. Their healing remains theirs.

My job is to be present with them while they find their way through.

And over the years, I’ve come to understand that “You’re going to be okay” doesn’t mean nothing painful will happen.

It means that whatever comes next, we can meet it from there.

When Your Body Starts Giving You an Answer

When I left corporate in 2006, I knew why I was leaving.

I had spent about 25 years in that world, and I was crystal clear that the way I had been living was no longer working for me. I needed to recalibrate my life around the mother and woman I wanted to be.

What I didn’t know was what I was going to do instead.

People would ask me what came next, as though surely I had left a 25-year career with a beautiful plan tucked under my arm.

I didn’t.

I remember telling people that I was going to get my kids to the bus stop, work out, go for a long walk and watch the full two hours of the Today show.

After that?

I had no idea.

For about nine months, I let myself live in that uncertainty. Eventually I began consulting. I met people. I tried things. At one point, I even owned a decorating franchise because interior design was something I had always wanted to explore.

I also kept coming back to something that had always felt natural to me: being with people. Sitting with them. Mentoring. Coaching. Guiding.

There was no guidebook. One thing simply seemed to lead to another.

That eventually led me to coaching, and later to graduate school. Somewhere along the way, I began noticing something I hadn’t paid much attention to before.

My body was often registering what felt right before my mind could explain why.

I remember driving to graduate school completely stressed by traffic and everything else happening in my life. Then I would turn onto campus and breathe.

Something softened.

I noticed the same experience when I would arrive at church to sing. I might be rushing or running late, my mind still occupied by the day. Then I would walk inside. Terri would begin playing the piano.

And there it was again.

A breath. Peace. Calm.

Those experiences became information.

I began noticing which people, places and opportunities left me feeling constricted or unsettled and which ones allowed me to breathe more deeply. Over time, what began as a physical sensation became a kind of knowing.

I didn’t suddenly have the whole plan. I simply became better at recognizing the next step.

If something felt aligned, I moved toward it. If something felt wrong, I learned to pay attention to that, too.

Eventually, I realized I was experiencing something I didn’t yet have a name for. My body was giving me information, my mind was learning to understand it, and something deeper in me was helping me give  meaning to both.

Mind. Body. Spirit.

That experience eventually became the foundation for the name Armonía.

When I was trying to name whatever it was I was creating, I knew I wanted a word that expressed that integration. Because my Italian heritage is important to me, I started looking through words and their Italian and Latin translations.

Eventually I reached harmony.

Then I found the Italian:

Armonia.

I never made it past the Hs.

That was it.

There Is an In-Between Stage of Healing

Healing, I’ve learned, has its own liminal space.

You can know the relationship needed to end and still miss it. You can leave the job that was hurting you and still wonder what you’ve done. You can finally make a decision you know is right for you and discover that relief, grief, fear and excitement have all decided to come along for the ride.

And sometimes you look around after making the big, brave decision and think: Okay. Now what?

Your old life doesn’t fit anymore, but the new one hasn’t taken shape.

The version of yourself you remember may not immediately reappear either. Your sparkle may still feel a little dim.

That doesn’t mean the healing isn’t happening.

Sometimes its first signs are remarkably ordinary.

You laugh and realize you haven’t laughed like that in months. You start caring about something you had stopped caring about. You want to plant flowers. You pull out the paints. You book the trip. You call the friend. You make plans for an ordinary Tuesday and actually look forward to them.

Little pieces of you begin making themselves known again.

Watching the Sparkle Return

That idea of “getting your sparkle back” comes up often in Colleen’s work, particularly with people recovering from narcissistic and emotionally harmful relationships.

When someone has spent a long time questioning their perceptions, accommodating another person or losing pieces of themselves inside a relationship, recovery can take time. Colleen notices the small signs when someone begins trusting themselves again, rediscovering what they enjoy and making choices based on what they actually want.

The sparkle doesn’t necessarily come back in one dramatic moment. It starts showing up in everyday life.

Christina sees healing differently in her work with children, teens and young adults. Young people don’t always have language for what they are experiencing, which is one reason art and creative expression can be so powerful. Sometimes what cannot yet be explained in words can still be expressed through color, movement, play or an image on a page.

Different people need different ways to heal.

There is no single sequence everyone follows, no perfect timeline and no one person standing at the finish line with all the answers.

What Healing Has Come to Mean to Me

I used to think clarity would eliminate fear.

It doesn’t.

I thought knowing I was making the right decision would make the decision easy.

It doesn’t do that either.

And when I sat in that coaching training nearly twenty years ago, I had no idea where one strange, deeply personal meditation would eventually fit into my life.

I can see more of it now.

Healing has required me to become increasingly honest about what hurts, what I need, what I know and what my body is telling me. It has asked me to tolerate periods when the next step wasn’t obvious. It has taught me to trust myself without pretending I can predict what happens next.

And slowly, we move.

Sometimes there is a dramatic breakthrough. More often, healing looks much less cinematic.

A breath. A boundary. A difficult truth finally spoken aloud. A moment of laughter you didn’t have to force. An ordinary Tuesday when you suddenly realize there is a little light back in your eyes.

Maybe that is why the message from that meditation has stayed with me for so long.

After all these years, I don’t think my work is to know where someone else’s story is going.

It is to be willing to sit beside them while they are still living the part that hurts. To compassionately hold them in their suffering.

And, when they need it, remind them that this chapter isn’t the whole story.

They’re going to be okay.