Healing Isn't A Battle

I think I finally figured out what bothers me about those posts that are about trauma/abuse survivors and people with health issues, usually aimed at women, that are always like, "You're a warrior queen Goddess fighting your battles draw your sword you are strong and a fighter defeat your enemies and wear your crown!!!" usually with some fantasy art of a woman warrior attached. They have never sat right with me, but I couldn't articulate why.

It's the warrior/battle metaphor.

We do it all the time in speech - "fighting to survive," "battling cancer," etc. But I think it's wrong.

First of all, making it a warrior/fighting metaphor is externalising an internal process. Basically, it makes it so that you are fighting yourself. Whether that's fighting mental illness (your own brain), or the survival mechanisms you learned during a traumatic time (that kept you alive then but are harming you now), or a disease that is causing parts of your own body to behave in ways that hurt you, it's still YOU. That's your brain or your kidneys or whatever, not an outside enemy that you have to defeat. You don't want to defeat your brain. You want to heal your brain.

Healing doesn't defeat, it integrates. That might mean growing some new neural pathways, that might mean learning to cope with a new reality such as if you had something amputated and now you have to adjust to that, that might mean your immune system containing a threat but keeping that information for future use, a little piece of the thing that hurt you so it can remember what to do should it return. When we are hurt and we get a scar, that scar is now a part of our skin. Trying to excise the scar instead of integrating it will only make the wound worse.

If we have survived some trauma or illness, we're going to have some scars (visible or otherwise). Your body recovering from that and learning from that experience isn't a battle, it's a meditation that makes you wiser as you integrate the information. You don't draw your sword and hack at your brain; you figure out what your brain needs to recover and live in a healthy way again. You nurture it, just like when you have a cold and your mom makes you chicken noodle soup to nourish you.

Our society loves violent war metaphors. "The war on drugs" made things worse, not better - just as fighting your own body isn't healing. To heal, you need rest, and nourishment, and gentleness, and time. You need to process and integrate what happened. You need to change what needs changing, and letting go of what needs let go. Like I've had to let go of teeth that were broken and infected, and my mouth had to heal and grow new flesh to cover up the places where they once were; I couldn't fight my teeth into submission or do battle with cavities. It didn't return me to the same state that I was before - I didn't grow new teeth. But I'm healed; my mouth no longer hurts me.

The fighting/warrior metaphor for illness and trauma is the exact opposite of what it really needs to be. We aren't warriors fighting PTSD like it's an enemy we can vanquish; we're students or artists or inventors learning what to do with this new thing in our lives to make it useful instead of harmful. Like upcycling trash into treasure. Take that plastic thing that you don't know what to do with and instead of letting it break down into microplastics polluting your environment, create a beautiful sculpture with it. Take this terrible experience and instead of letting it fester in your mind forever, create some beautiful art with your life. It isn't a battle; it's a metamorphosis.