Psychotherapists can hold a particular image in the collective unconscious, and the idea of baring our souls to them can trigger curiosity into how they got into 
psychotherapy themselves. The wounded healer in psychotherapy has a special place in therapy itself thanks to Carl Jung describing that archetype.
The idea of seeing a therapist can be confronting, psychotherapeutic counselling will occasionally require bold honesty to reveal hurts shames and traumas. To explore, accept, transform. However, myths also abound around psychotherapy, lazy reductions such as “They are all crazy themselves” or “I don’t need someone else to tell me what I’m thinking”. Ironically there is some partial truth to the former only. Therapists are not “crazy” but they have often suffered emotional trauma and followed a therapy of their own.
This actually makes them better therapists not worse. It provides us with first-hand experience of emotional distress, of existential angst, of the need for empathy and not just logic, it arms us with real world references as to what toxic relations can look like. This observation, that Carl Jung himself had made it, in the early 1920’s.
“Psychotherapists are usually wounded healers of the soul.”
Carl Jung, 1921 – Psychological types
Psychotherapists and wounded healers
Any healthy therapy will provide the patient with a safe space to express their most challenging thoughts. A healthy therapy will also often involve the therapist directly. The therapist also, must occasionally share their experience, their biases if they know of them, and their history.
Transference in therapy for example, can happen when client or therapist come to direct feelings or desires related to an important figure in their life—such as a parent—on each other. It is not necessarily a bad thing as long as it is somehow “owned” openly, and is in fact, used as an investigative tool in some therapeutic protocols like the Freudian psychoanalytical school.
The simple point though is that, the therapist also has a history, a character, and their own cognitive biases, that need to be taken into account for optimal counselling. The therapist provides the patient with a safe “sounding board” by sharing thoughts and opinions, when relevant. The therapist can help contrast unexamined opinions of the patient by simply sharing their own on any safe topic. A good therapist should not inhabit a moral pedestal.
And that involves owning our own experiences minimally at least. Wounded healers is, statistically speaking, a thing a coherent group of people. Multiple studies have shown that therapists are more likely to have experienced abuse, toxic relationships and emotional trauma than the average population.
The most famous one by Alison Barr a British psychotherapist herself, polling 253 respondents though plural open choices and thematic groupings, found that at least 73.9% of therapists had suffered from at least one emotional trauma. The most common ones were abuse, toxic relationships, dealing with someone with ill mental health.
Here again “Wounded Healers” who come out of trauma and abuse to lead productive lives tend to be better equipped for therapy. They do not just understand things more “first-hand”, they also understand the empathy and patience required for lasting change. Psychotherapists understand that life is made of ups and downs, odyssey and serendipity.
Wounded healer in psychotherapy and mythology
Mythology provides a gorgeous view into early foraging into the human mind. There is a very clear reason why mythology burnishes so much of psychology (Oedipus, Narcissus, Sisyphus, etc.) Mythology has always tried to explain and romanticise the human mind, its paradoxes and ironies, it’s hidden drives through story telling.
Mythology is the nourishing ocean that informed three colossal human inventions: Philosophy, art and psychology. Where dry logic could be abandoned for a moment and the imagination run free, with all it would reveal. From mythology were born an infinite amount of stories, books, oral traditions, tales of valour, romance and dilemma.
From mythology was born proto-psychology: mythology depicts vividly our human struggles. Excruciating decisions to take. Sinning and forgiving. The idea of free arbiter versus fate, concepts from narcissism to self-defeating guilt, mythology explores all. It borrows also the voice of the Gods to say things, to share the unspeakable.
To provide a basic kind of art therapy at the time, to people who otherwise would have had little idea even of what they were experiencing, how to become aware of their feelings, how to explain their struggles at least.
Chiron the wounded healer who could not heal himself
Wounded healer in psychotherapy has been codified through Carl Jung referencing Chiron in traditional Greek mythology as the symbol of his concept of “wounded healer”. In the old myths, Chiron is depicted as an exceptional centaur, far from the usual brawling and drunkenness of his kind. Furthermore he shows natural talent and intent to heal and nurture the youth.
However, as Ovid describes it in Fasti, tragedy strikes one day, when busy admiring Hercules’ weapons, he inadvertently drops a poisoned arrow on his foot. The myth goes that Chiron immediately tries to heal the wound but to no effect, the poison in question is incurable. After nine days spent with Hercules weeping next to him, he passes away, joining the skies as a new constellation.
The symbolism of Chiron is pregnant with meaning. He dies because of his curiosity to become a constellation (shining starlight from there on to illuminate life). Psychotherapists and wounded healers are familiar with clarifying meaning and options. There is also a grim, real-world message: Being virtuous does not protect from all. However, there is also hope and reason for joy: nothing is ever entirely lost, changed from being to constellation, Chiron still provides clarity and light.
The best you can do is to be virtuous and trust in the eerie poetic justice of life, but not in immediate or systematic meaning or fairness. What matters is to use our wounds for a good cause and to never stop learning.
Suffering is sadly also a central byproduct of growth, the two concepts are related. But here again there is meaningful, constructive pain that transforms to a better state of consciousness, and there is dumb, or destructive unexamined pain that weakens the soul, causes further hurt and disconnection.
Wounded healers can empathise with hurts and fears from a more authentic standpoint, and understand the concept of healthy or transformative pain, as opposed to destructive and unexamined pain, for the purposes of therapy.
Psychotherapists on transformative pain versus unexamined, repetitive pain
A therapy needs to be understood as something that will occasionally be painful, in session or out. The work of the therapist is to re-explore with the client issues, insecurities, scripts, traumas, and examine how real or helpful they are. Help the patient develop deeper understanding and typically a wider more balanced worldview that will sustain them in the future effortlessly.
A therapist should never tell the patient to do anything specific, but rather explore and re-examine more helpfully with them. It will hurt sometimes, but that transformational pain will save enormously more hurt in the long term. It is really about less of a smarter pain, than more of a dumber pain, to do a therapy.
But the two are intimately woven as another titan of Greek mythology Aeschylus famously noted. Aeschylus was a very ancient poet predating most Greek artists and philosophers, some 2500 years ago. This extremely ancient view makes his writings all the more gorgeously universal and timeless:
“He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and into our own despair, against our will, comes to us by the awful grace of God.”
Aeschylus, Circa -500BC
Psychotherapists are all too familiar with the enduring wisdom of these words. Wounded healers know everything about the subjectivity of our egos, or about the need for discipline for a fulfilled life. A wounded healer in psychotherapy is also symbolised by Chiron’s rare gift. It is not always a common passion in everyone to help alleviate suffering as therapists, unlike other careers that may have been more rewarding in terms of finances or status.
