The Wounded Healer

A Theology of the Boundary

Many years ago, during a chapel service at Yonsei University, I confessed my old secrets before several thousand students. A grade of 2.63 out of a perfect score, a heart that pounded the moment I had to give a presentation, my looks and my low self-esteem. In childhood there was even a time when, because I was a carrier of hepatitis, I had to eat from a separate tray. These were stories I had long wanted to hide. And yet that day, when I brought those wounds out into the open, a strange thing happened. The hall fell silent, and tears welled in the eyes of a few students. It was not my achievements but my wounds that reached them.

Why is it that an open wound, not a hidden one, saves a person? Not long ago, as I sent my mother off in death, I learned a strand of that answer in my own body. From chief mourner to father of the groom at my son's wedding, I had to be brave, with no room even to grieve. And there was a price to that suppression.

Having denied and suppressed my sad feelings, it seemed I could feel no feelings at all. I came to understand what it means when they say a traumatized person cannot feel the signals coming from the body.— 2025, Facebook

The psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk says, in The Body Keeps the Score, that a wound one could not bear is inscribed not on the mind but on the body. When you close off your feelings, the body suffers that closure. To hide a wound is not safety but the making of a sick body. If so, a wound is not something to hide but something that must, by whatever means, be opened.

Gabor Maté touches this severance at a deeper place. From my conversation with him, one thing has stayed with me longest. It was that the essence of trauma is not the event itself that befell me, but the fact that, through that event, I become severed from my own self. To close off feeling is to be cut off from my body, and from myself. And so the person who hides a wound becomes a stranger not only to others but to himself. That is why healing is the "opening" of a wound. For opening is precisely the rejoining of oneself.

The Dutch priest and spiritual writer Henri Nouwen grasped this in the phrase "the wounded healer." A healer is not one who hides his own wounds but one who makes those wounds the source of healing. It is not the perfect person who mends others; rather, the wounded person reaches another's pain through his own wound. I think of my colleague Professor Lee Ji-sun. In her university years she suffered severe burns over her whole body in a drunk-driving accident and endured dozens of surgeries; now she teaches students at Ewha Womans University and hands the strength to go on living to countless people. Her wound, not closing but opening, has become a passage through which others come and go.

A person without wounds is a closed fortress (城). It reaches no one at all.

Why is that? Because a wound is the place where my surface has been pierced through. I, who had been shut within a smooth shell, am opened at that place. It hurts. But it is only through that opened place that another can enter, and that I too can go out to another. A wound is a boundary: the place where the inner me and the outer world meet. Do you remember the hormesis of Chapter Five? A wound not great enough to kill made the body strong. Here that principle rises to the dimension of relationship. A wound not great enough to kill makes a person a healer. The Age of Coddling teaches us to hide our wounds and pretend we are fine, but a hidden wound can never become a passage.

For a long time I was ashamed of my wounds. I tried to cover them with more achievements. It was the way of swelling. But what saved people was not the covered wound but the open one. When I stood before cancer patients, the reason I could reach their fear was not that I was perfect, but that I too was a person who had once collapsed. A healer is one who stands at the boundary. One who does not close the boundary of his own wound but keeps it open, so that through that place the pain of others may come and go. Between two people opened in this way, what is born? That is the last story this book has long been preparing.

References

Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer · Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score · Gabor Maté (trauma)