Who the @*$&! is Chiron and Why Should I Care?

Chiron is the archetypal wounded healer.

For those of you who have never had much to do with depth psychology, that sentence meant nothing.

I know.

That’s why I’m here writing this.

Who is Chiron? What is an archetype? And ‘wounded healer’?

What next, “Buy my dreamcatcher?!”

No.

Psychology so often and so easily becomes an expensive intellectual exercise or it invites itself to be dismissed as new age fluff.

For all the talk of complexes, boundaries, autonomy, self-soothing mechanisms, family dysfunction, and codependence that therapists bandy around, what we often miss is the need for deep personal relevance. It's interesting and fun, and helps us spin comforting stories about why that cute guy in the grocery story didn't call us (he was disgusted by guava: obvious mother issues), but does it MEAN anything?

Ideally, therapy stirs the pot, makes us profoundly uncomfortable and provokes these kinds of questions:

How do I truly come to know myself beyond the knowledge that I struggle with this or that complex or have a boundary issue with person X?

How do I connect to myself deeply with an unwavering anchor?

Can I truly know my own pain, grief, shame, humiliation, fear, and rage, not just talk around it?

Do I feel at home in my own body?

Is my creativity flowing?

And am I aware that with everything I say and do, every choice I make, I am creating and reflecting my personal myth?

Which leads me back to Chiron.

Chiron was a mythical centaur famous for his ability to heal others and for his uncommon integrity. Centaurs, the frat boys of Greek myth, were not known for their intelligence or strength of character, and so Chiron was unique among his brothers.

He had a rough start. Both parents abandoned him. After raping Mom, Papa Saturn took off. And Mom, a nymph, was so disgusted with her hideous half horse son, she left him to die.

Luckily, baby Chiron was adopted by Apollo, and learned his healing and prophecy skills from the mighty sun god.

For all his skills, though, when he was accidentally wounded by his good friend Hercules, he was unable to heal himself. Being half god, he couldn't die either. So he lived in constant agonizing pain. Eventually, Hercules worked out a deal that allowed Chiron to end his suffering by becoming mortal.

In depth psychology, Chiron, the 'wounded healer' archetype is an important reminder that therapists are also wounded just as patients are also healers. It is a caution against professional arrogance, forgetting our own humanity and assuming the 'expert' role while pathologizing clients just because we are too afraid to see a similar flaw or wound in ourselves.

Chiron did not carry a clipboard.

He KNEW his patients’ wounds because he had lived them himself. He healed with the wisdom of someone who has scraped the rust off his own incurable suffering and found a reason to keep going.

So, why am I writing this?

I believe that therapy can be an incredibly transformative experience. It can also be a total waste of time. What you get out of therapy depends largely on the therapist, but it depends just as heavily on you. How seriously do you take it? Do you let it permeate your life, or is it a separate walled-off exercise that doesn’t touch your ‘real life’?

I think that the reason we can all so easily turn into psychobabble spewing wankers is twofold:

First, the jargon and the concepts run from awkward to ivory tower alienating. The language is so cumbersome that we lose touch with the grit and gore that I believe therapy is really about.

And that’s a loss for everyone, because buried under the layers of talk is some real gold.

You and I are not made of clean lines and catchy phrases, so why would we talk about ourselves that way?

Second, and more to the point, jargon keeps us safely removed from our emotional core. If I say I have a boundary issue, it’s two steps further away from me than if I let myself feel the anguish of being the needy, unloved, and unworthy person I truly feel myself to be.

If therapy is going to ‘work,’ it can’t be safe. It’s got to be messy and confusing and, yes, painful.

Like Chiron, each of us is wounded, and each of us has the capacity to heal. Being tooth-grittingly honest with ourselves about our woundedness cracks open the door to our healing.

Part of my mission in this blog, is to strip away as much jargon as I can and get to the meat of the matter. I hope to take a few stones out of that ivory tower's foundation so more of us feel a little closer to our personal myth.

I hope that Chiron Speaks will speak to you.