Does Time heal all wounds? Well, I think most of us are aware that this old adage has some truth but is not the full truth. When we experience physical injury or damage, it’s amazing how we can heal. A couple of years ago, my mother had a series of strokes. She lost most of her vision, spent a week or two seeing triple, and then over time, her vision returned to normal – even better than normal. Unfortunately, she has had a reoccurrence of strokes recently, again affecting her vision. She is back in the hospital, and her medical team is working hard to figure out why she keeps having these strokes. Having experienced this a couple of years ago, I have a different viewpoint now. I have had the experience of seeing her recover over time. The first time, it was not like that. The whole thing was frightening, and I had no idea what to expect. The whole thing is still frightening, and I’m still not sure what to expect, but I know enough to know that it’s reasonable to have some hope. It really is quite amazing how our bodies and brains can heal.
The same could be said for the stuff that causes us pain and suffering in our every day lives. When a stressful event happens, we often experience an acute stress reaction, which basically involves our minds and bodies adapting to whatever stress we are experiencing. Following this, we experience a period of adjustment or adaptation. Sometimes this period of adjustment or adaptation lasts much longer than we would like it to. In fact, we might get impatient and wonder why it’s taking so long to recover or when we will ever get over it. Usually, we eventually get back to some kind of baseline level of stress and learn to either incorporate the difficult event into our lives or to somehow move past it. When this happens, is time doing the work for us? Should we simply have faith that, with time, things will get easier?
I think that, to some extent, we can. The problem is that, as Einstein and other physicists have noted, it’s not clear that time itself is meaningful at all. We could almost consider time to be synonymous with change. So, if we say that wounds heal in time, what we are really saying is that wounds heal. We could get rid of the “time” altogether. If we do that, then we need to focus on what seems to be changing in order to help us adapt, heal, and recover from stress. As far as we can tell, Time is not some mysterious force that works magic to heal psychological and physical wounds. To recover from difficult or stressful events, we often have to actually do certain things and avoid doing other things. Some of the coping strategies that seemed to help a lot with adaptation include mindfulness and acceptance. Strategies to avoid include worry and rumination. More on this in the next blog. -Alexander L. Chapman, Ph.D., R.Psych