TIME DOES NOT HEAL ALL WOUNDS

It is a lie. But therapy is not brooding on the past; it is framing, preparing and creating clarity in emotional chaos and hurt. It is not magic. Love lost will always hurt.

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The first big lie:

‘Time Heals All Wounds”

Except it doesn’t.

Some phrases make sense, and this one has a ring of truth. It’s not like the phrase, buttering someone up - which, on its face, is insane. Buttering up means to impress someone with flattery. Its origin comes from a customary religious act in ancient India. The devout would throw butter balls at the statues of their gods to seek favour and forgiveness. Margarine was not allowed.

Another strange phrasing is “Go the whole nine yards”.

It means to do your best, but the phrase makes little sense on the surface. It references the World War II situation when fighter pilots were equipped with nine yards of ammunition. When they ran out, it meant that they had tried their best to fight off the target with all their ammunition.

But as I am prone, I digress; we are discussing lies, and the first is that time heals all wounds. The expression is not a lie hiding behind history and circumstance; it is unashamed and clear - but wrong.

If wounds go unhealed, we will start to believe that not only are we sometimes victimised in life, but we are victims.

Let’s be literal.

Does every wound automatically heal without scarring or heal at all? If you get a profound wound, it might cause permanent injury, or if you get a small wound that keeps getting reinfected, time will not heal it; you will have to deal with it properly.

The context of the first lie is usually grief.

However, the idea that time should or can heal wounds is sometimes a means of dismissing what should be addressed. But it can move into other areas of loss or injury.

Until recently, when dealing with work-related PTSD, my employer responded to Workman’s Compensation investigators with a variant of the “Time-healing all wounds” cliché, the always popular “He’ll get over it” - just dressed-up dismissal.

But the university meant to say, “If we lie about it or dismiss it, it may help us escape culpability.” They were not making predictive judgements.

And the WSIB disagreed with cliche number two. The first probably was not discussed.

But we speak of grief.

The first big lie is often repeated. It says, suck it up; any pain will fade away and heal if we ignore it. For some people, time does seem to bring healing, but that could be because the relationship was onion paper thin or they were hoping the “loved one” would die because they were pining for the proceeds of the will.

I doubt I’ve lost more than the average, or not much more, three close friends, some relatives, and my parents.

But I went to see a therapist for the loss of my dad.

I needed help; the wound was not healing.

Perhaps I was working, paying the bills, not drunk crying in front of strangers at bars, but I wasn’t healing.

There were unresolved pains, but saying, “he was old, and his loss was no tragedy” didn’t work either. I missed him, and a year later, I had to be careful bringing him up. Even when teaching, I tried not to start sentences with “My dad and I.”

I remember watching a father and son Tim Hortons ad in my advertising class. It’s a great ad that plays on nostalgia, but I had to turn away; it drove too close and almost ran over my toes.

“Closure” is also a cliché; it’s a poor metaphor for complex relationships. Love and resentment can exist together, and emotions, memory, and sensory triggers (that smell, frying pan) can no longer be pulled apart than the ingredients removed from a twenty-ingredient soup. The ingredients have morphed together, changed by heat, and are difficult to analyse; it’s better to get the recipe.

So, I met a therapist.

It was a prescribed course on grief processing; it wasn’t talk therapy; it involved a lot of homework. My sickness in session #5 was more a case of not doing the homework than illness, and I didn’t want to attend the session unprepared.

I am more of a natural suck-it-up than a therapy guy.

But this was worth it.

The process/therapy had me write out clearly when this or that happened and my associated beliefs. Subject-verb-object only, no wandering statements allowed.

In the end, I wrote a goodbye letter to him, and it’s not the type of thing you share or post on Substack. Some situations must be tied up, closed off, simplified, and put away, not subjected to endless self-doubt and analysis.

As far as the original grief, time had progressed, and while I was doing better than the first few weeks, it wasn’t good enough.

I remember my blood pressure soaring when the text appeared - “He is going downhill quickly, they say only a few more days.”

Unfortunately, ten days before, there had been a diagnosis of constipation, and I was relieved to hear - “They say he could be discharged soon.”

It was as if I had got off the freeway too early. I needed to keep travelling south.

But God gives us strength to plan funerals, write and deliver eulogies, book flights, tend to children, pack suitcases, and attend post-funeral family functions. But in undistracted moments, when you see that picture, and oh, when your daughter weeps, it hurts.

I remember at my dad’s graveside a year later, my daughter and I had made a pilgrimage to Grandpa, and I turned to see her broken by sorrow, her hand on her forehead, the gentle bobbing of the sobs - that hurt the most. i

But now the issue was me.

A therapist helped me walk through the steps; it was a fixed process, not just purging. It led to a grief recovery completion letter.

We act like grief is like a handful of grapes that, if we throw them to the ground, the summer heat will fade them, take them to raisins, and soon they will be a thousand specs of dust that can be palmed away and forgotten.

But no, there needed to be clear apologies, sentences of forgiveness, and gratitude that got right to the point.