Healing after physical injury or illness is a complex experience. Whatever the trauma, a car accident, surgery, exacerbation of chronic arthritis, or a cut finger, there is more involved in the healing process than automatic mobilization of some internal chemicals to affect repair. The cut finger may include momentary surprise, perhaps followed by some personal castigation about how one could be so foolish, which may affect the healing process in some way.
Surgery may have been preceded by months of worry related to pain, anaesthesia, and outcome. This time before surgery may be relevant to healing. The person with arthritis could have several remissions and exacerbations, each one changing perceptions and adding new dimensions to the complicated emotional factors, which in turn relate to the long struggle to regain strength, and perhaps gain a little time with less pain. Most individuals have experienced differences at various times in their lives in their ability to heal after contracting a cold.
Granted, the viruses vary, but there seems to be more involved than can be explained by viral characteristics or personal physical resilience. Chemical connections are being discovered between the immune system and the emotion system (Levy, 1998). Holistic healing is an attempt to study human illnesses as complex processes involving more than distinct cause-and-effect relationships. Many medical scientists are taking new look at how one becomes ill, how one becomes well, and what wellness means (Pender, 1997; Smith, 1996).
This researcher developed an interest in healing through working as psychotherapist and having an involvement in trying to enhance healing in both psychological and physiological ways. Some clients were observed to have rapid positive changes while others recovered very slowly. Many people with conditions such as alcoholism and premenstrual syndrome vary in their ability to recover and these variations seem to be related to differences in attitude and personality. Arthritis, allergies, and acute conditions, such as heart failure or infections, all have multiple dimensions that appeared to be relevant to healing.
Recovery from conditions that were more psychological in nature, such as depression, anxiety, or reconstructing one’s life after divorce, seemed to have similarities to recover from physical conditions. Healing in a broad sense was the initial topic of interest, but after reviewing the literature, the researcher recognized that more preliminary work needed to be done, because healing was undefined and much of the literature purported to be on healing was in fact on other topics such as longetivity and compliance with medical regimen.
It is appropriate to examine one segment of healing and build on that with further research. Individuals in a process that could be readily identified as healing is the appropriate population to use in exploring this phenomenon. To understand the experience of healing form the perspective of the individual in the process of healing, the following research question was asked.