Why Healers Avoid the Specific Truth in Their Own Forgiveness Work

If you are a healer or coach who is aware of the specific piece of forgiveness material that has not been directly engaged with — who recognizes the avoidance and continues to circle around the material rather than approaching it — the avoidance in practitioners has specific professional dimensions worth understanding. Take your time with this.

Why Practitioners Avoid Their Specific Material

The healer or coach who avoids a specific piece of their own forgiveness material is navigating avoidance with the same mechanism as anyone else — the nervous system’s protective response to material it predicts will be overwhelming. But practitioners often have additional dimensions to the avoidance that arise from the professional role:

Professional identity threat: The specific truth that is avoided is sometimes a truth that feels threatening to the practitioner’s professional identity. The healer who avoided early signals of harm in a professional relationship may be avoiding the truth of having made that choice — because the truth challenges the self-image of the aware and attuned practitioner. The coach who participated in professional dynamics that harmed others may be avoiding the truth of that participation for similar reasons.

The shadow of the professional role: Healers and coaches often carry a specific shadow in their professional identity: the gap between the professional self who facilitates healing and the personal self who has unresolved harm. The avoided material often lives precisely at this shadow — it is the material that is most inconsistent with the professional self-image.

The fear of clinical relevance: The healer who is actively working with clients on forgiveness material may avoid engaging with their own forgiveness material out of a specific fear: that the avoidance will produce countertransference that affects the clinical work. This fear, while clinically valid, can itself become a reason to not approach the material — the avoidance is maintained by the fear of what engaging with it might reveal about the clinical work.

The Professional Use of Understanding

The practitioner’s avoidance often takes a specific form: extensive professional-level understanding of why the avoidance is occurring. The healer who is avoiding specific material can often generate a sophisticated and accurate clinical analysis of their own avoidance — the protective mechanism, the nervous system prediction, the developmental origin.

The sophisticated analysis of the avoidance is not the same as approaching the avoided material. It is the professional-level version of the avoidance itself: thinking carefully about the material in lieu of engaging with it directly.

This is not malicious. It is the natural deployment of the practitioner’s most developed capacity — cognitive and clinical processing — in a situation that requires a different capacity: direct, personal, somatic engagement with difficult material.

Graduated Approach for Practitioners

The graduated approach to avoided material works for practitioners with the same mechanism as for anyone else — getting as close as the nervous system currently allows without pushing past the protection into overwhelm.

For practitioners, the graduated approach often benefits from the following adjustment: doing it in a professional context. Working with a supervisor, a peer, or another practitioner in a role that provides the external container creates conditions in which the professional role can be set aside because someone else is holding the facilitation.

The practitioner who can only approach their avoided material when they are in the professional role — when they are analyzing and facilitating rather than directly engaging — benefits from the external container that removes the professional role as the default position.

The specific truth in the practitioner’s forgiveness material, approached with the support of another person holding the container, is typically more approachable than the same material approached alone. The aloneness of the practitioner doing their own work is itself part of what makes the approach feel overwhelming.

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