Being healthy includes „I am (here)“, I feel myself and can also feel others. I can recognise my needs, allow my emotions, be in relationships, feel vitality and joy of life. I can meet others, be curious, take an interest in life, develop myself, find meaning, etc…feel the dignity of my life.
We humans all originally have a healthy core of life, life potential and the will to live. Traumatic experiences, excessive demands, being overwhelmed, threats to life can shake us to our foundations. Vitality and development can be impaired, interrupted, blocked. Biographically necessary coping strategies and the resulting survival patterns change what was originally healthy. We then have to prevent and suppress what is healthy ourselves. We humans then hide inside. We have to protect ourselves out of necessity in order to be able to endure or no longer feel the unbearable, pain, loneliness, abandonment, fear, excessive demands. We become firm where we are actually soft. We hold back where something might actually flow. We contract where something wants to unfold within us. We remain alone with ourselves where a relationship would be natural, human, the best thing and where the longing for it is self-evident.
In this way, we inevitably create circumstances within ourselves and around us in which we settle in and feel „at home“ over time. We then no longer realise that we are not there at all, that we are not really „at home“. Many life issues ( as conflicts with family, children, partners , work, illnesses) have their origins here.
Christina Schön 