The most famous scene in the movie Good Will Hunting is the “It’s not your fault” scene.
Will Hunting, played by Matt Damon, is a genius whose intellect is largely stuck inside him, along with his ability to love. After several months of counseling with a psychologist played by Robin Williams (it’s either therapy or jail, for assaulting a cop), it becomes clear that what’s holding Will back is the fact that he had an abusive childhood—a foster father who regularly beat him.
“You know, it’s not your fault,” the psychologist tells Will.
“I know,” Will says with a shrug.
“Look at me, son. It’s not your fault”
“Yeah. I know.”
“No, you don’t. It’s not your fault.”
Will just stares at him.
“It’s not your fault,” the psychologist says again.
“Don’t f— with me.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Don’t f— with me. Not you.”
“It’s not your fault.”
Finally, Will buries his head in his hands and bursts into tears, along with—if memory serves me—much of the audience, myself included.
Apparently, many of us have experienced something that wasn’t our fault, but we’ve been hauling around with us our whole life as if it was. Likely something our parents did or didn’t do, or something we believe we did or didn’t do that made them stop approving of us or withdraw their love, that made us afraid to be ourselves and trust the world.
Whatever those original wounds were—abuse, betrayal, abandonment, rejection, shame, neglect—they ended up playing a starring role in who we turned out to be and how our lives unfolded, whether we’re aware of it or not. The kind of partners we continually attract, the dramas we keep reenacting with those partners, the stories we tell about ourselves and the world, the dreams that keep coming back, the ways we self-sabotage, even the kind of work we end up doing.
But the movie also portrays—true to life, in my experience—that Will blossoms dramatically after this confrontation with his childhood wound, coming into his power, his gift, and his heart.
But the cold truth of healing from a wound like this is that you’ve got to be willing to feel the thing. To go back and touch it, re-encounter the grief of it, starting with the brute fact that you got a bum deal, that justice is beside the point, and no one’s going to make it up to you, and maybe the best you can do is retell the story of your life with the wound as the middle of the story, not the end.
Now I don’t want to oversell the value of such a confrontation with the past. It’s certainly not for everybody, and you can have a perfectly satisfactory life without facing off with your demons. A very successful and high-functioning relative of mine recently described the “psychological uncoupling that allows me to put childhood difficulties behind me, and be relieved not to think about them anymore.”
Psychological uncoupling might sound like another word for denial, but denial isn’t always a bad thing. Perhaps my relative’s coping strategy is just a more protracted version of the kind of healthy denial you might employ to keep anxiety at bay long enough to deliver a speech.
Still, not thinking about old wounds anymore may be a relief, but it isn’t the same as healing from them, though it’s arguable which takes more effort. Squaring off with old wounds or traumas is no picnic, but neither is the constant vigilance and self-monitoring required to avoid thinking about them. Despite your best-laid plans, the ghost of that thing that wasn’t your fault can readily mutate into emotional numbness, self-defeating patterns, mental-health struggles, and possibly ill health.
And because you often encounter such symptoms far downstream from whatever set them in motion, you may have to swim back upstream to the source in order to properly treat them, rather than trying to ignore or medicate them into oblivion because you don’t want to “dig up the past, open a can of worms, rock the boat.” Even if that way lies healing. My mother once captured this philosophy of avoidance when she said of an old anguish, “If I start crying, I’ll never stop, and I’ll flood the basement.”
The truth is you do stop crying, and the willingness to give in to it is a heartbreakthrough—a heartbreak and a breakthrough.
In fact, nearly all schools of psychoanalytic thought are based on this: if you would be healed, turn and face your wounds. Which is typically a threefold strategy: confront pain, process it, and reclaim your vitality and freedom.
Needless to say, these aren’t “three easy steps.” Setting your soul to rights isn’t for quick-fixers and resolution junkies. Deep old wounds, certainly traumas, are emotional superfund sites that aren’t going to be cleaned up overnight, or tidied up with a hankie and a good cry. Nor is breakthrough a one-and-done, an obstacle you leap over in a single bound.
It requires unflagging compassion and patience with yourself, a supportive community if not professional guidance, and a life stable enough to handle the confrontation. It typically starts when you reach a tipping point—when the fear of facing the truth is finally exceeded by the pain of not facing it, and you realize that something inside you needs to be admitted, in both senses of the word. Needs to be owned up to, and needs to be welcomed in, allowed into consciousness.
And it requires understanding that though you crave closure—healing, restoration, finishing unfinished business, maybe even discovering the purpose for the pain—closure is more a verb than a noun. It can’t be forced, as hungry as you might be for emotional efficiency, to turn lemons into lemonade, and to make the past come to heel.
In fact, I’m not convinced you can completely heal a wound sustained 40 years ago with anything you do in the present, though I’ve certainly put my shoulder to that wheel on many occasions. The wound also belongs to its own time, is to some degree out of your reach, and the past is not always yours to project-manage. As the 12-steppers say, you’re always in recovery.
Still, in the present time, these old wounds, these things that weren’t your fault, tend to lodge themselves in the middle of your path, between your intentions and your achievements, between you and your aliveness, and you’ll constantly stumble there and not know why. Until you turn on the receiver. Until you realize that healing old wounds is like extracting a fishhook—you have to back it up a little before pulling it out.
