Self-help Articles

by Richard B. Patterson, Ph.D.

Good for you for having the courage to overcome those childhood hurts! Some persons spend a lifetime wallowing in bitterness over such wounds. These are the persons the author you mentioned is probably referring to.

You, however, did not allow yourself that and instead faced those hurts and took on a process of healing. You then have used your pain as a resource in helping others.

You have become what is known as a Wounded Healer. This is a person who faces his/her suffering and transforms it into a resource for compassion.

The book you mention says nothing about such persons, a most unfortunate fact since Wounded Healers tend to be extremely gifted in the area of "emotional intelligence", i.e., keen insight and understanding of emotions of self and others.

Trust your own self-assessment. Take the book you mention with a grain of salt. To jump from research to long-range predictions is always risky.

Applications of psychological research to daily life needs to be evaluated cautiously since the complexity of human behavior often eludes the demands of scientific rigor. Further, psychological research (as well as research in general) is very much influenced by the biases of the experimenter and the experimenter's theory.

So don't be discouraged. You are squarely on the path of the Wounded Healer and therefore more emotionally intelligent than the rest of us. Overcoming emotional wounds can make us stronger.

About the Author:

Richard B. Patterson, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist in private practice in El Paso, TX. He is the author of three books on psychology and spirituality.