Earlier today I started a new 1,000-piece puzzle–a Van Gogh painting. I’m almost done with the border. While working on the puzzle, I listened to a lecture about healing trauma by a hypnotherapist (Isa Gucciardi) in California. One of her contentions was that our symptoms (addictions, relationship issues, and even some physical symptoms) are our teachers, that if listened to can lead us to the heart of our problems.

For example, one woman who couldn’t (and didn’t really want to) quit smoking knew that she used smoking as a form of escape. Her life was busy–she had a bunch of kids–and smoking gave her a break and acted as a boundary that kept others away. What she realized in hypnosis, however, was that her desire for both escape and boundaries began when she was molested as a child. One man realized in hypnosis that he used chewing tobacco as a way to “be quiet,” a message he’d gotten as a teenager from his mother. For both people, once their root issue was recognized with compassion, they were able to give up their addiction (or symptom).

Based on everything I’ve read and studied, compassion for every part of yourself is a huge component in healing. There’s an idea in shamanism that when we experience trauma (which we all do and can take the form of something dramatic and physical or seemingly ordinary and psychological), parts of our soul splinter off because they can’t take the stress. Like, Deuces! However, thankfully, the can be coaxed back into the fold–with compassion. By listening to their story of what they went through (what YOU went through) and assuring them that you’ll take care of them (of yourself) from now on, they’ll gladly integrate.

This was a point the hypnotherapist made, that there isn’t a part of your personality or soul that doesn’t want to integrate. According to Jung, wholeness is the goal. Not because anyone can truly put Humpty Dumpty (all your broken pieces) back together again, but because the deepest, most true part of you, your soul, isn’t capable of being broken in the first place. In other words, that’s a part of you that’s ALREADY WHOLE and that knows how to heal, that knows how to gather up all your scattered pieces and get them working together again.

This, it seems, is the journey of a lifetime. Also, like the putting together of a puzzle, it’s apparently something that can’t be rushed. Personally, I get really eager for projects (including myself if I can rightfully refer to myself as a project) to be completed. I think, Let’s heal–today! Let’s solve all our issues this afternoon. But my therapist says I or anyone else would go nuts if their subconscious unleashed all its secrets at once. “You’d crack up,” she says. And so it seems that the best way to heal is a little bit here, a little bit there. One piece at at time.