published 06/21/06, updated 5/17/10

Personal Growth

The art of healing by growing up

by Paul Ingraham, Vancouver, Canada MORE
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Credentials and qualifications

I am a writer and retired Registered Massage Therapist (unusually well-trained for a massage therapist, a 3000-hour program). I’m almost done with a Bachelor of Health Sciences degree. I am a peer reviewer for The Natural Standard, and a copyeditor for Science-Based Medicine. My most important qualification is more than a decade of workaholic post-graduate study, clinical experience, and constant conversations with readers from around the world, including many experts who have provided countless suggestions and criticisms.

For more information, see: Who Am I to Say? More information about my qualifications, credentials and professional experiences for my readers and customers.

My clients often refer to their pain as “another *%$@!! growth opportunity.” It’s almost always funny, because it is so deeply true that I never get tired of agreeing with it, and yet it is incomplete — pain isn’t just an opportunity for growth. Sometimes, growth is the way out the pain.

Personal growth is a self-healing strategy that I sometimes give to my clients as a general method of tackling a difficult and/or mysterious rehabilitation process. It can be a wild goose chase — results are definitely not guaranteed — but sometimes it succeeds where all else fails, and it’s never a waste of time.

What is “personal growth”? And do I have to eat granola?

It’s true, “personal growth” can be a flaky-sounding bit of terminology. But it’s an important concept that I decided to get comfortable with a long time ago.

Personal growth is simply the process of increasing self-awareness and self-actualization — knowing and being more like yourself — and probably breaking down self-limiting behaviours at the same time.

Personal growth is more popularly known as “growing up” or “getting older and wiser”.

Why should I grow personally?

Sometimes when you embark on a personal growth “journey”, chronic pain and other mysterious or stubborn physical problems change or heal.

Personal growth is more popularly known as “growing up”.

Besides, personal growth is something you end up doing sooner or later whether you like it or not! You might as well take credit for it.

How can personal growth affect health?

Everything we experience — pain included — is somehow an expression of who we are. If you could magically change everything about yourself, you would become someone else and trade all your current problems for new ones — even diseases and injuries would vanish, obsolete manifestations of your old self.

The hope of personal growth is that, if we change enough, we might just change the part of us that is hurting — without necessarily even understanding the connection. Mysterious problems sometimes just go away when we work on ourselves.

Massage therapy and other physical therapies usually can’t work if we don’t know what to aim it at, and even when we do there may be no way of getting to the root of the issue. Sometime it’s clear that my clients’ pain may be bubbling up from a deep well inside of them, and it’s going to keep coming no matter how much I try to hold it back with my hands.

Problems sometimes just go away when we work on ourselves

Personal growth, on the other hand, is general. It has the potential to affect — and change — almost anything about you.

How to “do” personal growth

There is no one way of doing personal growth, but here are some guidelines:

You will have to be deliberate about it. It won’t be enough to just tell yourself it’s time to grow up and get your shit together. You’ll need to accept the premise that there’s work to be done, and do it. Take action to solve problems in your life.
Very generally speaking, human hangs-ups and self-limiting behaviours are about being in a rut. Once way or another, you will need to challenge yourself with unfamiliar experiences, show emotions previously unexpressed, and generally be willing to do things you are probably uncomfortable with. Hint: other human beings will have to be involved.
You will need expert advice, perspective and instruction. Ignorance is the largest single barrier to personal growth: most of us simply do not understand what makes people tick, least of all ourselves. We need to consult people with vast experience. Read books, go to workshops, and find any wise-seeming mentor who has worked with a lot of people: a psychologist, an athletic coach or teacher, a leader or manager, a clergyman.

Or you could take a shortcut

Sort of.

There literally an infinite number of ways of going about personal growth. However, without a doubt, going to Haven is probably the best and easiest.

Haven is a school on Gabriola Island, on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. Founded in the 1970s by a pair of loving and creative psychiatrists, Jock McKeen and Bennet Wong, Haven now hosts many experiential workshops. Although undeniably a bit hippy dippy in tone, the place is devoted to a strong central philosophy — exemplified by the fact that they are an actual diploma-granting school for counsellors. Haven is much less “new agey” than some other famous West Coast institutions, like Hollyhock and Esalen, which basically just rent space to any motivational speaker or spiritual guru who can draw a crowd.

Haven’s founders sensibly believed that life is a fine art that must be learned — and can only be learned from other people, including people with much more experience. They first got interested in group therapy when they famously noticed that people were doing better talking to each other in their waiting room than they were in individual therapy. So, to this day, workshops at Haven are all about doing and trying things with other people — tinkering with social context, and doing it with expert input from people who have spent decades carefully observing and participating in the human experience. The best course to start with is called Come Alive, a “crash course” in a lot of their basic ideas. This is the shortcut.

Life is a fine art that must be learned — and can only be learned from other people.

And here’s another handy shortcut tip: the good news about using personal growth as a general approach to healing is that it’s not unusual for your primary health concerns to be directly associated with your biggest personal hang-up. If you go to Come Alive, for instance, you might want to think about focussing on whatever your most obvious “damage” is. This simplifies things quite a bit!

Unfortunately, it’s not always that straightforward.

The bad news

Or, to be more positive, let’s call it a hot tip, something to watch out for. There’s this terrible catch-22 in personal growth …

If you were the kind of person who could easily change the thing about you that makes you hurt, then you probably wouldn’t have the problem in the first place.

There’s a reason that people don’t routinely experience surprising recoveries from deeply intertwined psychological and physical suffering: it’s really, really difficult.

Good luck!