The Healing Journey

May 20, 2026

The following is excerpted from “A Crazy, Holy Grace: The Healing Power of Pain and Memory” by Frederick Buechner.

“We all have different ways of dealing with our pain, depending on what day it happens to be and how we happen to be feeling. But it seems to me that it is worth mentioning what I think of as sort of the principal ways of dealing with the sad things that happen, the bad, wretched things that happen.

One of them, the one that was certainly the one that my family tended to choose, and that I think most dysfunctional families tend to choose, is to deal with your pain by simply forgetting it. Shutting it away. This is what my mother did. She had not only the suicide of my father but two other unsuccessful marriages. I think it’s why she shut so many out.

I always suspected her deafness was related to not wanting to hear the word of judgment that she felt the world was passing upon her for having had these bad marriages. I think part of the reason she closed her eyes when she talked to people was she didn’t want to see or, ostrich-like, to be seen somehow. She closed herself off. She dealt with her pain simply by dismissing it. Except from time to time, once in a great while, she’d talk about it. And that is a method of survival. Of course, all these ways of dealing with your pain are methods of surviving your pain, and this is not the worst. It is a way of surviving, and my mother miraculously did survive her pain….

And she survived as a human being, despite all the reasons she might have had for becoming something less than human. But I think that the price that one pays by dealing with your pain by forgetting it, by stuffing it aside, by not looking at it, is that some part of you doesn’t grow. I think the part of her that didn’t grow was what might have been the compassionate part of her, the part of her that by sort of looking at her own pain would have opened her up to the sense that other people were in pain, and then she might have been able to reach out into other people’s lives. She never did.”

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