Many of my clients have devoted years to their quest for healing, but they’ve done nothing more than wander aimlessly in the forest of children, jobs, marriages, failures, and successes. They spend years in psychotherapy trying to understand the time they were hurt last, instead of healing the first time that they were wounded. They often want to tell me about a recent incident that caused them pain-which I often explain is probably version number 27 of an original wounding that created the beliefs and behavior patterns that are causing them trouble now. This is the wound we want to fix, not the 27 later versions.

In fact, there may only be a few major healing themes in our entire lives, all of which stem from our original wounds.