Book review: “Healing Your Wounded Soul: Growing from Pain to Peace"

 

    In his new book, “Healing Your Wounded Soul: Growing from Pain to Peace,” Fr. Joshua Makoul masterfully blends Eastern Orthodox Christianity’s ancient ascetical wisdom with complementary insights from modern psychotherapy to offer hope to those emotionally – and spiritually -- crippled by painful memories of abuse, rejection, and shame.

      It is a mission for which Makoul, dean of the St. George Cathedral in Pittsburgh and veteran certified counselor with academic degrees in Psychology, is well-qualified. His straightforward, crisp, and thought-provoking writing style builds a solid foundation of understanding such therapeutic concepts such as “relationship trauma,” “transference” of past pain to present experiences, and “projection” of our own faults onto others.

     None of those psychological frameworks are left to stand alone, however. Fr. Makoul consistently illuminates them with the light of faith. Introspection, for example – so stressed by secular therapists as key to unearthing the origins of debilitating behaviors – has been key to the Eastern Orthodox path to theosis (the eternal goal of the faithful “to become by grace what God is by nature,” as Fr. Makoul explains).

     This holy introspection, a core teaching of the Desert Fathers’ “science of the soul,” is the key to spiritual—and arguably emotional – healing echoed in the teachings of the saints for millennia. As St. Isaac of Syria – one of numerous Desert Fathers mined by Fr. Makoul – put it, “Enter eagerly into the treasure house that is within you, and you will see things that are in heaven – for there is but one single entry to them both. The ladder that leads to the Kingdom is hidden within your soul.”

     What Fr. Makoul’s book is not, is a self-help tome with specific quick fixes for those memories and errant coping habits that may cripple the reader’s present. Rather, it helps the reader acquire clearer perspective and understanding of self-destructive and self-defeating behaviors – and with those insights, to be ready for true healing.

     Start with a visit to your parish priest and/or spiritual father; he may, in addition to his grounding in the Faith, have also been trained in counseling – or be able to refer you to a network of “faith-friendly” therapists.

     For anyone struggling with painful memories, and the negative behaviors spawned by them that can damage present relationships with God and others – or those who have loved ones suffering such emotional injuries and their aftermath – I strongly recommend  “Healing Your Wounded Soul: Growing from Pain to Peace.”