Proxy or surrogate healing is the act of standing in for another during some kind of therapeutic process.
I consider myself a pretty pragmatic guy. I appreciate how important it is for us to have an answer or some kind of reason for why things happen as they do. We invent religions and gods to help us cope with what we don’t understand or fear. Even science has its own religion of sorts – always seeking to find that illusive reason why.
I, too, would love to know why. It’s in my nature to want to know. Although questioning is important, asking the right question is much more important – and difficult to do. In lieu of proper questions, I’ve often settled with poorly formed questions along with answers I’ve settled upon and defended – answers to the wrong questions or a question asked wrongly. Further, I have tended to put “reasons” behind my settled upon answers – a means by which I can protect my “truths” and make them seem right no matter their veracity. We call this process justification or rationalization.
For a moment, let’s dispense with all reasoning/justification/rationalization and simply look at cause and effect. Something happens and that causes something else to happen. Some cause and effect relationships we have experienced often enough that we feel that we can predict effect from cause.
For example, if I step off the step, I fall to the ground. I’m familiar with the action of gravity on this earth and I can expect to fall to the ground every time I step off the step. Further, I can predict with fair accuracy that if you step off the step, you, too, will fall.
Physicist David Boehm showed that cause and effect is all an illusion, though, because all causes are entwined with all effects in a mesh so tightly woven that it is literally impossible to separate cause from effect – we just believe that we can – it makes us feel safer to know that we can know cause from effect.
This is “if-then” thinking and we all do it – it is our nature. We like to accurately predict – it makes us feel safer. Even when we accurately predict hurt, it somehow feels better because we were right about our prediction.
That leads me to cheating. We are great humans but lousy scientists overall. That is, as humans, we like to be right rather than correct. I will tend to “fix” the outcomes of my experience to make me look more right – rather than accepting what is as correct. To that end, I set myself and others up so that I will more likely make myself right. I cheat!
The Golden Setup
Now to the good stuff. Let’s consider the common cold. What if I want to experiment with what happens when I change a small part of the cause-effect relationships I have assigned to a cold? What if now I want to introduce a new element into the cold equation? I want to introduce a setup – a new “reason” for the cold – a new purpose. I want to affect my cause-effect relationship in the case of a cold.
Since I am introducing a new element that I already believe might change how I experience a cold, I am primed for a new cause-effect setup – and a new or different outcome. In NLP language, I’m messing with my presuppositions to achieve a new outcome – a “frame-up.”
In my experiment, I tell myself that my cold is no longer a sub-par condition – that is, I am no longer “under the weather.” Rather, I tell myself that the purpose of the cold symptoms is cleansing or body energy realignment, or mind-body belief system adjustment, or proxy clearing, or even weight adjustment processing. I elevate in my mind the purpose of the cold from recovery from disease to some positive function – part of my weight reduction regime, for example. I’ve assigned a new frame for the symptoms I collectively call “cold.”
Now, when I see the weight loss, my new cause-effect relationship is “when I experience the symptoms of a cold it is part of the overall weight reduction my body does as a result of my weight management plan and goal.” This is just as valid a cause-effect relationship as my previous one that basically said, “My body is reacting to a disease element that is invading my body.”
From a purely results oriented viewpoint – without any judgment – which cause-effect relationship would you consider more useful in a weight management regime? I think it’s obvious.
Proxy or Surrogate Healing
I don’t adhere to the “processing the woes of the world by proxy” viewpoint because I don’t think there is anything fundamentally wrong in the world. There are merely events that I interpret. If I want to change something to suit my mood, attitude, present mind set, or whatever, all I have to do is change MY MIND – MY PERCEPTION. Proxy is just one way I can do that.
It’s a scientific fact that if you change your mind, you will change your body as a result – it’s all part and parcel. This is no mystery – change your mind about where you want your finger to be in space, for example, and you will move your finger accordingly – your body has adjusted to suit your mindset about the location of your finger – so long as your thought about movement rises above a certain threshold so as to become action – that is, the thought extends beyond simply thinking about moving your finger (trying) into the realm of action where your finger actually moves (doing).
If I proxy the hurts and woes in the Middle East, for example, my body will change as a result of my change of mind/heart. That change could show up as cold symptoms – it’s merely evidence that we can interpret.
If one enjoys “processing” (an action taken in response to environment, such as body sweats, tearing, heart racing, etc.), they might over time believe – and reinforce their belief with more experience interpreted in the same manner – that they are somehow blessing the world over and over and over – but seeing little or no real change as a result – which might cause them to continue to do more of the same – like doing proxy every day for the world that never seems to get any better – “so I better keep doing more proxy or the world will get oh, so much worse if I quit… blah, blah, blah…” This is the same mentality that sent thousands of warriors and young women to their deaths in the rituals of the Mayan, Hawaiian, and Aztec cultures to name but a very few.
The truth may be that the world never needed healing in the first place because it was never sick or hurt or wrong or whatever else from just being what it is.
I call such behavior – doing proxy repeatedly because it appears to be needed – proxy addiction – just like healing addiction – or substance addiction – or any other kind of addiction. It is simply one way to use the power of justification/rightness. All addiction is, from that point of view, is a pattern of satisfaction – a cycle that reinforces good feelings – feelings the person likes and wants to repeat. It could be thought of as part of a cycle of action and feeling that includes justifying one’s behavior toward others.
At this time of my life, I’m letting go of getting all wrapped up in the right “why’s” – the right answers. I already have those. Instead, I’m now interested in seeking out the questions. That is what the world is short of if anything.
“What the world needs now are questions, sweet questions – that’s the only thing that there’s just too little of…”
It’s a reasonable answer, eh?!