Healing Is Remembering Relationship

SEP 29, 2026 • Written by Dr. Anne Marie Chomat, MD, PhD, MP, Integrative healing guide

There are some places I’m not sure we can reach alone…

For much of my life, I understood health primarily through the lens of the individual body.

It was the body I learned to examine in medical school: heart, lungs, nervous system, immune system. The body whose blood could be tested, organs imaged, symptoms gathered into a diagnosis.

That way of seeing remains deeply valuable to me. But my understanding of healing has changed over the years, shaped by the people and communities I have had the privilege of working alongside in very different parts of the world.

I began to see that a woman’s wellbeing could not be separated from whether she was safe at home. That mental health could not be separated from belonging. That a child’s development and future possibilities are intimately connected with their mother’s wellbeing and the conditions of care and support surrounding them. That what becomes possible in our lives is profoundly shaped by whether we have people beside us.

And gradually I have also come to understand something that now feels very simple: we do not become ourselves alone.

At different moments in our lives, I think we need people who can see something in us that we cannot yet quite see ourselves.

A friend. A teacher. A therapist. A guide. An elder. A partner. A circle of women.

We all need people who remind us of who we are when we forget. Who see our potential without trying to determine who we should become. Who can witness what is emerging in us, hold a space large enough for it, perhaps see it before we can, and accompany us while we risk inhabiting it.

I think of them as midwives of our becoming.

Because we are never finished becoming. Motherhood changes us. Illness changes us. So do grief, menopause, the ending of a relationship, a child leaving home, or a calling we can no longer ignore.

Again and again, life asks us to become someone we have never quite been before.

And there are some places I’m not sure we can reach alone.

Sometimes that relationship is one person sitting beside us with enough presence and curiosity that we can begin to hear ourselves differently. Someone who does not tell us who to be or where to go, but helps us notice what is already stirring, what we have learned to silence, and what might now be asking to emerge.

I have seen how much can shift in the presence of another person who is willing to listen deeply, without rushing to fix or explain.

And sometimes, in that kind of listening, we begin to discover that what we have experienced as deeply personal is not entirely ours alone.

Many of the stories women carry about themselves feel deeply personal: I am too much. I am not enough. Something is wrong with me. I don’t belong. I have to care for everyone else to be loved. It isn’t safe to be fully myself.

But these stories do not arise only inside individual women. We learn them in families, relationships and cultures, and through expectations about what it means to be a good mother, daughter, partner, friend or woman. Some are embedded so deeply in the structures around us that we experience them almost as the air we breathe.

And there is another dimension of this that I have witnessed particularly powerfully in collective spaces of healing.

I have watched women speak something they have carried silently for years, only to discover that another woman carries it too.

I have seen what happens when a woman risks taking up more space and isn’t rejected. When she speaks honestly and is still loved. When she asks for help and someone comes closer rather than turning away.

Something that was learned in relationship can begin to change through a different experience of relationship.

Women’s circles and other intentional spaces can allow us not simply to talk about another way of being together, but to experience it. To practice it.

I can tell myself that I am allowed to take up space. But something different happens when I take up space and discover that I am not rejected.

I can know intellectually that my needs matter. But something begins to shift when I express a need and someone comes closer rather than turning away.

I can believe that another woman’s power does not diminish my own. But there is another kind of knowing that comes from sitting among women who are learning to become more fully themselves together.

Perhaps some things need to be experienced in relationship before our bodies can begin to believe them.

Perhaps this is part of what healing is.

Not becoming someone different but being accompanied back toward who we are—and toward whatever is asking to emerge from us now.

Because becoming more fully ourselves happens in relationship.

Perhaps this is one of the things I have been learning all these years: that healing does not end at the edges of our bodies. Perhaps healing also asks us to remember that none of us exists in isolation. We belong to one another, to our communities, and to the living world around us. Our lives are continually shaped by these relationships.

As we become more able to inhabit ourselves, something changes in the way we meet one another. And what becomes possible between us changes too.

We begin to create relationships, families, communities and spaces in which others can become more fully themselves as well.

I keep returning to relationship.

Not only because relationship can help us heal. But because so much of who we are—and so much of what we might yet become—comes alive between us.

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Disclaimer: Information can be empowering, but we all have unique health profiles and needs. Health-related information contained in this article is intended to be general in nature and should not be taken as medical advice nor should it be used as a substitute for a visit with a licensed health care provider.