The Elder Mother: What If Healing Isn't About Becoming Someone New?

By November, the elder has become easy to overlook. The frothy white flowers of June are long gone, as are the dark berries that arrived towards the end of summer. Against the more spectacular copper of beech and oak, an elder at the woodland edge can look rather unremarkable: a little untidy, often leaning, its branches twisting in ways that suggest nobody ever told it how a proper tree ought to behave. It doesn't have the grandeur of an oak or the clean white beauty of a silver birch. Elder seems comfortable being slightly unruly. Perhaps that is part of why so much folklore gathered around it.

In the old stories, the elder was treated with considerable respect. It was associated with protection, healing, death and regeneration, and people were warned not to cut one without first asking permission of the Elder Mother believed to inhabit the tree. Whether or not you have any interest in tree spirits, there is something rather lovely about the idea that before we cut into another living thing, we might at least pause long enough to acknowledge what we're doing.

The elder's reputation for regeneration is less mythical. It is remarkably good at recovering from damage. Branches that reach the ground can root themselves and begin growing again, while damaged trees readily send out new growth. What looks old, broken or finished may simply be finding another way to continue.

I find myself thinking about that a great deal in therapy, because we have some peculiar ideas about what healing is supposed to look like. There is often an imagined person waiting at the end of it. Calmer. More confident. Less anxious. Better organised. No longer triggered by the things that have always triggered us. Someone who has finally sorted out their childhood, established excellent boundaries, stopped procrastinating, made peace with their body and developed an apparently effortless ability to communicate their needs......A finished version.

It is an appealing idea, particularly when the version of ourselves we're currently inhabiting feels exhausted, frightened or thoroughly fed up. But I'm not convinced that person exists. I've sat with people after relationships have ended, after bereavements, through addiction and recovery, during burnout, estrangement and the slow untangling of experiences that happened decades earlier. I've also sat with people who arrived in therapy without one enormous event to point towards, but with the growing recognition that the way they have survived their lives is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. Again and again, the work isn't really about creating a new person.

It's about understanding the one who is already there.

That can be less immediately satisfying.

Reinvention has momentum. It offers plans and targets. We can clear out wardrobes, download apps, buy notebooks and decide that from Monday things will be different. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that. Sometimes change needs energy and deliberate action.

Regeneration is quieter.

It asks different questions.

• What happened here?

• What adapted?

• What protected you?

• What did that protection cost?

• What still belongs to you, and what have you been carrying because once upon a time it was necessary?

Those questions take us somewhere very different from How do I fix myself?

A person who grew up around unpredictability may have become extraordinarily good at reading rooms. Someone whose needs were repeatedly dismissed may have learned not to have many. A child who received approval through achievement may become an adult capable of working long after everybody else has stopped. Someone who learned that conflict threatened connection may become remarkably skilled at smoothing things over, anticipating what others need and keeping everyone happy.

Later, these same adaptations can become painful. Hypervigilance becomes anxiety. Independence becomes an inability to receive help. Achievement becomes exhaustion. Keeping the peace becomes self-abandonment. We can look at the adult pattern and decide it needs removing. Therapy asks us to understand why it grew. That distinction matters because there is a world of difference between telling ourselves, I need to stop doing this, and recognising, Of course I learned to do this.

The second doesn't excuse behaviour that harms us or other people. Understanding isn't absolution, and compassion isn't the same thing as allowing every pattern to continue unchecked. It simply gives us somewhere more useful to begin. When we understand what a pattern has been trying to accomplish, we have a much better chance of finding another way to meet the same need.

This is particularly important in trauma work. The language of trauma has entered everyday conversation so thoroughly that sometimes we risk forgetting what an extraordinary thing adaptation actually is. Human beings find ways to survive experiences they should never have had to accommodate. Minds compartmentalise. Bodies remain alert. Memories fragment. People numb, appease, withdraw, control, achieve, drink, eat, work, disappear into other people's needs or become determined never to need anybody again. These responses can create enormous difficulty later. They also made sense somewhere.

Healing doesn't require us to admire every survival strategy. It does, however, ask us to stop treating the person who developed it as the enemy. The same is often true of burnout. By the time someone reaches the point where their body or mind simply refuses to continue at the previous pace, the understandable response is often to focus on recovery so they can get back to normal. Rest, reduce the workload, sleep more, feel better, return.

Sometimes that works.

Sometimes the more uncomfortable question eventually arrives: what if the old normal was part of the problem?

Burnout can expose structures we've mistaken for personality. The belief that our value lies in being useful. The inability to disappoint people. The conviction that rest must be earned. The standards that looked like ambition until the body could no longer meet them. The life built around coping exceptionally well. Recovery then becomes more complicated than replenishing depleted energy. We have to decide what deserves to grow back. There is something in the elder that I find useful here. Regeneration isn't restoration. The damaged branch doesn't somehow become untouched. The tree continues from what has happened to it. Growth comes from the same organism, carrying the history of storms, pruning, disease and seasons within its shape.

Perhaps that is closer to human healing than the language of returning to ourselves. There may be no pristine self waiting underneath everything that has happened.

There is simply us.

Changed by what we've lived through, certainly, but not entirely defined by it.

This can be particularly painful around estrangement and grief, where the idea of moving on often feels not only impossible but somehow disloyal. Some losses aren't things we get over. They alter the geography of our lives. A person can learn to live well again and still carry sadness. They can know a boundary was necessary and grieve the relationship it ended. They can stop waiting for an apology while still wishing one had come.

Two things can remain true.

Therapy doesn't need to resolve every contradiction.

Sometimes the work is learning to live without forcing one truth to cancel out another.

Recovery from addiction can contain similar contradictions. Giving something up may save a person's life while also removing the thing they relied upon to survive it. There can be relief and grief, freedom and longing, pride and shame. If we insist on a simple story in which the harmful thing was entirely bad and recovery entirely good, we leave very little room for the complicated human being who had a relationship with it.

I think we do this because clean stories feel safer.

Before and after.

Broken and healed.

Ill and recovered.

Lost and found.

They create the reassuring impression that difficult experiences have edges.

But most lives are less orderly. November certainly is. There are days when the woodland glows in low golden sunlight and others when the whole world seems constructed from wet grey. One storm can strip a tree that looked almost autumnal the day before. Ivy flowers while other plants retreat. Tawny owls begin courtship as we approach the darkest part of the year. Coppiced stools that appear to have been cut almost to nothing will eventually send up vigorous new growth. Ending and beginning aren't taking turns. They're happening together. Perhaps we are like that too.

There are parts of ourselves we may be ready to relinquish while others still need protecting. Patterns we understand intellectually but continue to repeat. Losses we have accepted that still hurt. New ways of living that feel simultaneously right and unfamiliar. That isn't evidence that healing has failed.

It may simply be what healing looks like when we stop demanding a before-and-after photograph.

The old folklore places the Elder Mother at the threshold between life and death, endings and beginnings. I don't need to believe literally in the old mythology to appreciate what our ancestors were noticing. The tree that appears old and ragged at the edge of the winter woods possesses an extraordinary capacity to begin again from what has been damaged.

Not by pretending the damage didn't happen.

Not by becoming a different tree.

By continuing to grow from where it is.

There is a kindness in that idea that I think much of modern self-improvement lacks.

• Perhaps you don't need to reinvent yourself.

• Perhaps you don't need to become fearless, endlessly resilient or finally free from every old pattern.

• Perhaps the work is more interesting than that.

To understand what has shaped you without handing it permanent control over what happens next. To recognise the strategies that once protected you and decide, with rather more choice than you had when they first appeared, which ones you still need. To allow some things to end without assuming that everything they gave you must disappear with them. The elder at the woodland edge will lose what remains of its leaves soon enough. Through winter it may look as though very little is happening. But it has never confused being bare with being finished. Neither should we.