I doubt you remember which animal you were saving when you withdrew…when part of you officially stepped over the threshold of what you could bear. It may not be an identifiable moment when you, your personhood, your identity, your nervous system took on that one next thing, the thing that meant, on a deeper level somewhere out of sight, that you had finally taken on too much. Seen too much. Borne too much.
We call it burnout, trauma, compassion fatigue, moral distress.
At the end of those names, though, the most important part of it all is that we see that something broke. That in the course of doing this work, you got buried.
I’ve been down there in the dirt. Underground. Buried alive. In a place that felt unreachable.
I know. And I see that you’re probably there now, too. Feeling as though you’re running out of air, and running out of time.
You can’t yet hear the voices, but the search party is already on its way. Please keep breathing. Trust that you will not be in the darkness alone much longer. Believe that your buried self can be unearthed, and meaning can be remade. Please don’t give up.
Rescue is on the way.
I want to tell you about a book. It’s The Seven Frequencies of Communication, by Erwin Raphael McManus. His premise is that each of us has a native way of engaging people — a frequency. He names seven: the Motivator, the Healer, the Challenger, the Commander, the Professor, the Seer, and the Maven.
The Motivator helps inspire people. The Healer sees you. The Challenger says the hard truth. The Commander leads, so others have direction. The Professor educates. The Seer is a visionary and futurist. The Maven brings about new realities.
Each of these frequencies is pulsing with possibility, and each also has a shadow — a darker side that appears when the energy turns from serving others to serving the self. It’s the inversion of that natural gift.
McManus also explains how, when we’re under strain, we can slide to the frequency that lies next to our own.
As I listened to this book, I felt pretty confident about my primary frequency. Good, bad, or otherwise, I thought to myself, I am clearly the Professor. My work, and so much of what I have to offer, is about knowledge, and transmitting that knowledge to the world.
It was only as I began asking myself what my dyad or triad would be, however, that this framework began activating something deeper in me, not an undoing, but more of a remaking. It began bringing together for me things I’ve sat with for some time, but that, with this framework, were making sense in deeper ways. You know those moments where you’re hearing something you’ve heard before, but suddenly it’s hitting in new ways? Perhaps it hits differently because of the new verbiage, the timing, or maybe just the delivery, which McManus would point out is the frequency of the speaker. Maybe you just never heard the message at the right signal before.
But for me, the signal was finally tuned in. And I want to share what was transmitted.
Beginning with what I learned about my buried Healer. My wounded Healer.
Because I knew that I had the Professor frequency; that resonated immediately. But as I listened, I found myself recognizing that one of the other frequencies was also mine, but that I hadn’t seen her in a while. I started getting curious about what had happened to my Healer.
Even as a kid, I was always sensitive to other people’s pain. I was attuned to it. But beyond being able to just see it, I always cared about trying to help it (even if it took me until my adult life to learn how to really do that well). And then it became my career, my calling. I loved being a therapist, creating safe space for people in their deepest pain, being a container for what they needed help holding.
In the last few years, though, I began to grow weary in this work. I found myself dreading sessions and being drained by them. And even though I cared deeply about my clients, and showed up fully and competently for the time I was with them, I could tell something was different. In my personal life, the shift was even more pronounced. I became more disconnected, put up more boundaries, and, most significantly, I stopped asking the deeper questions, stopped initiating the conversations that would have let me know a person and what they needed most. I simply let the helper fade into the background.
And suddenly, as I thought about this in terms of frequencies, I realized that my Healer had gone quiet.
We come to animal care work because we feel for living beings: for their fear, for their suffering, for their outcomes. That care for the living was the same driver that led me to become a therapist before I became an animal advocate. I carried that deep compassion for all living beings, of every species and kind. But this kind of work wounds us. And our tenderness can become the very thing that makes the work feel unsurvivable.
So as I listened to this book, I felt in some ways surprised to admit the absence of my Healer, while simultaneously in a moment of self-admission and clarity, I allowed myself to consciously acknowledge what I already knew: that I had let my Healer go into hiding, because she had gotten hurt, and she withdrew.
What let me understand all of this in a new way was how McManus explained that we can shift into the frequency next to our own. And he specifically mentioned that the frequency sitting right next to the Healer is the Professor.
This instantly made so much sense to me. When my Healer withdrew, I didn’t stop functioning as a person. I slid one door over, into the Professor frequency. And at the same time, I let my third frequency (the third in my triad) take a backseat too. But we’ll come to her later, in the next piece.
For now, I want to stay focused on my wounded Healer.
That part of me is what needs attention first. I mean that both personally and privately, and here, too, publicly in how I share this story. Because it’s the part of us that has been most wounded, and most deeply buried, that we most need to remember. So that we can find them again.
In therapy, this is often discussed in terms of “parts work.” Richard Schwartz built a therapy model in which he explains that we’re all made up of parts of ourselves, and these parts all carry burdens, and benefits, but none of them are bad. Among the parts that are possible, we have protectors that step forward to shield tender, exiled parts that have gotten hurt. Our communication frequencies can behave exactly like parts. In my case, my Healer had become an exile, and my Professor became a protector.
Protectors keep us functioning. And we owe our protectors significant gratitude for the work they’ve done to help us survive and keep us safe.
I am grateful for my Professor part. It has served me well in many ways.
But a protector that never stands down becomes a problem, because rather than serving as a shield to the part it stepped in for, it becomes a silencer to that part. And we run the risk of that buried part going silent and staying buried forever.
The work here becomes thanking the protector, and asking it to step aside, so we can finally start to unbury the other part of us that needs to be let back out into the light.
This is where I am in my story.
The Healer, that frequency that meets people in what hurts before it asks anything of them or tries to give them knowledge, is one of my native voices. Or was, before this work of trauma therapy and animal welfare wounded her.
I want to find that voice again. Reclaim that frequency.
The search party is already on its way. She is still breathing, still trusting, and she is ready to be unearthed…and for meaning to be remade. Rescue is on the way.
But this is not only my story. It is an occupational one.
So many of us have wounded parts that we’ve buried. We’ve armored into something else when the realities of this work got too heavy to carry. On its face, this may look like competence, detachment, being the fixer, or the savior, or the one who goes a little numb and gets a lot done. And whatever we’ve done to survive is not all bad. There’s a protector part of you that figured out a way to function. Maybe you slid to the frequency next door to your dominant one. And that’s not altogether bad or wrong either; it works, the way armor works. It gets us through the shift, the season, the story. It also means, though, that we may have lost a part of ourselves in the process. And if that part is buried somewhere, gasping for air, they deserve to be freed.
And maybe that’s why you’ve felt lost, incomplete, disoriented. Because you haven’t been whole.
I am on a journey to unearth my Healer, and to embrace her again. So, here is my invitation to you: would you come along with me? To find the part or parts of you that have also been buried? It may not be the Healer, but my guess is, if you’ve been in this work a while facing the darkness of this world and the struggles of this life, that part of you has gotten lost along the way. Maybe it’s time to ask what part of you has been missing. What frequency needs to be reclaimed to make you more whole? That part of you deserves to be unearthed. Let’s go find them: shovel in hand, and hope in sight. Keep breathing. You can be unburied, and rescue is already on the way.