Have you noticed that the word healing is being used to death? That dose of linguistic Penicillin is experiencing exactly the attenuation in its value that the actual drug has gone through.
What do I mean? Recently, one of my students wrote in an essay that she found the beach to be a “healing” place. I put a circle around that and asked her to find a better word. We hear that people who go through loss need healing. People who endure a trauma need it too. People who listen to New Age gurus apparently need a whole lot of healing. (That may be weaking my case. . .) What, in fact, does the word mean?
Simply put, healing means to restore injured tissue to normal functioning. If I get scratched, the cut needs to close, and new skin needs to grow. If I break a bone, that bone needs to knit itself back together. That’s healing.
I suppose we must acknowledge that those who experience psychological trauma require time to heal. But let’s consider just what is an injury to the mind and what is normal. We hear the word healing used often in the context of grief. A loved one has died, and the survivors need to heal, or so we are told. I have to take issue with that.
To say that I need to heal after I lose a loved one implies that my feelings of grief are unhealthy. But that’s unacceptable. If I love someone or am friends with someone, that person has an important and an individual part in my life. The loss of that person cannot be replaced. It is certainly necessary for me to learn to live without the person. (Do we have to call that recovery? That’s another overused word these days.) But the loss is permanent. To say that I would need to heal is to say that the loss is an abnormal state, and when I return to health, I won’t feel the absence any more.
Certainly, someone who has endured abuse, for example, has been put into an abnormal state, and for that person, healing is the right word. But when a loved one dies or a relationship ends, the grief that we feel is appropriate and healthy. We need to use the right words in those situations to clear up our own thinking and to give honor to what has been lost.
Greg Camp's Weblog 
True, grief is healthy and normal, but your heart feels like it’s being ripped apart and your eyes burn and swell from all the tears. I believe when healing is used in conjunction with grief, it is referring to the time when your heart starts to beat again without the 900 pound weight on your chest. When you wake up in the morning and your first thoughts are of your loved one.and you don’t dissolve into tears, your eyes are being healed. Your emotional, spiritual and physical beings are once again working in harmony. That’s healing and it takes too long to occur in my opinion.
Your description of grief is accurate, but again, I question calling grief unhealthy. If we need to heal, we are in an abnormal condition that we must return from. Is grief abnormal? That’s part of what I’m challenging.
I like posts like this because this is something I had never considered, and now every time I hear the word I will think about its true meaning and how appropriate it really is. I wish I would have had English teachers who could have been bothered to really read through my writing rather than just give it a quick glance to check for improper grammar or punctuation.
We do get piles of papers to grade, alas. But I find that my students are surprised that I want them to write well, not just grammatically. There does seem to be the unconscious belief in many users of English that we have no responsibility to the language, and I’m fighting that. More posts to come.
I’ve been meaning to ask what your opinion is on the word “whom.” I’ve read a few places that in the future it will be one of those words we just don’t say anymore. I don’t think it’s odd when people use “who” when they should be using “whom,” but it’s terrible when people use “whom” when they should be using “who.”
It kind of makes me cringe.
That’s a good question, and now that you’ve asked, I think I’ll write an article as an answer. Look for it in the next couple of days.