When Healing Becomes Educating, Vol. 2 - Waldorf Research Institute

Why Me? – Elements in Considering
the Meaning of Illness and of Handicap*
Michaela GlÖckler
In pediatric practice, one frequently hears the question: Why does my
child have to suffer like this, why has this happened to my child? But people
who develop a disease in adulthood—and it often comes like a bolt from
the blue—ask themselves why it has to happen to them, and why at that
particular moment. The same question is rarely asked by parents who have
a parti cularly gifted child or by people who have special gifts themselves.
Unusual ability tends to be taken as a matter of course or a “natural gift.”
An answer to the question as to the origin and meaning of illness and
special gifts begins to emerge if we look at life to see what we have been able
to do thanks to such a gift or what has developed in our life or for people
around us because of the illness. It is a particular aspect of human nature
that we learn from pain, suffering and sickness, and this helps us to develop.
The essential and fruitful question to ask in dealing with such destiny events
is: How was or am I able to learn; what will be the effect on my further
development?
Even harmless infections such as the common cold may be seen to have
meaning for they help to activate and exercise the immune system, and it
will have grown stronger when the infection has been overcome. There is
good reason, therefore, why children have numerous acute febrile infections
in their early years, when the immune system is still developing and the
body has to learn to resist pathogens. The meaning is also fairly obvious in
the case of relatively harmless psychosomatic conditions in youth and early
adult hood. Sleep disorders, loss of appetite, gastric pain and headaches
are functional symptoms which serve to show that the individual has not
yet learned to deal with problems and worries inwardly in such a way that
they do not affect the functions of the ether body and consequently of the
physical body. Insight into these relationships, combined with suitable
*Original title: Warum ich? – Motive zur Sinnfrage von Krankheit und Behinderung.
Der Merkurstab 1997; 50: 213-17. English by A.R. Meuss, FIL, MTA. Reprinted, with kind
permission, from Begabung und Behinderung, published in Stuttgart in 1997.
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