What "Heal Your Wounds and Find Your True Self" Taught Me About Setting Down My Masks at 66

Lise Bourbeau's Heal Your Wounds and Find Your True Self is the book behind this personal record of what I noticed, and what I've actually started doing, at 66. I previously wrote here about Norman Cousins' The Healing Heart, and the courage it takes to start something new at 63. This time I picked up a very different kind of book. Rather than statistics or conversations with doctors, it's about five wounds of the heart — rejection, abandonment, humiliation, betrayal, and injustice — and the "masks" each one creates. The author's premise is that returning to your true self restores love, happiness, harmony, peace, and health. Reading it made me think again about which masks I've been wearing without quite noticing.

A mask being gently set aside, with a small new shoot peeking out from underneath — an image of the true self beginning to show.

Not fleeing, and waiting for things to grow

The first wound the book describes is rejection, and people carrying it heavily tend to wear the mask of "the fugitive" — someone who leaves a situation the moment it starts to feel uncomfortable. Reading this, I recognised the pattern in myself. When something new doesn't seem to be working, I have a habit of finding a reason to let it go rather than staying with it.

Right now I'm growing asparagus in one of the raised beds in the garden. It's a crop that takes a few years before you can harvest it at all — even when thin spears come up in the first year, you have to resist cutting them so the plant can build up strength underground. That waiting, without harvesting, without fleeing, feels like its own kind of practice. Blog posts, and learning to use a new tool like AI, are much the same: things worth growing slowly, rather than abandoning the moment results don't show up right away. Healthy longevity is probably no different — a stack of small habits, kept up without fleeing, long before any effect is visible.

Thin asparagus spears just breaking through the soil in a raised bed — a small image of patience, and of not rushing the harvest.

Whole, even alone

The wound of abandonment, the book explains, tends to produce "the dependent" — someone who feels anxious without constant company. Since retiring at 65, the time my wife and I spend together has increased all at once, in a way it never did while I was working. Talking with friends my age, I often hear the same thing: the sudden increase in time with a spouse forces a relationship to be rebuilt from scratch. I'm no exception.

Since reading this book, I've been deliberately keeping some time for myself. Time in the greenhouse tending the vegetables, or reading up on investments, isn't something I do because I need someone else there — it's something I do because I want to. Rather than depending on someone else's presence, I try to check in with whether I feel whole on my own. That, for me, is one way of keeping the relationship healthy going forward. Keeping a few things that genuinely excite me also turned that alone-time into something I actually look forward to, rather than something to fill.

Listening to the body without scolding it

The third wound, humiliation, produces the mask of "the masochist" — someone who puts themselves last and feels ashamed of their own weakness, as the book describes it. I trained in acupuncture and Kampo medicine years ago, but honestly, I still catch myself feeling almost embarrassed by my own body's decline. When I couldn't keep up with garden work the way I used to, my first reaction wasn't kindness toward myself — it was irritation.

Lately I've been trying to treat fatigue or discomfort as a message rather than something to be scolded for. Homeopathy works from the idea that a symptom is trying to tell you something. I don't take that literally in every case, but the habit of pausing to ask "why, though?" when I notice tiredness, rather than pushing straight past it, comes from that way of thinking.

Learning to let go of control

The wound of betrayal produces "the controller" — someone who wants everything to go exactly to plan and finds it hard to hand the reins to anyone else, and this description struck a chord. It's been about ten years since I started investing, and I remember checking prices multiple times a day in the early years, unable to settle unless I felt I was the one in control.

The same tendency shows up in the practical side of living between the UK and Japan. In Japan, a lot gets done on trust — "I'll leave it to you" is often enough. In the UK, I still feel I need to check every contract and procedure myself before I can relax. Neither approach is simply right or wrong, but this chapter reminded me that learning to trust that things can be fine even without my hand on every detail is probably the real shortcut to fewer money worries.

Masks and tatemae

The fifth wound, injustice, produces "the rigid one" — someone who holds emotions in check and pushes themselves toward an exacting kind of perfection. Reading this, I thought of the Japanese word tatemae — the face we show that suits the occasion, keeping honne, our real feelings, hidden underneath. It overlaps with what this book calls a "mask." But having lived in the UK, I've come to feel that tatemae isn't simply a bad thing. It can also work as a kind of wisdom for keeping the peace.

I used to write this blog with a certain rigidity too — wondering if anyone was reading, feeling as though it didn't count without some response. My memory certainly isn't what it was, and I've come to feel that's exactly why putting things into words and keeping a record matters. Even without a reply or a comment, I hope that simply having the record out there can be a small light for someone. Taking off a mask, I've learned from this chapter, doesn't mean exposing everything about yourself. It means letting go, one at a time, of the "shoulds" that have been holding you in place.

Two landscapes meeting at a quiet horizon — a small suggestion of the space between two home countries, two ways of keeping face.

Taking off the mask is also a practice in living today

The book's first chapter describes an idea that before we're born, we choose, to some extent, the trials we want to experience in this life. I have no way of confirming that, but at 66, I do find myself able to believe that each of my old wounds and habits might have carried some meaning.

In Buddhism there's a term for the suffering of the five aggregates — the idea that clinging to the very things that make up mind and body is itself a source of suffering. The "masks" this book describes might be a version of the same thing: a fixed idea of "this is who I am," built up to protect a wounded self. Taking off the mask, I think, is the slow work of loosening that grip.

The idea of a "law of love" in the book's final chapter stayed with me too — the observation that beneath an inability to forgive someone else, there's usually an inability to forgive yourself. When we talk about goodness, we tend to think only of kindness toward others, but this chapter taught me that forgiving your own wounds and failures is just as much a form of goodness.

When I was younger, I thought wounds and weaknesses were things to hide. Now I can see both sides — that some of my gentleness, some of my persistence, grew out of those very wounds. Not being swallowed by numbers, listening to the body, feeling whole alone, learning to let go, setting the mask down: none of these are extraordinary, but at 66, they feel like the practices worth holding onto for enjoying my true self, today. A rich old age, I've come to think, isn't a distant goal — it's what waits at the far end of small practices like these.

The book I mentioned here:

Lise Bourbeau, Heal Your Wounds and Find Your True Self

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Lise Bourbeau, and Her Era

Lise Bourbeau was born in 1941 in Quebec, Canada. She began a career in sales in 1966 and became one of the top-performing managers in North America before she started holding workshops to share what she'd learned from that success — the beginning of her work as a therapist and author. Her first book, Listen to Your Body, became a bestseller in Canada, and her method of reading physical and emotional imbalance through four levels — physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual — has since spread to workshops in more than twenty countries. Underlying all of it is one consistent idea: that the body is a mirror of the mind, and that symptoms are themselves messages. Heal Your Wounds, the book covered here, sits as an extension of that same lifelong work of "listening to the body," rather than as a separate theory.

The Quebec where she began her career, in the 1970s, was still working through the aftermath of the Quiet Revolution — the shift away from a society where the Catholic Church had shaped nearly every part of public life. It overlapped with the broader North American self-help and New Age movement, which turned attention toward individual psychology rather than religious authority. I suspect it's the combination of her grounded, results-driven background in sales and her own encounter with wounds and masks that gives this book its practical, pattern-based way of talking about pain, rather than abstract spiritual language. Reading it at 66, I didn't feel lectured to; I think that plain-spoken, practitioner's voice is part of why.

1970s Quebec — a church spire in the distance, and a quieter turn toward looking inward, sketched to suggest that shift in era.

Heal Your Wounds and Find Your True Self went on to sell more than three million copies across the French-speaking world, followed by a sequel, Five Wounds, Healing Messages. Its Japanese translator, Yumeji Asaoka, is a scholar of French and Quebec literature and thought who has introduced a wide range of Francophone spiritual and self-help writing to Japanese readers. Between Bourbeau's own directness and the care that's gone into translating her words, I think that combination is what has kept this book in print, and in readers' hands, for so long.