The concept in which the process of healing takes place can have many different points of view.  There are several different ways in which a person can be healed that involve numerous amounts of treatments.  Anything from putting a band aid on one’s knee to heal a scrape to locking oneself in a room to heal one’s mind.  The human mind is perhaps the most delicate part of the body and more complicated than most can even imagine.  Trying to fully understand the way it works and how to “heal” it is an ignorant thought.

In the 1900s there were therapy strategies used on women to try and fix cases of insanity that would be frowned upon today to say the least.  “Patients were beaten and verbally abused on a daily basis with no ways to defend themselves” (Bly 295).  A woman was considered “insane” if they simply spoke a different language than English.  Being put under house arrest in a sense was a common treatment for some women.  “Complete isolation from the rest of the world with nothing to do, no one to talk to” (Gilman 303).  A woman named Charlotte Gilman had to undergo this process if isolation and the only thing that kept her sane throughout the process was keeping a personal journal.

Gilman was obsessed with the wallpaper that covered the walls of her prison.  This prison was on the second floor of her house and her husband stayed downstairs from that prison most of the time.  “The sense of anxiety and powerlessness is daunting and seemingly unavoidable” (Taylor 110).  The patterns and colors that the wallpaper was composed of never seemed to leave Gilman’s mind.  The repeating patterns served as a symbol of repetition as Gilman had to live every moment of every day trapped inside her room with nothing but her thoughts.

After a while Gilman began to see a woman trapped inside the walls of her prison, the wallpaper housed a ghost that lived inside her imagination.  This ghost brought out Gilman’s sense of entrapment that lived inside of her.  “The torment that coexisted with the sense of anxiety has a continuous hold on your every thought and action” (Taylor 115).  Gilman’s personal journal was the one thing that made her feel safe in her world of anxiety.  Of course, she was not allowed to have such an item according to her therapy treatment, but that journal symbolized everything that was still normal in her life and gave her an opportunity to speak her mind.

Living with the thought of hopelessness is no way someone should have to live.  There should be a sense of hope, even for some deemed “mentally insane”.  “The only thing that kept me going in my darkest times was the idea that the next day was going to be better than the last” (Taylor 96).  In order for Gilman to see beyond the wallpaper and overcome her obsession with it she had to, in her mind, realize that the person in the wallpaper was her all along.  She was trapped inside her room just as the woman was trapped inside the wallpaper.  
