Any honest psychotherapist will tell you that when genuine healing arrives, it wells up out of a hidden source, dispensed by something (or someone, depending how you look at it) that surpasses our understanding.
What exactly that hidden source is, we can truthfully only speculate. People in the psychology field can (and frequently do!) draw up diagrams and theories of the healing force, but the jury is still out.
The theorizing, of course, has been going on for millennia, since long before modern psychology was a twinkle in Freud’s bespectacled, Austrian eye. Model after model has attempted to explain not only what’s going on when soul illness takes hold, but also what is happening when we heal.
No model, in the end, resolves the mystery to anyone’s permanent satisfaction. And as this blog post will explore, we at Villa Kali Ma are inclined to call that a good thing.
Internal Family Systems Therapy and the Self
Some contemporary psychotherapy models, like Internal Family Systems, have postulated that healing wells up from a kind of independently operating energetic field that is very personable and relatable. Something that’s not the human mind nor the ego personality per se, but nevertheless feels like it’s us.
IFS calls this inner healer Self, in honor of the language that came most naturally to IFS founder Richard Schwartz’s clients as they were articulating its presence in sessions. Because rather than being a theory dreamed up outside of a clinical context, Schwartz says that he first uncovered and then verified Self’s presence and properties through decades of clinical work, helping the most “hopeless cases” recover.
In the final analysis, Schwartz (a self-proclaimed rational pragmatist by training and inclination) proposes that Self is an indwelling, benevolent healing energy found within everyone. Self is available to help with the healing process. Schwartz maintains, in fact, that Self is the probably the best, most reliable guide for healing that we have.
The benefits of working with the model of Self
Self cannot be dirtied, damaged, or destroyed, Schwartz insists, no matter how much else goes wrong in our lives. Like the sun, Self shines on, untarnished, behind our trauma, addictions, and mental illness. Once we clear the clouds, the Self is revealed, shining gloriously as ever. And Self can be called upon – in fact it is the best source to call upon – for help removing all that blocks Self’s light from reaching us and healing us with its life-giving radiance and warmth.
Far from resolving the mystery that surrounds psychological recovery, however, IFS’s concept of Self raises almost as many questions as it attempts to answer. For some skeptics, the concept of Self sounds like another version of the storied holy grail. A fountain of healing, perhaps, but nothing we can lay our hands on in any satisfying way.
For the pragmatic among us, though, it’s important to acknowledge that embracing this core tenet of the IFS model produces specific results that have eluded other models. IFS is counted as an evidence-based practice which is particularly helpful with some of the toughest areas of the mental health field, including extreme trauma, addictions, eating disorders, self-harm, bipolar disorder, and dissociative identity disorder.
The success of the model is owed, in large part, to IFS’s gift for creating true alignment within, bringing peace to a fractious inner system under the benevolent leadership of the Self. So whether or not we find the IFS picture of a benevolent healing Self latent in all people to be plausible, the results speak for themselves. Navigating the healing journey by consulting a compass magnetized to the concept of Self (or something similar) is undeniably useful in many psychotherapeutic contexts.
Most importantly, IFS has brought hope and healing to desperate cases that have languished or been abandoned altogether elsewhere in the behavioral health field, including the fields of trauma and addiction recovery.
Self-Healing as An Emergent Property of Nature
Setting aside IFS and the notion of Self, some folks may intuitively and rationally relate more to the idea that an indwelling, self-correcting and emergent healing force is available to all of us, simply because we are part of nature.
We are mammals after all, born from nature’s creative genius, the same as the rest of life. Therefore, the reliable property that can be counted upon to cleanse, heal, replenish and restore communities of animals, plants, materials – even whole ecosystems – can be prevailed upon to heal us too.
Nature shows a remarkable ability to bounce back from the extreme burdens placed upon her, as the returning forests of Chernobyl testify. Similarly, nature finds ways to heal the body and spirit, from even from the deadliest of toxic loads.
Healing by A Power Greater Than Ourselves
Many psychotherapists and others drawn to the healing professions are actually privately inclined to relate to the healing force as what AA calls “a power greater than ourselves”. For such professionals, the healing force is to be approached with humility, reverence, gratitude, and profound respect. Though to use spiritual language is generally frowned upon in the behavioral health profession (perhaps with good reason), there are many healers who, in the privacy of their own heartspaces, do unwaveringly believe that it is God, Spirit, buddha nature, christ consciousness or something along those lines, that is dispensing the healing, and not the healer themselves (at best an instrument of God’s healing).
If we are willing to believe what gifted healers, including groundbreaking psychotherapy visionaries like C.G. Jung have said about their own experiences with inspiration and discovery, we will find this to be a common theme: healers serve as medium, channeling healing from higher realms, much more like a priest or shaman, than a doctor or machinist repairing a broken mechanism.
Healing as a Property of Physics
Still, some therapists and healers are drawn to more materialistic, rationalist explanations of the healing force. They might be more prone to view healing as the effect of ultimately predictable operations of physics, large or small scale; healing is mysterious only because we don’t yet understand these operations.
For such healers, there is a kind of faith that we may eventually, through scientific experimentation and discovery, crack this mystery once and for all. Then we may at last be able to harness and control the properties of nature’s healing powers, to be at our command. In such a view, it is our ability to finally see into the heart of the mystery which may liberate us.
A Mystery at the Heart of the Profession
We at Villa Kali Ma find something compelling in each of these models. What we like about IFS’s notion of Self is that it feels personal and relatable. What we like about a nature-based understanding of healing is that it feels beautiful and abundant, like nature itself. Many of us feel wonderful acknowledging that healing comes from a power which will always be far greater than ourselves. And what we like about the scientific approach is the encouragement to experiment, and make sure we always favor the facts over our biases.
None of these approaches, to our view, erases the mystery. And that’s ok. That’s good. Because while the mind is an articulate tool for conceptualizing and interpreting data we may gather about the ultimate source of healing, and the heart is good at finding healing waters by feel, there nevertheless remains a mystery at the heart of the art and science of recovery.
This mystery encompasses why exactly it is that some of us who undergo terrible trauma do not end up turning to addiction (or other extreme behaviors) to cope, while others of us do. Or why some of us who fall into domain of addiction or mental illness have it in us to find our way back to the land of the living again, while others of us don’t even start that journey. Why, furthermore, do children growing up in the same family, with similar genes and identical childhood conditions, come up with such different solutions to the same problems? If abuse begets abuse, why don’t all children of abusers become abusers? Pull on this thread, and you may unravel a tapestry shot through with patterns which are far larger than we are prepared to glimpse.
Indigenous and Contemporary Practices for Healing
At Villa Kali Ma, we offer a spectrum of modalities, representing the full scale of what we have found to be practically helpful for helping women recover from trauma, addiction, and mental illness. Sometimes, our holistic approach means integrating indigenous, alternative, Eastern, or just non-mainstream healing systems into the work, and sometimes it means we rely mainly on broadly accepted clinical models. We’re open to all healing systems that bring benefit – we’re interested in what works in the real world. Most often, we combine approaches, because each woman is different and not everything works for everyone.
Answers to the mysteries briefly touched on in this blog post have been offered by indigenous cultures and ancient systems of knowledge for thousands of years. Respectfully, we often lean on these traditions, taking many tools and ideas from these treasure troves.
For example, we rely on the healing powers of posture and breath discovered by yoga to help women regulate their bodies and create peace, safety, strength, and calm. We use the power of imagination to encounter symbolic personal representations of illness and find their energetic medicine – a healing approach akin to what is found in most shamanic cultures (though also used in art therapy, hypnotherapy, and Jung’s active imagination, to name a few Western healing systems that rely on healing imagery too). Throughout our many mindfulness-based approaches to therapy, furthermore, we use insights taken from the science of meditation, originally gifted to the West by way of Eastern cultures.
We run a fully licensed facility and our board-licensed and certified therapists are anchored in the Western model. But we don’t mind acknowledging where the Western scientific model has fallen short. If the mental health crisis facing America is any indicator, the West has, in spite of its resources and special kind of brilliance, not yet solved the problem of how to heal human misery.
Humility in the Healing Profession
Whether you believe that the contemporary Western models of illness provide a better model, or you’re more inclined to acknowledge the wisdom of older indigenous models as potentially superior, is not that important at the end of the day. Either way, whatever model, we here at Villa Kali Ma we believe in the power of humility. No matter which tool we take in hand, a spirit of humility needs to guide that hand.
We know we may very well lose our footing if we reach too far into speculation about the what and the why, and most especially if we ever think that we have settled an issue once and for all. Those of us who work in the field of trauma, mental illness, and addiction recovery cannot afford to be settled.
Instead, we must learn a different art than certainty, dominance, mastery, and generalization. These are dangerous practices for us and our clients. Rather, we learn, with humility, to do all we can to dowse for the waters of a healing spirit inside a client’s system. We do what we can to invite, encourage, and honor that spirit, so that it might feel welcome in the psychotherapy room with us.
When we see the healing force’s promising seed sprouting within ourselves or another, we do what we can to nurture it, careful not to crush it or harvest it too soon. We remember not to assume we know what it is. A lot of the time, doing what we can to nurture it means getting out of the way, trusting the inborn wisdom of that force, to know better than our well-meaning, sometimes-anxious healer personas.
If you find yourself resonating, dear reader, with our conviction that humility as healers protects, you might be interested to peruse our many offerings available for healing women’s suffering. Whatever your situation, we send our heartfelt blessings over to you today, that it may fill you with all that you need to thrive and shine, filled to the brim with health as you define it!
