HEALING?! WHAT'S THAT?!?

The concept of healing has been discussed for thousands of years, by cultures as varied in lifestyle and customs as varied are the shapes and colors of our flags. In this sense the recent focus on healing that is prevalent in Western societies today is nothing new, but the multidisciplinary inquiries that are being carried out on the subject lead to an abundant amount of definitions. While some can seem conflicting, the overall convergence is on a number of processes that can be evoked by various experiences within a clinical setting, spiritual and religious practices, and general interactions with the environment, nature in particular. In "Healing: The Journey From Concept to Nursing Practice" McElligott reviews  contemporary definitions of healing and I took the time to copy paste them into a word cloud. The picture to your left is the result. You may want to save it somewhere, or take the time to read through these words, but there is little surprises. 

All agree that healing is a process, not something you can just manufacture at once, and most point to the fact that is an event that occurrs from within, an event related to the way in which we relate to ourselves and others, a slow but recognisable transformation in our thinking and feeling that brings us to a sense of wholeness, balance, and appreciation. It is not an unexpected conclusion, the noun 'healing' itself derives from 'to heal' meaning to 'be sound or whole', its Greek root 'Hal' describing the medieval association between healing, wholeness, and spirituality we have seen so many times on renaissance frescos.

The Historical Roots of Healing Practices

Even much before the renaissance, 4 centuries before the birth of Christ to be precise, Hippocrates proposed that nature was the cure of illness, the instrument that would harmonize body and soul and restore wholeness to the sufferer. Several tribal healing practices of North America dating back 12,000 to 40,000 years ago describe health as a state of balance, where the person, family, community, environment, and universe are interconnected, whole, and greater than the sum of their parts. And records of Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine date back 3,000 years and describe healing as a process where imbalances are removed and the flow of energy (Qi, prana) is strengthened. The Korean worldview of healing, derived from Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Shamanism, describes a philosophy seeking the harmony of yin and yang energy. Across the Pacific ocean shamanism considers healing as a conscious activity involving quieting the mind and going inward to initiate 'the process'.

If you have been reading around this blog on trauma you'd know that post-traumatic stress is caused by an hyper-activation of the lymbic system (the mammalian brain), and that this has incredibly wide repercussion on our organ functions and hormonal systems. By all accounts, a state of traumatic stress could be easily described as a major state of imbalance, and so healing would be the process by which the healer and the sick (read therapist and client) work together to bring back balance to the system.

Modern Perspectives on Healing and Balance

Interestingly, for most cultures and time, healing has had a much less an anthropocentric focus, and more strongly relied on one's own relationship with the elements and the environment, such as nature and the community at large (eg. its work, its kinships, its elders, shamans), than it relied on technological human intervention detached from both nature and community. The reasons behind this shift away from the holistic, complex, detailed, locally sensitive and towards the universal and theoretical, is well documented as an historical philosophical process, particularly by authors like by Stephen Toulmin, who in his various books on modernity has shown the shift to have been the result of various crisis in the West, from cultural to religious, from political to personal.

We may temporarily shelve the contexts of our problems, but, eventually, their complete resolution obliges us to put these calculations back into their larger human frame, with all its concrete features and complexities. Walter Lippmann, who so succincitly distils the principles of modernity said 'to every human problem there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong' and this is as true of intellectual as it is of practical problems. The seduction of High Modernity lay in its abstract neatness and theoretical simplicity but both of these features blinded the successors of Descartes to the unavoidable complexities of concrete human experience (Toulmin, 2015)

Biologists believe that particular genes may hold the key to spontaneous physical healing as witnessed in newts, flatworms, starfish or salamanders for instance. Healing here is seen as an engineering problem, and the techniques to solve it are purely rational and mechanistic in nature. However, as we move away from a purely Decartian and mechanistic Newtonian perspective of the universe and nature, we find that the holistic perspective of healing is gaining research interest, with alternative therapies taking up increasingly important roles in preventive medicine, treatement, paliative care, in both traditional and innovation focused medical institutions, like the Samueli Institute and the American Holistic Nursing Association, one of the largest non-profit organizations solely devoted to investigating complementary, alternative and traditional healing practices through rigorous basic and clinical research. This is the view they hold of healing:

Healing is how we recover, restore, repair and retain health, and wholeness in mind, body, spirit, community and environment. Healing may or may not result in cure.Healing is an emergent process of the whole system bringing together the body-mind-emotion-spirit-environment at deeper levels of inner knowing, leading towards integration and balance

Healing as a Journey of Inner Transformation

In this sense on the journey to self-discovery, healing is the restoration of peace within oneself and of harmony with the vital field of the whole environment, showing, as we saw in History is Ridden with Trauma, that notions of suffering and healing are something not at all unrelated to the general condition of life. The process of healing is often seen as “form-less,”  an individual response that cannot be mapped in advance, with qualities like increased self awareness, spiritual or philosophical meaning, presence and centeredness, acceptance and reaching out for help, order and compassion, but also, challenging and unpredictable fears, nonlinear processes characterized by spiraling, progressing, and regressing - being a central feature of both suffering and healing. 

Here is an example:

Jim is a 27-year-old Gulf War veteran, newly diagnosed as HIV+ (dis-covered as he was donating blood), married, and the father of a newborn. Jim was referred to the local holistic clinic for massage to assist with the treatment of his lower back pain. He was angry throughout the treatment, frequently cursing as he described his new diagnosis, calling it a“death sentence.” His anger continued to be verbalized as he discussed his need to stop “pot.” One month later, after weekly treatments, Jim was no longer using “pot,” and his back pain was improving. He was exploring exercise programs, seeking nutritional information to support his immune system, and his anger was decreasing. He reported that his family was his main priority and that this illness was his wake-up call. He said massage calmed him down, but he still felt suspicious of people and relied only on himself.

Jim’s process includes many of the healing attributes of a positive move toward wholeness and a reinterpretation of his life through the new meaning he gives to his family relationships. In terms of a sense of interconnectedness Jim does not experience a spiritual transcendence, but he is willingly to participate, and this willingness progresses with each encounter with the therapist as trust grows, opening up opportunities for holisitc recognitions. But not all cases progress on this line:

Ruby was a 52-year-old female with end-stage colon cancer. She was hospitalized for her inability to tolerate food and underwent a feeding tube placement. She complained of pain, inability to sleep, and the lack of the morphine drip to relieve her pain. She agreed to reflexology treatments and received slight physical comfort from the treatments and nursing presence, but was not willing to participate in her care. She refused to discuss her care, delegating all decisions to her husband who wanted every effort made to cure her. She reported that she was very lonely in her disease and that her husband and family did not understand her. She refused to speak with the psychiatrist, rabbi, or social worker for support and was becoming weaker each day. Her family refused to take her home. Ruby died not long after.

Although Ruby appears to have some relief from a caring presence, she is not willing to participate in the relationship and continues to grow weaker, debilitate, and suffer. Her ongoing focus on isolation does not encourage the spiritual and relational openings she desperately needs at this stage of her life. Having said this, and as I have explained here and there in the Trauma Talks blogs, much of this unwillingness cannot be attributed to our conscious deliberate will, and is often influenced by unconscious fears or difficulties trusting others that are formed early in childhood and cannot be changed with ease.

So this concludes this second log focused on healing, and so far there is little evidence that healing is not a subject of wide and deep human concern and interest. All things considered, the concept converges quite uniformly across history and cultures towards ideas of balance, harmony, inner processes, changes in attitudes towards oneself and others, and an increase sense of wholeness and unity.

Wishing you Well,

Your Shrink in Bansko