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Yep, that's what I think.
I suspect that many of you have been in some kind of talk therapy--maybe even on and off for years. I've heard many clients say to me that they have been in so much therapy that they feel as if it isn't going to help them any longer.
From the age of 23 to about my mid-40s, I myself sought out the help of a few psychologists. Short-term counseling offered by the student health clinic at my graduate school was the beginning. It helped to have someone to talk to, process, and understand some in dealing with the problems I was having with dating and with my overbearing mother. But it was "short-term"--meaning you had to finish at the end of 3 months, no matter where you were in your process. I was left hanging still grappling with a lot of anxiety, depression, and conflict in my life.
Then in my mid-20s, I found a Jungian psychoanalyst. I drove a 3-hour round-trip, once/week for a 3 years to see her--truly a pilgrimage. We unpacked my dreams and my screwed up childhood as a means to shift outer patterns and to try to stay afloat as I dealt with my mother's ongoing incursions into my life. It helped some to delve into my inner world and learn to understand what my deep psyche was trying to show and tell me. But it wasn't hitting that pot of gold that I imagined for my life in which I would be liberated from what was a variety of chronic misery.
It's not that I didn't have happy times and happy thinking. In fact, despite everything, I have always been temperamentally a very optimistic and, at root, happy person.
But those qualities were often overlaid with struggle--whether with others (my mother) or within myself. There was no enduring peace. And that is what I wanted--desperately and beyond all belief.
Even back then in the 80s, the word "healing" was front and center in my vocabulary. I say "even" because, to be honest, in the field of psychology, it wasn't commonly used. But somehow, I had this idea that I could achieve my goal of being free of the suffering that hounded me. I defined this as HEALING that would create a deep, profound transformation of my inner and outer condition. I did not buy into the beliefs that swirl around out there in our world that say we can never really recover from the loss of loved ones to death or from traumas. That they will always stalk us.
I knew that freedom was possible. I still do.
The other thing that I KNEW was that it wasn't just my mother and her impact on my childhood and teenaged years that were creating problems. I felt between us the reverberation of experiences which were not explicitly of this life, but seemingly of others.
Lastly, no matter how much I unpacked my life experiences through talking, I continued to feel some kind of energetic imprint deep in my body--or should I say that went deeper than even my body. That was long before I discovered energy healing.
The renowned psychiatrist, Bessel van der Kolk was one of the first in the field to begin to talk about how "the body keeps the score" when someone experiences a traumatic event. His book by that same name backs this up with neuroscience. It is powerful. Occasionally, he uses the word "energy," but never acknowledges that there is an energy body that is both interconnected with and equally as impacted by trauma as the physical. He also talks about "recovery" from trauma and sometimes uses the word "healing." His ideas were and still are radical in western psychology.
The needle, in my opinion, is moving in the right direction. Now we have to develop a larger, societal acceptance of the factual existence of the energy body and how it is intricately interconnected with recovering from and thriving after trauma.
I discovered energy healing at the age of 32. It profoundly changed the equation and trajectory of my life for the better. Talk therapy (which undoubtedly has its benefits) gave me the tools of self-reflection and self-awareness from which I could track symptoms to their deeper sources--the wounds embedded in my energy body and deep psyche and the energetic vortices of old, negative beliefs passed down through my ancestors--meaning, in shamanic terms, both my blood lineage in this life and the experiences of other lives.
Thus, when I say our understanding of healing is dead wrong, what I mean is that for a lot of people, to truly be free, they have to have an integrated approach which works with the mind, the body, and the energy body. They also have to delve into the multidimensionality of the human soul through which all experience--from other lives, from ancestors, and even humanity, as a whole--impacts us in our present lives.
This is the right view of healing body, mind, soul, and spirit. It is holistic and embracing of the totality of our human walk in life and our spiritual source.
Consider working with me in my 3-Month Shamanic Mentoring Program to get the full monty. The tools I pull out of what I call my Medicine Basket of Love include self-reflection and building self-awareness, unpacking the impact of our past woundings on the present, deliving into dreams and visions arising from the subconscious, working with the parts of self (soul parts, as they are called in shamanic work), and powerful shamanic energy medicine. Here's the link to sign up for a free Discovery Call to see if it's a good fit for you. Launch into an holistic way of working with your challenges and see how powerfully they can change!
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