Traditional healing, the body and mind in psychotherapy

Abstract

There is a growing trend in the West to seek alternative, complementary and traditional healing not only as a reaction to Western biomedicine but also to the mindset of “talking heads” in psychotherapy. Traditional healing aims to restore harmony and balance within the individual through a symbiosis of the body, mind and spirit. Through this process traditional healing offers a holistic conceptualization of wellness and wellbeing, both within the individual, and between the individual and his or her environment. Comparative studies on alternative healing practices indicate that many patients/clients often see a mental health professional and a traditional healer concurrently. This paper considers the use of traditional healing alongside Western counselling psychology as a process of dual interventions for clients who engage traditional healing practices alongside psychotherapy.

Keywords:

• traditional healing
• body-mind division
• holistic healing
• counselling and psychotherapy
• ethnic minority clients
• cultural healers

Declaration of interest : The author reports no conflict of interest. The author alone is responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Notes

Notes

1. “The health and medical care of the newly arrived African slaves were gravely threatened by the inhumane life conditions imposed by the European colonizers. Neglect by the slave owners and the high cost of medical services exposed these individuals to the full violence of diseases and epidemics and forced them to tend to their own health care needs” (Voeks, 1993, p. 66). As a result, slaves relied on their African traditions and the utilization of plants that were available to meet their health care needs. Michel Laguerre (1987) contends, “the health and medical care of the newly arrived Africans as well as that of the Creole slaves, the freedmen and the maroons in the early period of Caribbean slavery, rested primarily on their efficacious use of folk medicine” (p. 15).

2. In Yvonne Chireau's (2003) work on black magic, religion and African-American conjuring tradition she writes about the rich hoodoo, conjure and roots-working traditions that the slave communities engaged in. Chireau suggests that “Black Americans utilized conjuring traditions not only because they saw them as valuable resources for resistance, but because they believed that the supernatural realm offered alternative possibilities for empowerment” (p. 18).

3. In her work Spiritual transformation, ritual healing and altruism, Joan D. Koss-Chioino (2006) explains that radical empathy takes empathic behavior to a further degree, in that the wounded healer actually enters into the feelings of suffering and distress of those persons who attend the sessions and whom a spirit indicates need help (or, at rare times, persons she meets in the course of her life). Importantly, she has the guidance and authority of her spirit guide–protectors who prevent her from being overwhelmed or seriously affected by the client's suffering. When a healer's own well-being and continued healing avocation depends upon a spiritual connection, the interpersonal space in which healing takes place becomes sacred space, and radical empathy acts as a path to transcendence by the group assembled (pp. 885–886).

4. According to Waldram (2000) “Empirical” proofs are anchored in the “material world” and confirmed by events that are explainable; “scientific” proofs are those confirmed through the application of scientific methods; and “symbolic” proofs, the most ambiguously defined of the three, pertain to the “ordering” of “events and objects” that give meaning to, and allow people to manage, sickness episodes (p. 606).