If you missed Part 1 of this series 10 Things I Still Believe About Health After Debunking Everything I Now Think Is Nonsense, please start there. This is a continuation of what’s left after getting indoctrinated into (and then deconstructing) both the world of academic medicine and then the New Age wellness industry teachings. I’ve so appreciated all of your feedback and applause about this synthesis of what’s the baby and what’s the bathwater. Please do continue to engage in this deconstruction/ reconstruction alongside me, and share what arises for you, so we can crowd source this!
1. Healing is an interdisciplinary process.
The human body is not a car, and doctors are not auto mechanics. It might work to take an engine out of a car, fix the engine or replace it, leave the rest of the car alone, and expect the car to run smoothly. But the car mechanic approach to practicing medicine doesn’t work for human bodies. Often, what happens in the bodies of people who have experienced psychological, emotional, and/or spiritual trauma (and the resulting nervous system dysregulation) is that physiological systems start to break down one by one, and all those systems are interrelated because the nervous system and other whole systems in the body link every cell to every other cell.
This means you usually wind up with one diagnosis first, and then the medical system gets to work trying to treat that one condition. The problem is that, even if the medical system winds up curing the initial problem, if the trauma is still untreated and the nervous system is still firing stress responses, and all the body systems are interrelated, the next disease may be already underway. So you wind up playing medical whack-a-mole with medical conditions that keep popping up once the threshold of tolerance for the body is crossed. In other words, you might cure one medical condition successfully with conventional medicine, but if you don’t treat the underlying root cause of what is dysregulating the nervous system, causing the body to break down, there’s a good chance you’ll get sick from something else.
Western culture is celebrated for its focus on breaking whole systems down into their constituent parts and then developing expertise in smaller and smaller reductionistic splits. For example, you have a medical problem, you go see the doctor. If you have a psychological problem, you go see a psychotherapist. If you have a spiritual problem, you go see a chaplain, minister, rabbi, priest, iman, or other spiritual leader. If you’re “relationsick” (as Jeffrey Rediger and I write about in our new book RELATIONSICK), you go see a family therapist or couples therapist.
But if nobody stands back to look at the larger picture, which should be the role of the family doctor but often gets overlooked, crucial insights necessary for healing may be missed. Healing, by definition, requires wholeness, which requires stepping back and looking at all those aspects of yourself in relationship with each other. Breaking up the healing process into silos robs you of your opportunity for wholeness.
The truth is that you can’t heal psychologically without having it impact your physiology. But medical schools and psychology PhD programs don’t tend to teach that psychological healing could reverse medical diseases. You can’t heal medically without having it impact your psychological and spiritual well-being, but almost nobody in academia talks about how a cancer journey or recovery from an autoimmune disease or surviving a near death experience after a heart attack can be a spiritual experience. If you experience spiritual healing, it could impact you psychologically and medically, but divinity schools, medical schools, and psychology graduate schools aren’t teaching us this.
Medicine, psychology, spirituality, and science are all tangled together and cannot (and should not) be peeled apart, even by those who try to separate them. As much as we’d like to believe we can divide these categories into different academic silos that belong in different departments of universities, healing fails to play by such rules. Healing does not behave according to the principles of the Cartesian mind/body/spirit split. The etymology of the word “healing” comes from the Proto-Germanic word “khailaz,” which translates as “to make whole.” Healing is, almost by definition, a unifying phenomena that restores the academic splits into a reunion of integration.
2. Your habitat matters.
Where you reside, where you hang out, whether you’re surrounded by natural wild beauty or the tidy beauty of an organized, well-designed space matters. Whether you’re starved in a concrete jungle or living in a chaotic environment matters. Whether there’s noise pollution, toxic chemicals or mold in your environment, or lack of nature, your environment impacts your health. One of the reasons people tend to experience temporary relief when they go away on a healing retreat is that they’re removed from what might be a toxic living environment and they’re awash in a beauty bath. Sure, you can go away from a poisonous habitat and get temporarily transfused, but as soon as you go back to a habitat that doesn’t help you heal, your nervous system will register the poison.
And…living in a healing environment is a privilege not everyone can afford or access. Not everybody has the choice to live in a beautiful habitat, go away on a healing retreat, or free themselves from the kind of chaos one might experience in inner city public housing. And that’s not fair. Everyone should be entitled to beauty baths in nature and a habitat that fosters healing. But we have a long way to go when it comes to health equity around healing habitats.
3. Life force is essential to the healing process.
Call it life force, call it chi, call it prana, call it energy, call it love or Self or God or Shakti or the Holy Spirit. What you call it doesn’t matter. All of us have times in life when our life force wanes, and we become anemic on life force. Trauma and its sequelae, like depression, loneliness, or paralyzing fear, is the most common reason for dwindling life force and reduced will to live. We all need life force to flow freely in our bodies in order to be optimally healthy, and if that flow gets impeded or our overall life force gets dangerously low, we may wind up with physical symptoms—and we might not survive. You might need drugs, surgeries, or other conventional medical interventions to save your life or spare an organ while your dwindling life force or reduced will to live gets addressed. But those interventions won’t solve the underlying problem of what interfered with your life force flow any more than a blood transfusion solves a bleeding problem or a bone marrow dysfunction.
4. Pleasure, play, and laughter are good medicine.
Trauma healing work can be painful, as we face everything we have compartmentalized into trauma bubbles we typically don’t touch. As we gently and patiently penetrate these bubbles so healing can happen, we need both compassion and accountability. Compassion helps us accept ourselves, what happened to us, and what we have lost because of what happened to us. Accountability helps us reckon with who we have become because of what happened to us and who we have hurt because of the way trauma has impacted our ability to trust or love.
Many of us who have been in therapy long enough to know well how painful it is to face the ways you’ve been the victim of trauma. But the hardest part is where you get the dawning sense that you have also become the perpetrator of trauma—because of your trauma. And that pain, the pain of hurting others, can be excruciating. It can also help reverse medical illness, as I wrote about in the Advanced Integrative Therapy (AIT) chapter in my book Sacred Medicine.
Nobody can tolerate constant discomfort, so we need to be intentional about counterbalancing the emotional pain with play, pleasure, laughter, and deep nurturing experiences. As your tolerance for pain increases, your tolerance for pleasure needs to increase just as much. Many trauma survivors have unconscious resistance against feeling good and receiving deliciously pleasurable experiences, usually because we don’t feel worthy of experiencing awe, joy, and pleasure. Feeling the pain of being human needs to be counterbalanced with feeling all the pleasures of all the senses that only creatures with human bodies can experience. Otherwise, healing can quickly devolve into masochism- which, of course, is not healing.
Take beauty baths in nature. Watch dolphins and whales jumping and breaching. Dance to playlists you make for yourself. (Or try one of mine.) Sing in a choir or sing along to a playlist. Make art or otherwise express your creativity. Have orgasms, partnered or with yourself. Get a massage if you can afford it, ask someone to do a trade with you, or massage your own hands and feet. Read fiction, for fun. Watch a comedy show. Listen to public music in your local town green or enjoy buskers on local street corners. Garden. Take a workshop. Put your feet in a body of water. Take baths if you can. Throw a ball or swing on a swingset. Play!
And…play can be a privilege. Some people are working three jobs just to make ends meet, and play is beyond their access, even if it costs nothing.
5. Optimal health requires regular nervous system hygiene.
If your nervous system is in Type A hyperdrive 24/7, or if it’s in dorsal vagal hypodrive beyond when you’re resting and sleeping, your body is practically guaranteed to pay the price. This is why it’s ridiculous to even think about practicing medicine without considering the state of a patient’s nervous system. As I said in Part 1, it’s my point of view that we shouldn’t even be talking about mind-body- because the nervous system IS the body. Every single part of your body is connected to the nervous system, because the nervous system is far bigger and more diffusely distributed than your mind/brain.
Most diseases are the result of the long term consequences of chronic nervous system dysregulation—the immune system breakdown, the chronic inflammation, the microbiome disruption, the epigenetic influences, and such. Therefore, most disease treatments will be mere Band-Aids that are ultimately inadequate and ineffective unless they include nervous system hygiene. Nervous system hygiene requires caring about your own safety, emotional health, relationships, and protection from abuse, overfunctioning, or exploitation.
To practice nervous system hygiene and bring your nervous system into an optimally healthy state capable of somatic self-repair, you have to heal trauma. It’s not just war veterans that have trauma that can make them sick. Everyone has some trauma that likely needs healing. Some people have experienced the Big T traumas, the ones researchers call the Adverse Childhood Experiences.). But 100% of us have experienced what might seem like smaller traumas, such as the developmental traumas that interfere with our healthy individuation, capacity for intimacy, ability to assert agency and autonomy over our lives, and other natural full expression of our authentic selves. (Learn more about whether you might have experienced developmental trauma here and here.)
Developmental trauma and other “little t” traumas, which Buddhist psychiatrist Mark Epstein, MD calls “the trauma of everyday life,” affects every one of us and impacts our health. Therefore healing and adequately treating psychological, emotional, and spiritual trauma is essential for whole health healing.
Nervous system hygiene require “interoception,” the ability to accurately interpret the state of our own nervous system, to sense when we’re in “fight or flight” hyperdrive (sympathetic nervous system) and when we’re in a dissociated freeze or combination dorsal vagal/ activated fawn state. Only then we can employ strategies to help bring us back to healthy ventral vagal “tend and befriend” nervous system states.
And…nervous system hygiene can be a privilege. If you’re living in a war zone, running away from ICE, facing homelessness, or otherwise under constant nervous system distress, it might be impossible to calm the nervous system. Likewise, many of the somatic treatments that help develop interoception cost a lot and are largely inaccessible to the majority of people who need them.
6. There’s a difference between healing and curing.
Healing and curing are not the same thing. You can be physically cured without being healed, and you can be psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually healed without being cured. Conventional medical interventions might cure disease temporarily, but unless the necessary healing also happens, patients are likely to get sick again, sometimes from an entirely different disease. Healing, on the other hand, creates the physiological conditions that optimize the body’s chance of reversing disease and preventing the onset of new diseases or recurrences of diseases in remission, but you can be healed and still sick. You can be healed and still die.
As much as we might wish we could, bypassing the psychological, emotional, and spiritual healing process, even if conventional medicine knows how to cure us physically, does not optimize health outcomes. Medications, surgeries, and other conventional medical interventions might alleviate symptoms and lead to remission of disease processes, sometimes resulting in cure. But if you’re cured without addressing the necessary healing, you’re at risk of getting sick all over again.
Likewise, you might temporarily feel better if you engage in spiritual practices or interventions, like meditation, yoga, contemplative prayer, plant medicine journeys, making a pilgrimage to a sacred site, or visiting an energy healer. But you can’t bypass the necessary psychological and emotional healing with spiritual healing alone, and it’s unwise to willfully skip conventional medical treatments that might cure you. Sure, medications, surgeries, and even spiritual interventions might make you feel better temporarily, and it might even look like you’re cured on lab tests or radiology scans. But if you’ve bypassed the secondary work of making sense of what was happening when you got sick, you might wind up falsely reassured by that temporary relief, thereby bypassing going back into the past pain of traumatic memories, which is what true healing sometimes requires.
Trauma survivors tend to be drawn to spiritual seeking, and this can be a blessing for some. Many trauma-supportive practices- meditation, creative practices, being in nature, engaging in rituals, prayer, movement meditation like hiking, yoga, or dancing- can help regulate the nervous system in the short run. And they feel good, so it can be tempting to just focus on doing more and more nervous system regulating practices. But nothing replaces the true trauma treatment that happens when you go back into the past, figure out how you adapted to survive, internally “redo” the past, and complete the neurological rewiring of the “memory reconsolidation” process, which lays down new neural pathways and helps neutralize the emotional charge from the past memory, thereby halting the automatic stress responses generated by those past memories that are stuck in the body.
It doesn’t work to bypass the steps necessary truly treat unhealed trauma: 1) basic safety and survival needs get met 2) psycho-education about things like boundaries, narcissistic abuse, the various trauma healing models (like IFS, Somatic Experiencing, NARM, AIT, etc) and how trauma healing works 3) nurturing resilience, resourcing, and meaning making 4) understanding adaptive strategies so we can have compassion for why we do what we do 5) embodiment practices and somatic mindfulness 6) nervous system regulation 7) metabolizing implicit sensations, emotions, and memories 8) treating negative core beliefs, installing a new identity, and rewriting your story 9) safe, brave communities of healing. For more detail on each of these elements of trauma healing, read this. [Hat tip to Chris Rutgers at The Trauma Foundation for helping me figure this out.]
And…do you know how much it costs to try to hit all these boxes and find practitioners who have availability if you can afford them?
7. Positive Childhood Experiences (PCEs) can protect against the harm caused by Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs).
PCEs include positive family experiences in childhood- closeness, support, loyalty, protection, love, importance, and responsiveness to health needs, all of which can increase resilience and function in a dose-dependent way towards protecting against the negative mental and physical health consequences of ACEs. For example, a child might get sexually abused by a neighbor, but if they have loving parents at home this will help offset the ACE. They might have divorced parents or a parent in jail, but if they have loving grandparents who remind them they are lovable, this might also offset some of the trauma. (Learn more about Christina Bethell, PhD’s research on PCEs in JAMA.)
And…some kiddos got loads of ACEs and no PCEs, and that’s not fair. So many spiritual types try to explain this injustice with a spiritual explanation, but I don’t believe there is one. The world is unjust. Some people have easier lives than others, not because they’re superior, but because they won the parenting lottery or the genetic lottery or the status and privilege lottery. You might disagree with me, but I don’t believe people with shit childhoods chose their abusers to grow their soul or are paying off karma from past misdeeds. While it might make some people feel more in. control, it’s generally easier to make peace with the random injustice of life than to believe you did something to cause a horrible childhood or that you somehow earned it or chose it.
8. Let go of healing perfection and go for being “healed enough.”
The bad news is that there’s no perfect human. I don’t believe there’s such thing as an enlightened human who never suffers. If you’ve met as many so called spiritual teachers in person, as I have, you come to realize what an incredible relief it is to give up that magical thinking search for an idealized human. Thank goodness we can give up that ghost.
The good news is that giving up this kind of childlike magical thinking can allow you to stop striving to achieve some unnatural, impossible, idealized standard of enlightenment, perfection, or finally having arrived at complete healing. There’s no such thing as “perfectly healed,” and there’s no “there” there. There’s only here. We can strive for “healed enough,” and recognize that healing is a lifelong practice and that we will die one day still engaged in the healing process.
9. Be proactive about healing but without bullying yourself.
Stressing about healing is counterproductive. If you’re dysregulating your nervous system by trying to bully yourself into healing, you’re defeating the purpose. This is a paradox, because being proactive about healing can help you become a health outlier or Olympian of healing. Being passive will not help you achieve an optimal health outcome any more than being a couch potato will get you an Olympic gold medal athletically. But if you’re obsessively restricting your diet, being a drill sergeant about exercising, pressuring yourself to do more and more trauma work, or otherwise trying to perfect yourself, you’ll impede the healing process.
10. There are no shortcuts to the healing process.
Healing takes the time it takes. While spontaneous healing may sometimes seem to happen instantly, it is often based on all the things you proactively did to create the conditions for that to happen. Because we so want to believe healing can happen rapidly and painlessly, charlatans make millions promising quick fixes. But anyone who promises you a rapid, painless healing journey is probably selling you a scam. Sure, some interventions might speed the healing process more than others, but no matter how effective a particular healing method is, no matter how transformational a medicine might be, no matter how much hype surrounds some healer, no matter how powerful a meditation or plant medicine journey might be, healing is a long, slow, arduous process. It can be softened with humor, pleasurable activities, loving community, and fun healing practices, like art, dancing, singing, and ritual. But don’t believe anyone who hooks you with the false promises of fast, pain-free healing.
What am I missing so far? I’d love to hear your feedback or questions, to inform my next post.
*If you want to dive deeper into teachings like this, check out a prerecorded online class I co-taught with IFS founder Dick Schwartz Healing The Trauma That Surrounds Medical Illness.
