Healing the Healer:
How Do They Heal Themselves?
Physician, heal thyself.
—The Bible
Healing is not a one-way street. What heals the patient can also heal the therapist. Even the desire to help another may benefit both people. This mutual healing may be especially important for those shamans who undergo an initiation crisis. Some of these were the original “wounded healers,” healers who had themselves once suffered and were therefore enabled to relieve the suffering of others.
Shamans have often suffered greatly. Their pain may burst upon them in the initiation crisis or be sought deliberately through isolation and asceticism. Learning to shamanize and help others may rescue them from their initial crises. In other cases, “The shaman must first cure himself and his initiatory sickness and only afterwards can cure the other members of the community.”168 If he gives up his calling, he may relapse, and according to the Chuckchee, “While the shaman is in possession of the inspiration, he must practice, and cannot hide his power. Otherwise it will manifest itself in the form of bloody sweat or in a fit of madness similar to epilepsy.”29
How does self-healing occur? The traditional explanation is through the power and grace of the spirits. However, psychological and cultural processes doubtless play their parts, and these processes can be viewed, according to one’s belief system, as either complementing the spiritual factors, mediating them, or accounting for them.
What social and psychological factors contribute to the dramatic reversal from patient to physician and from psychologically disturbed to psychotherapist? Major factors include reinterpretation of their symptoms, the shamanic journey and social role, altered states of consciousness, and the benefits of altruism and service.
REINTERPRETING SYMPTOMS OF THE INITIATION CRISIS
The initiation crisis can begin as a dramatic, even life-shattering disturbance. In our own culture, the patient would likely be seen, and see himself, as sick and disturbed.
In tribal cultures similar symptoms may be viewed very differently. The “patient” would be regarded as a shaman-to-be and the symptoms seen not as a pathology but as a calling, not as an emergency to be suppressed but as an emergence to be guided. This is what Western psychologists call reattribution or reframing, a powerful technique by which symptoms are reinterpreted from a more healthful perspective. This encourages the patient to value and work with the symptoms as part of an important developmental learning process and as a doorway to a new and valued social role.
THE SHAMAN’S WORK AND ROLE
To love and to work—these were the hallmarks of psychological health for Sigmund Freud. Of shamans’ ability to love we know little, but of their ability to do meaningful work we are certain. The shaman’s work is crucial for the tribe and likely confers significant status and self-esteem, both of which foster physical and psychological health. Having been healed oneself may also inspire confidence in potential for healing others.
ALTERED STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
A defining characteristic of shamans is their ability to enter ASCs, some of which are both psychologically and psychosomatically healing. ASCs can easily slip into self-hypnosis, which can be a powerful aid to healing. Since shamans enter altered states expecting to receive spiritual help, these expectations might produce significant healing, especially when melded with hypnosis. In addition, the music of many rituals could benefit both shamans and their patients.
It has been suggested that the ability to enter hypnotic states was genetically selected, and this played a role in the evolution of shamanism and other religious traditions.231 However, there are specific problems with this suggestion137 and general problems with any theory that tries to explain (away) religion purely in terms of underlying psychological or neural mechanisms.411
THE SHAMANIC JOURNEY
Experiences during soul flight may also be healing. These experiences may include ecstatic love and compassion,154 but even terrifying confrontations can be beneficial. Visions of death and destruction may arise, together with malevolent spirits and supernatural forces. Yet the shaman’s task is not to quail, but to overcome all that stands in the way of bringing information and healing to the community. Shamans must confront, not flee, whatever horrors arise.
Confronting fears can extinguish them. In “implosive therapy,” patients create and confront images of whatever they fear until they become less reactive. The result is a desensitization in which the images, as well as the feared objects or people that the images symbolize, lose their fearful impact.
The similarities of this process to the shamanic journey are obvious. Shamans themselves recognize this desensitizing process and say that “you may see dead persons walking towards you, and you will hear their bones rattle. If you hear and see these things without fear, you will never be frightened of anything.”85
Spontaneous fearful images can symbolize what Jungians call the shadow, those aspects of self and psyche that have been disowned and repressed because we judge them as bad and fearful. Yet when these shadow aspects of ourselves are recognized and accepted, they lose their compulsive terror. Jungians regard a confrontation with the shadow as essential maturation and individuation: the process of becoming a unique, self-actualized individual. Jung himself regarded shamanic imagery as an indication that shamans go through a process of individuation.260 Identification with spirits or power animals may also play a role.
As yet we have almost no research studies of the effects of journeying on shamans. However, pilot studies of neoshamanic practitioners showed improvements on some measures of the sense of well-being, as well as increased levels of salivary immunoglobulin A (a measure of immune function).155, 156, 204
ALTRUISM AND SERVICE
All that one gives to others one gives to one’s self.
If this truth is understood, who will not give to others?
—Ramana Maharshi 297
Shamans serve their communities, and such service is the final stage of the hero’s journey. Michael Harner points out that shamanism, at its best,
goes far beyond a self-concerned transcendence of ordinary reality. It is transcendence for a broader purpose, the helping of humankind. The enlightenment of shamanism is the ability to light up what others perceive as darkness and thereby to see and to journey on behalf of...humanity.146
Of course shamans are not alone in this. Every one of the great religions regards service as a crucial practice and culmination of spiritual life. The true person “never deserts benevolence,” claimed Confucius,207 while the Third Zen Patriarch exclaimed that “for the unified mind in accord with the Way all self-centered striving ceases.”329
Modern psychology agrees and sees altruism and service as hallmarks of health and maturity.398 According to Abraham Maslow, “Self-actualizing people are, without one single exception, involved in a cause outside their own skin.”226 Greater psychological health results in greater service.397 Which is why the psychologist Rollo May claimed that “finding the center of strength within ourselves is in the long run the best contribution we can make to our fellow men.”230
What has been recently recognized is that the reverse also holds true. Not only does health foster service, but service fosters health. Those who assist others may gain both psychological and physical benefits including a “helper’s high,” an afterglow of well-being, satisfaction, and self-esteem.
A helper’s high may also translate into physical benefits. It may relieve high blood pressure and other stress-related conditions and enhance immune system function. Helping others and helping oneself can fuse into a single process, and as Abraham Maslow wrote: “The best way to become a better ‘helper’ is to become a better person. But one necessary aspect of becoming a better person is via helping other people. So I must and can do both simultaneously.”226
This is remarkably similar to Michael Harner’s observation that “in shamanism there is ultimately no distinction between helping others and helping yourself. By helping others shamanically, one becomes more powerful, self-fulfilled and joyous.”146 Shamans may therefore have been among the earliest humans to discover the truth of Albert Schweitzer’s statement:
I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know:
The only ones among you who will be really happy
are those who will have sought and found how to serve.