The Threshold We're Tending
ALIGN is a holistic and integrative mental health practice in Atlanta, Georgia that is tending the gap and the overlap between psychotherapy and healing arts for clients, clinicians, and community.
My career as a therapist began immersed in a space where psychotherapy and spirituality intertwined. I learned how to practice Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) right next to Twelve Step Models of Recovery. Evidence-based practices co-mingled with longstanding and anecdotally successful community based healing. Peer reviewed science blended with the natural healing power of being witnessed and accepted by another. Of rigorous honesty practiced in a group. Of mini-rituals marking transformation assigned as therapy homework. And my baby-therapist self wondered which input was driving the positive outcomes I was seeing in our clients, not to mention the way that my exposure to the 12 steps and their conceptualization of “a God of your own understanding” was rocking my own spiritual world. Questions forming that I wouldn’t develop the language to actually ask until years down the road, like: where did these healing practices and psychological theories come from, really? and what are the potential harms and benefits from making these practices accessible in our capitalistic system of institutions and payer sources? and how can we best maximize the benefits and reduce the harms? and which parts of the system should we work with, and which should we actively resist?
Fast forward about ten years. I’m in the process of leaving my job directing a luxury holistic intensive outpatient addiction treatment program I’d built that had just been acquired by a publicly traded, profit-driven, exploitive, massive healthcare corporation (who I had already taken a paycut to escape once before in my career), and launching my own private practice. Through my yoga teacher training and a breathwork workshop I had attended, I learned about a shamanic teacher who was coming to town to lead a Cacao Ceremony. Having no idea what a shaman was nor cacao, I signed up right away. Coincidentally (wink), I got into a car accident right before the ceremony, and I was selected for a Soul Retrieval practice. (The simplified idea being that part of our soul leaves us when we experience a trauma, and we can call it back now that we are safe again). As the teacher talked me through the steps, my mind drew immediate and direct connections to the Internal Family Systems (IFS) training I’d completed days before. It was the same thing, in a different language. I wondered if Dick Schwartz, the founder of IFS, had studied shamanism (yes), or if Truth’s muses had simply told its stories to more than one person in more than one way (also yes). A spark was lit that day that has grown into the fire of one of the core purposes of my work: to help build a bridge from the power of those older, earth-honoring, and ancestral practices to the people who sought care through traditional healthcare channels. To people who would never know to or dare to or want to go to a shaman or a ritual or maybe even a yoga class, but who deserve access to this deeper place of meaning and transformation nonetheless. To stand in the gap, to practice in an in between space. To translate healing practices into patriarchy-and-insurance-company-approved language so that they’re available to more of us, and to somehow try to do that while keeping the integrity and wholeness and spirit of these practices in tact.
I made similar connections between shamanic journeying practices and depth processing scripts from hypnotherapy, and noticed dramatic gaps when sacred meditation practices were turned into sterilized mindfulness exercises. I studied psychedelic prep and integration and connected the dots between the access to innate and subconscious healing intelligence that trance states offer and the way that techniques like EMDR offer a path to that same Inner Healer, Self, or Soul via different methods (distracting the ego/overthinking mind vs. calming it and decreasing its volume.) Tarot could be tied in to Jungian work with archetypes. Yoga and meditation practices dovetailed into DBT and somatic and polyvagal theories. Ancestral lineage healing work becomes working with Legacy Burdens in IFS.
What is lost when we uproot these practices from their cultural context? When we dissect them and label their parts with anglicized and scientific names? What is left behind when we extract the vitamin from the whole fruit?
Are the benefits of yoga diminished when we think of them only in terms of nervous system regulation and improving skills of interoception and somatic awareness? Are we removing something mystical, something crucial? What does Prashant Iyengar mean when he says, “What is happening might be more profound than you know. Cultivate the happening.”? A teacher once described yoga to me as aligning the bones just so, so that an Energy can flow through. What do we miss when we reduce that to a metaphor, powerful, though, as metaphor, story, and myth may be?
I have vacillated in my understanding of ancestral healing work. True to my ever ambivalent skeptical and believing spirit, some days I feel that I’m actually communicating with my ancestral lineages, and some days I think that I’m using the language of “guides” to access parts of my psyche through symbolism. Are both equally valid and useful modes of approach to this work? (I don’t know). Or is there a danger in working with Legacy Burdens through an IFS lens that ignores steps like ritual protection because the model doesn’t include the existence of harmful external entities? (Unless you study the controversial Unattached Burdens). One thing I do know for sure: studying these more “mystical” practices deepens the clinical work I do with my clients, and has created profound healing experiences that I don’t think would come about with CBT alone.
These practices also emphasize the communal over the individual. Clinical psychology has pathologized aspects of the normal human experience, creating diagnoses out of the ways we respond to systemic oppression. The Western world often co-opts spirituality into WellnessTM and shifts the focus from the ways these practices can benefit me when they were meant for the collective we. How can we can re-introduce the dominant culture to reciprocal community and purposeful action that benefits us all? To spiritual practices that feed our souls, help us withstand and resist oppression, and thereby resolve many of our mental health symptoms? How can we write this into our treatment plans and progress notes?
I have many more questions than answers, and I think that’s a right-sized place to be. This in between and overlapping space - the clinical, scientific, regulated world of psychotherapy in one hand and the earth-honoring, ancestral, human birthright world of ritual and mystery in the other - is rife with opportunity for error and harm: appropriation, misuse, professional liability, misinformed consent, unclear boundaries, to name a few. Some choose to move completely into one lane or the other, choices that I understand and support. Every choice - in, out, or in between, carries risk of great harm and great benefit with it. I think we need all of us: inside the system, outside the system, and in the doorway between the two. All of these places, and this liminal space, especially, requires a willingness to get it wrong and humility to repair when we do. I, personally, and Align as an organization are called to work firmly within this expansive threshold.
Where do you land in your clinical/healing work? What are the questions you are wrestling with most right now? What experiences have been the most instrumental in your own healing/wellness?
Subscriptions at The Tended Threshold are currently free, with an option for a monthly donation to participate in mutual reciprocity and support our ability to continue to provide this resource. All content is available regardless of whether or not you make a donation. You can subscribe to the full blog, or to The Garden, The Den, or The Hearth specifically. We also have a more general Align newsletter that goes out eight times per year as the Wheel turns.
 | A guest post by
|