Therapeutic Practices in a Spiritual Context
The extraordinary unrecognised healing potential of non-ordinary states of consciousness.
More and more people are seeking meditation, psychedelics, and ancient tantric and shamanic practices because of great suffering in their lives, often due to challenging backgrounds in psychologically unhealthy environments. Many are dissatisfied with what society currently is offering them as remedies for their afflictions like psychopharmacological drugs or short term structured therapies (https://aeon.co/essays/why-depth-therapy-is-more-enduring-than-a-quick-fix-of-cbt).
When writing my master’s thesis in psychology, I became interested in researching what seemed to be a growing minority of people that had turned away from the psychiatric mental health care system and had started to look for alternative ways of living a more fulfilling life. By doing this they were also encountering a new narrative about mental health based on central ideas in many spiritual contexts like connection, trauma healing, and personal transformation quite different from a psychiatric one based on imbalances in biochemistry or behavioural conditioning.
In our study, many of the participants reported that through the use of what we called “therapeutic practices with a spiritual context”, which also included the use of psychedelics in therapeutic settings, they had extraordinary healing experiences often through a sense of being connected to something greater than themselves. These “non-ordinary states of consciousness”, often led to dramatic shifts in their lives, with great health benefits including recovery from depressions and dramatically reduced anxiety, along with a newfound sense of love, peace and connection to the world. As a practitioner of these methods myself I was happy to find their experiences to confirm my own sense of what great potential they may have not only for people in general but also for those who are in great suffering.
Unsurprisingly, participants also reported that they never had such experiences whilst in the mental health care system. On the contrary, one of the participants was considered to have symptoms of psychosis when sharing his experiences, whilst others were reluctant to share experiences with the mental health staff at all out of fear of being judged and pathologized for it.
In addition, some also felt that conventional treatment that did not take the reality of spiritual experiences into consideration would have had a negative impact on their health. As a result, many felt isolated from the health care system and continued to rely on environments where spirituality and non-ordinary experiences were accepted and seen as a potential resource. This paints a more nuanced picture of the impact of spiritual experiences than the one that is often glorified in the wellness world or on social media.
These findings made me reflect about the implications of how the mental health care system today views spirituality and non-ordinary states of consciousness. How is it that these deeply personal, meaningful, and potentially healing experiences are not considered in a field dedicated to the wellbeing of its citizens? Perhaps these examples point to something that is missing in today’s psychiatry. Surely there are cases of mental disorders like psychosis and dissociative disorders where there is a sense of transcending the conventional boundaries of the self, often with great suffering as a result, but to exclusively rule altered states of consciousness out as pathological no matter the content and implications for people’s lives seemed rather limiting.
It turns out that health professions have a long history of ignoring and pathologizing religion and spirituality. This goes back all the way to the inception of psychology as a science with individuals like Sigmund Freud, who described religion as an “obsessional neurosis” and viewed mystical states without inherent value for health marked by “infantile helplessness” and “regression to primary narcissism”. However, his convictions were not shared by everyone during this period, with theorists such as William James, Carl Jung and Roberto Assagioli coming to see these as a sign of mental health as well as powerful agents of transformation.
Their influence eventually gave birth to the field of Transpersonal Psychology, or The Psychology of Spirit, which grew out of humanistic psychology through the work of individuals like Abraham Maslow. Later in his career Abraham Maslow emphasized with secular yet spiritual terms like self-transcendence and peak experiences that:
“Spiritual life is a part of the human essence. It is a defining characteristic of human nature, without which human nature is not fully human. “
Transpersonal psychology is described as a scientific approach with a vision that both spirituality and empirical science can meet. However, this position has been criticized as unscientific and is generally excluded in mainstream academic psychology.
It is not surprising then that experiences related to spirituality are today met with suspicion by mental health care. In addition, such experiences are often metaphysical in nature, and sometimes include experiences of a transcendent reality which by definition speaks of something existing beyond our physical reality. Medicine, being a natural science based on an empirical study of the physical and natural world, assumes that experiences of anything beyond this physical reality ought to be considered illusory, or at least irrelevant. In other words, there seems to be a conflict between the two perspectives.
However, we also need to consider that even though non-ordinary states of consciousness are linked with higher wellbeing that does not mean that these cannot lead to difficult experiences where people are in need of therapeutic support. Such difficulties could result from challenging trips in relation to usage of psychedelics where we might need help to integrate unconscious material that has arisen or to relate powerful experiences to our everyday lives. Another example is so-called “dark nights of the soul” that are mentioned in Buddhist traditions, which are considered difficult periods that many spiritual practitioners must go through in order to get further ahead on the path towards enlightenment. https://www.learnreligions.com/buddhist-meditation-and-the-dark-night-449760.
Many participants in our study had experienced such difficult periods which were generally marked by negative and uncontrollable streams of thinking and emotional content along with an unstable sense of self, but most seemed to have successfully navigated these to arrive at greater wellbeing and sense of empowerment in their lives as a result. Such reports are indications that if these can be supported appropriately, they could be, like the Buddhist traditions are suggesting, potentials for psycho-spiritual development and long-term health benefits in contrast with similar psychiatric disorders that seem to have different trajectories. One of the main differences between spiritual crises and other psychiatric disorders although the symptoms might be similar seems to be that those who are experiencing something like schizophrenia have less awareness around their difficulties and a reduced ability to reflect on their inner world, which makes their symptoms more difficult to work through in therapy.
This makes discernment an especially important quality for mental health professionals to judge whether someone might be experiencing a severe psychological condition or a spiritual crisis. Unfortunately, because of the medical field’s difficult relationship with non-ordinary states of consciousness, individuals in need of support are often considered delusional without question and offered medication which in turn often lead to greater difficulties to integrate their experiences.
What might be the implications of the health care system, being representatives of health in our society, viewing non-ordinary experiences in this way? In the study many of the participants not only felt excluded from mental health care but also in some sense from society itself, because of their experiences. Some felt like they had to act less spiritual in social settings and with friends. Essentially this started to paint the picture of a marginalized group of people subjected to feelings of shame and isolation in a western society where a materialistic belief system was the intellectual norm. On a personal level, I could also relate to these experiences. Often had I downplayed my own experiences and questions about life for fear of being seen as too “woo woo” or New Agey, in order to fit in, especially in academic circles.
The question here when it comes to diagnosing someone who is having a non-ordinary way of experiencing life really seems to be about who holds the power to dictate the correct view of reality.
The question here when it comes to diagnosing someone who is having a non-ordinary way of experiencing life really seems to be about who holds the power to dictate the correct view of reality. Perhaps this is what is at stake here. Today, the everyday implicit western worldview about life is mainly still based on a Newtonian model assuming that the world is fundamentally made from separate parts and that human beings also are essentially separate from each other as well as to the rest of the world, which also reflects most people’s everyday experience of life.
But what is going to happen when more and more people begin to experience themselves as an integral part of the whole of existence, perhaps having direct concrete experiences of connection to other human beings or of a transcendent metaphysical reality that challenges their materialistic understanding of life? This growing minority of people who are experiencing life differently from the cultural norm will have to be addressed by the larger social sphere at some point in a different way than just by declaring them insane, because I don’t believe that the emerging interest towards spirituality is just a short-lived trend.
I believe that it is an expression of a cultural re-discovery of a collective longing for our latent potential to have deeper, more meaningful and mysterious experiences that we in our current western disenchanted interpretation of life have lost touch with somewhere along the way. Just how this return back to re-enchantment of our world, while still honoring the discoveries that came with the scientific revolutions of the modern era, will play out and how it will affect our cultural landscape remains to be seen. Hopefully, it will be one guided by humility, respect, and a genuine interest to explore what life is all about.
