The Hidden Structural Gap Limiting the Healing Professions — And What We Must Do About It
It's Time for A Theory of Healing
In the healing professions, we throw around the word “healing” every day. (Heck, I just did that in my third word.)
Yet too few of us have a clear and shared definition of what that word means—of what we are aiming for in our work.
For me, nowhere in any of my own hundreds of hours of energy and somatic healing training was “healing” defined or described. Neither as a process, nor as an end result.
Maybe it was assumed I’d know it when I saw it. Or that fulfilling the goals of the seeker of healing was my only goal. (Remember from fifth grade what assume does to you and me, though?)
When I first started as a healer, I was, I confess, very insecure about my new skills. I wanted to know precisely what I was doing and how I made that happen. I wanted to understand how to recognize a “healed” state at the end of it. I asked teachers. I asked other students and I asked practitioners who had built their practices in many modalities.
But I couldn’t get the same answer from two people about what healing is or how we make it happen. Eventually I had to figure out it myself, draw up a model and ask what it had to say about healing. That’s what I’ll be sharing here, and here’s why:
While the healing professions today are of course quite effective, I believe this lack of shared understanding creates a structural limitation underlying our work.
Furthermore, resolving it can empower and improve our results.
The Structural Gap: Healing Illiteracy
If you ask 10 practitioners what healing is, you’ll receive 10 different answers. Their definitions often reflect the focus of their technique or practice. That makes sense.
But I find that most of these answers are largely not talking about healing. They tend to describe states of repair, processing, reestablishing maintenance cycles, symptom removal, and temporary relief.
While these shifts may occur with healing, they may also occur without a healing transformation.
If you ask 10 seekers of healing what healing is, you’ll hear a fairly consistent answer that runs along the lines of fixing what’s wrong with me, making me better, or returning me/my part to how I was.
In these answers I also hear misunderstandings of what healing can do. But it’s not the seeker’s responsibility to know what healing is and can be.
It is the practitioner’s responsibility. Mine. Yours.
The gap gets worse when you ask practitioners what they DO to create healing.
Here the answers truly become concerning. Common responses I’ve heard (and that I used to say!) include:
I do my technique
I do nothing (the seeker does all the healing)
I remind the seeker (client, patient, sitter) that they are healthy
I hold space
After almost 30 years of observing the utterly unique phenomenon we call healing and what triggers it, I believe these statements are dangerously limited misunderstandings.
I have to ask—if we as practitioners are vague about what healing is, how can we aim for it? How can we adjust our procedures when we miss the mark? How can we develop more effective healing processes if we don’t have a defined healing goal?
We behave as if the meaning is obvious, but it is not.
We act as if we have an established, robust healing theory underlying our techniques, but we do not.
Our techniques do often create change that feels better. And in acute situations, that is very important!
But what if they could create more healing?
In my observation, healing is way more incredible than I knew when I got into healing. It took me years to see the extent of its effects (and you’ve probably noticed even more).
The qualities of healing are beyond notable. It is a win-win, positive, systemic transformation with permanent positive effects. You can see already how healing differs from repair and processing. Repair is a one-time event, linear in nature. For example:
Break, fix. Degrade, patch. Wear out, fix.
Healing is another phenomenon entirely, and is likely nonlinear. It goes more like:
Hurt, heal-and-shift-to-a-greater-way-of-being.
The Costs and Consequences of Not Studying Healing Theory
Both illness and thus healing significantly affect quality of life. Being chronically unwell or managing a condition daily can be a challenging, painful, and expensive (in all meanings) burden across all aspects of life. Indeed, healthcare makes up about one-sixth of the United States’ GDP.
So what happens in the healing professions when practitioners perform techniques and protocols without healing literacy: a clear definition of the profound phenomenon that is the healing transformation, a knowledge of how it is triggered, and enough practice to recognize healing results?
What happens when we do not aim for healing itself as a goal (not including in emergency/acute care)?
Quite a few distortions can develop in our industry. You may recognize many of these. Many are known issues that are considered challenges by practitioners.
In no particular order:
1. We practitioners become doers of technique—mechanics who hope. Now there’s nothing wrong with an excellent mechanic and a solid repair. But in long-term healing, there is a greater way to operate. Yes we can affect (if not effect) outcomes. So much more potential is available when we aim for healing transformation, providing repair as a side benefit along the way.
2. We focus on problem management and become historians of damage. Without a healing mindset or orientation, our attention locks in on pathology, dysfunction, symptoms, deficits, trauma, imbalance, diagnosis... We become experts at what is wrong more than what could be right. Additionally, seekers often identify with their conditions.
3. We offer temporary or superficial relief, applied over and over. Success is defined as minimizing symptoms, feeling better, coping better, compensating, etc., but not healing when we don’t know what healing looks like. Without recognition of the healing process, we may even dismiss or misattribute actual healing instead of encouraging it.
4. Seekers of healing feel disempowered, dependent on practitioners—an imbalance of power. Seekers overly defer to the practitioner’s expertise. Seekers do not feel they are part of the process or may influence it. They become victims to efficacy rates and other statistics.
5. Loss of human wholeness in the system. With a focus on technique instead of healing, we fragment the human body-mind by what part of it a technique can address. The big picture and systemic patterns can be missed, and the coordination burden often falls on the seeker.
6. Technique tribalism dividing the healing practitioner community instead of bringing us together to get better at what we all do. As an energy healer I felt this acutely, being taught to never use the word “cure” and to think of modern medicine as broken. It’s not. ALL techniques have strengths and weaknesses; all I want to know is which aspects of these protocols create healing?
7. A culture of escalation and automation, of both doing more, testing more often, repeating processes on set schedules—while minimizing expenses. All while not focusing on the factors that go towards healing, such as interaction quality, universal healing skills, wholism, and more. It’s a challenging paradox.
8. Practitioners burn out under exhaustive strain. In addition to dealing with the other points here, to develop our practices, we typically have to learn a new technique or buy new equipment or supplies. When we understand healing, however, we can work on improving our universal healing skills, mindset and protocols to get better and better results with the same process.
9. The bottom line is the ceiling effect: Options and results are limited because of that lack of healing literacy. This one hits me the hardest. When I believed my goal was fixing a person’s conditions, returning them to the way they were before they got sick, I totally missed the potential of a healing focus. I unconsciously capped my outcomes because I wasn’t aware they could be so much more profound.
The ceiling effect may also be seen in normalizing partial recovery, or managing a condition. I’d rather normalize partial healing.
Nine challenges is plenty for now. (What else have you noticed?)
A Bright Vision of a Health Industry that Heals
My vision, instead of the above nine challenges, is to see the following:
1. Practitioners who are transformational healers, using their usual technique to aim for healing.
2. More broadly effective, permanent, deeper results. This alone would lower costs.
3. Permanent, at least partial relief via a focus on healing.
4. Empowered seekers who know they are an integral part of the co-creative process for their health.
5. Honoring the human as whole and central to the healing process. (Yes if this is our goal, we can create the systems to do this.)
6. Practitioner camaraderie and cooperation across modalities and approaches, from surgeons to shamans, talk therapists to touch therapists, energy healers to dentists. All of us working together to create better outcomes.
7. A healthcare culture of deepening and improvement, applying healing principles to our existing techniques and protocols to focus them and make them more effective, as well as finding new ways to trigger healing.
8. Inspired, invigorated practitioners who find their practice and professional development profoundly rewarding.
9. Widespread healing literacy: practitioner awareness, encouragement, and recognition of the profound outcomes that come from healing (vs. repair and amelioration). Greater realistic optimism. Practitioners knowing what parts of their technique create healing and strengthening those aspects.
Seekers understanding healing and working to create it in everything they do.
Leaders incorporating healing processes (no better way to create change!) into corporate, educational, and other settings.
When healing is our focus, techniques become tools, cooperation is attractive and we can all fulfill our original goal—the reason we all got into healing—supporting another human in feeling better and living a better life.
How We Can Get There
As a practitioner, I don’t want to overlook a jot of healing that I could have facilitated. Knowing what I know about healing and what makes it happen has overhauled my healing practice. It’s changed how I interact with clients and even what I do for them.
I believe that we health practitioners have a responsibility to learn everything we can about what healing is and how to trigger it without burning out.
We have a responsibility to develop a widespread, simple theory of healing and identify common practices to make that happen.
We have a responsibility to develop our “ear” or recognition of healing. (Music is taught through technique, theory, and ear—healers are missing theory and ear.)
What You Will Get Here
Back in the aughts, I developed a simple, six-part model of healing that shows exactly what is involved—and not involved—in creating a healing transformation. This model also points to what practitioners can do to become more effective in their professional development efforts, whatever their technique or modality. It reveals universal healing skills anyone can develop.
While I’m sure every healing practitioner who looks at this model will say, “Oh of course, that makes sense,” we do have to start somewhere. So I’m offering my model here, open and grateful for your thoughts on the matter.
What is truly amazing is that, when you understand the model and what it teaches, you don’t even NEED a healing technique. You can trigger healing in a conversation. With a hand on a shoulder. With a prayer. For yourself. You can offer win-win positive transformation (vs. fixing or mere change) as a parent, a teacher, a salesperson, or sitting next to someone on a bus.
In 2011, I wrote a book draft explaining my healing model. Recently I’ve dug out that document and will be sharing many parts of it here as I rewrite the book.
Stick around if you too would like to see the healing professions improve and grow—for them to heal, together—by illuminating and understanding the powerful, one-of-a-kind phenomenon we so casually refer to as healing.
Looking forward to witnessing what you're sharing, Daria!