What is “Healing Psychology?”
Chances are that you’ve never heard the term healing psychology used before. The words heal and healing are neither spoken nor written in graduate programs in psychology. They simply do not exist in the lexicon of the profession. Psychologists are not trained to heal psychopathology, perhaps because of an unspoken assumption that there are no psychopathologies amenable to healing. But is this, in fact, a sound assumption?

The APA’s official search platform, PsycINFO, is designed to access more than 4.5 million abstracts of peer-reviewed literature. Enter the term healing psychology into this search engine and it will yield a single hit. “Indigenous Healing Psychology — Honoring the Wisdom of the First Peoples” (2017), by Richard Katz, Ph.D., informs its readers of an alternative paradigm for understanding and healing the mind that mainstream psychology has entirely ignored. Why?
If the field of psychology doesn’t consider itself capable of healing, then what is its purpose? It would be more accurate to say that psychology is a profession that seeks to cure. Curing and healing are not the same thing. A cure is an intervention that treats disease (illness), whereas healing is a treatment of injury. Curing and healing not only have different treatment objectives, but the nature of their treatments differ in significant ways as well. Curing an illness is the process of eliminating foreign elements that impair health, whereas healing an injury is the process of restoring wholeness to that which has been damaged or broken apart.
Since its inception more than 140 years ago, Western psychology has conceptualized mental health and mental illness according to the paradigms of science and medicine. Why, then, is it possible for the medical profession to heal injuries to the body, but there is no parallel for psychology to heal injuries to the mind? The obvious answer would be that the mind is not an objective entity capable of being injured. The mind, by contrast, is a subjective phenomenon, and according to the dictates of science, there is no way of conceptualizing how a subjective phenomenon can be injured.
To challenge the assumption that psychopathology cannot be healed would require answering two questions: 1) What is there within the mind that can possibly be injured?, and 2) How can the mind’s injuries possibly be healed? What follows is an attempt to answer both of these questions, concluding with the assertion that the mind can, in fact, become both injured and healed.
There’s no reason we should not be able to apply the concepts of injury and healing to the subjective mind. All that is required is for us to recognize the possibility that the mind has a subjective infrastructure analogous to the infrastructure of the body. There are many clues to this infrastructure that can easily be gleaned from the language of everyday people and which are routinely understood by their therapists. The agonies of wounded or broken hearts, pride, spirit, trust, hope, will, faith, security, dignity, confidence, and self-esteem are common examples that describe a sense of personal injury. Similarly, we understand when people complain of feeling “conflicted,” “divided,” “torn,” “shattered,” or “in pieces.” Such language points toward two dimensions of the mind’s infrastructure where injury and healing are possible. I refer to the first of these as affective pillars, and the second as relational bridges.
The difference between affective pillars and relational bridges is that the former are “stand alone” experiences, whereas the latter are “stand together” experiences between two or more parts of the mind. More specifically, these are the relationships that exist between the mind’s subpersonalities.
The Relational Infrastructure Of The Mind
Transpersonal philosopher Ken Wilber defines subpersonalities as “functional self-presentations that navigate particular psychosocial situations.” As abstract as that may sound, the concept of subpersonalities has been a part of our mainstream consciousness since the 19th century. Freud introduced us to the subpersonalities of the Id, Ego, and Superego, explaining how the intrapsychic conflicts they experience with one another were responsible for causing neurosis (mental illness). The relational bridges between subpersonalities are analogous to the bonds between different members of a family. Even though these bridges and bonds are both relationship connections that are entirely subjective in nature, there can be no doubt that they can be damaged or broken. Relationships surely do break. But just as the body’s broken bones can be restored to wholeness, broken friendships, marriages, families, and minds can be restored to wholeness as well.
There have been numerous models of subpersonalities popularized since the advent of modern psychotherapy. In addition to Freud’s, the theories of Archetypes (Jung), Psychosynthesis (Assagioli), Transactional Analysis (Berne), Gestalt Therapy (Perls), Transpersonal Psychology (Wilber), and Voice Dialogue (Rowan and Rowan), are well-known examples. Today’s most well known school for the identification and treatment of subpersonalities is Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems (IFS), a model embodying an extensive classification of subpersonalities and a method for treating their conflicts. Subpersonalities are even found in our popular culture, from the simple notion of a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other, to the 2015 blockbuster Pixar movie, Inside Out, in which the emotions of joy, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust are personified in the mind of a troubled 11 year-old girl.
What all theories of subpersonalities share in common is the recognition that the relationships between the mind’s subpersonalities have profound effects on the status of an individual’s mental health. This observation parallels what we know about how the quality of family relationships affects the mental health of all its members. In fact, what we know about the importance of family dynamics and how to heal family relationships provides the most valuable insight we need for learning how to heal the mind.
Revising our understanding of mental health to include the influence of relationships has profound implications for psychology as we know it. The most significant implication is the fact that our scientific paradigm doesn’t have an adequate way to accommodate the critical influence that relationship dynamics have on mental health.
The atomistic paradigm of Western science and medicine explains the world by breaking whole entities down into their individual parts. By contrast, a holistic paradigm understands the wholeness of an entity as being greater than the sum of its parts. For instance, a family is a system that cannot be understood by simply aggregating individual evaluations of each of its members. In order for a family to be fully understood, its evaluation must also include an analysis of the relationships its members have with one another. Imagine two families in which every member of family A has an exact twin in family B across the street. According to the atomistic paradigm, these families would be regarded as identical. But if family A was torn apart by hostile relationships, while family B enjoyed the cohesion of affectionate relationships, these families would be entirely dissimilar. The same is true with the nature of the mind. Families and minds are both are collectives (wholes) made up of individual members (parts), plus their complex relational patterns. This represents a fundamental shift in the way the wholeness of the mind is defined, evaluated, and treated.
The adoption of the holistic paradigm requires us to rethink how we define mental health and what aspects of it we will need to focus on in treatment. Here again, the dynamics of a conventional family help to clarify the point. Family C has two members diagnosed with mental illness, yet all of its members enjoy wonderful relationships with one another. This would represent a family in which a cure for illness would be required, but the family as a whole would not require any healing. In family D, nobody is diagnosed with a mental illness, but its relationships are damaged by hostility. This family would not require any cure, but it would require healing. Family E has a combination of several members with mental illness and damaged relationships with one another, thereby requiring both curative and healing treatments. Family F has no mental illness and does have strong relationships, making it the healthiest family in the neighborhood. These exact same configurations of illness and injury can be seen within the minds of individuals.
What the holistic paradigm allows us to see is that both individual and family mental health are functions of: 1) the presence or absence of mental illness, and 2) the degree of wholeness as determined by the quality of their internal relationships. Therefore, the healing of injuries to a mind or a family requires the treatment of their relationship injuries.
Healing Relational Injuries In The Mind
Fortunately, for individual therapists wanting to learn more about healing the injuries of the mind, there is already an abundance of knowledge available from the expertise of family therapists. And what every therapist who works with couples and families understands about healing relationships is that expertise is required in the art of conflict management. Any system embodying two or more individuals inevitably experiences conflicts between its members’ needs and values. If the system is to remain stable and healthy, it will require effective ways for managing its internal conflicts. Of course this applies to the mind as well, just as Freud taught us. Toward this end, systems therapists teach communication techniques that foster mutual understanding, empathy, and collaboration for the purpose of managing conflicts in healthier ways. This goes hand-in-hand with the need to extinguish patterns of judgment, hostility, and domination because, regardless of how effective they may be for managing conflict, these conflict patterns are destructive to relationships. Individual therapists wanting to help their patients heal their mind’s injuries will need to acquire and teach these same techniques to inner families.
“United we stand, divided we fall” (Greek fabulist, Aesop, c. 550 BCE). This timeless bit of wisdom captures what may be the essence of mental and relationship health. The more united members of a system are, the more stable, adaptive, and enduring that system will be. When systems become divided by conflict, they are weakened, destabilized, and they lose their ability to adapt and survive. Ergo, psychologists, the de facto masters of mental health, not only need to be the masters of relationship health, but must also know how to bring their mastery directly to the family of the subconscious. The goal of this therapy is to bring an individual’s internal family of subpersonalities into the most unified and harmonious state of wholeness possible.
So how do psychologists conduct family therapy in the subconscious? There are three fundamental elements needed to do so: 1) the skills for healing relationships, 2) an understanding of the nature and functions of different subpersonalities, and 3) a method for accessing and interacting with the subconscious family. Of these three, many therapists already have the necessary skills for healing relationships, but have less understanding of the nature of subpersonalities and the skills required for interacting with them.
The Nature of Subpersonalities
There are a number of important things to understand about the nature of subpersonalities. The first is that they all have some form of adaptive function to serve. They all possess inherent value, even the darker ones lurking in the territory Jung called the shadow. But in addition to bringing some form of value to the self, they all come with vulnerabilities and risks, which is why they need to be regulated. The aggression and lust of Freud’s Id both come with value and danger, but once they are effectively tamed, they become effective servants of the self. The same goes for the subpersonality that serves the function of internal authority. Freud called this the Superego, but it has also been referred to as the Judge, Critic, or Parent. This important subpersonality is an essential servant of the self, but it can also be the greatest source of its psychopathology.
What’s also important to understand about subpersonalities is that they tend to be very immature. What this means is that they mostly operate according to instinct and impulse rather than reason and reflection. In other words, they are unenlightened, so doing therapy with subpersonalities is largely a matter of enlightening them.
Enlightening a subpersonality is not difficult to do, provided it is addressed with respect and an appreciation for its value. Doing so will elicit its willingness to cooperate in making changes to its concerning habits. But if an unenlightened Judge tries to compel change, this has the opposite effect and typically makes things worse. Subpersonalities have their own instincts for self preservation, so they become oppositional when threatened. Oppositional minds do not change easily, if at all. Collaborative minds change willingly.
One of the most important subpersonalities often referred to in the self-help literature is the Inner Child. This term is a descendent of the archetype that Jung referred to as the Divine Child. Both are terms for what people ordinarily refer to as their heart. There are actually different “chambers” of the heart, if you will. The romantic heart is one chamber and the nurturing heart is another. But the chamber of the heart that is most relevant for mental health is the vulnerable heart, which is why it comes with the connotation of a child. This is where emotional sensitivity is greatest, where love, comfort, and protection are needed, and where pain and injury are suffered. More than anything else, it is people’s hearts that break and need to be healed.
As mentioned earlier, every subpersonality has a role to serve that comes with a potential risk. These risks all have an impact on the heart. When turmoil between the Judge and other subpersonalities heats up and the Judge begins to use fury, shame, and humiliation to restore order, the heart is the child in the room internalizing all that negativity, making it ill and causing various forms of injury. The heart is the house of the affective pillars which crumble and fall as a result of external and internal assaults. Therapists routinely use their own nurturing skills to help repair these damages. But of even greater value is a therapist’s ability to awaken a patient’s own Inner Nurturer and guide that subpersonality to tend to the needs of its Inner Child. This is in keeping with the wise adage — Catch a person a fish, feed them for a day; Teach a person to fish, feed them for a lifetime. Doing so becomes the foundation for ongoing self-soothing and self-healing.
Healing Internal Relationships
There are six goals to consider for helping people heal their minds. These are: 1) eliminating toxic beliefs and self judgments, 2) developing healthier understandings of subpersonalities, 3) learning healthier systems of self regulation, 4) releasing toxic emotions, 5) restoring affective pillars, and 6) repairing relational bridges. What each of these goals have in common is that they require a set of relational skills to accomplish. What makes relational skills distinct from cognitive and behavioral skills is that they are inherently personal in nature. Furthermore, they are all essentially expressions of love.
Love is another word that is unfortunately absent from the training of psychologists and other psychotherapists. It goes without saying that romantic, social, and sexual versions of love are violations of the therapeutic process, yet it remains true that love is at the heart of the healing process. The most effective therapists routinely draw on the loving skills of sincere empathy, compassionate understanding, non-judgmental acceptance, respect, reassurance, validation, affirmation, collaboration, and more, all within the constraints of appropriate professional boundaries. Even the protection of boundaries is a loving act. Psychotherapists must not throw the baby of love out with the bathwater of boundary violations. Instead, we must embrace the power of loving relational skills and harness them for their ability to heal.
All six of the above treatment goals amount to teaching the family of subpersonalities to relate to one another in more loving ways. Releasing toxic beliefs and self-judgments is loving. Developing healthier understandings of subpersonalities is loving. Regulating internal conflict more humanely is loving. Helping release toxic emotions is loving. And repairing the damaged infrastructure of affective pillars and relational bridges is loving. Healing needs to be a loving process because the mind is a very personal reality. It is not a computer simply needing to have its hardware repaired or programs debugged in order to be more functional. The mind is governed by the relationships between its interconnected members. In order for families to be healthy, they need more than good cognitive and behavioral skills. They need to learn how to relate in loving ways. The same is true for the mind.
The last piece of the healing puzzle is having the skills necessary for accessing and interacting with the subconscious family. Some of the more common methods are hypnosis, visualization, two-chair dialogues, or simply inviting subpersonalities into direct dialogue with the therapist. My preferred method is one learned from the art therapist Lucia Capacchione, Ph.D., in her book, The Power of Your Other Hand (1988, 2019). Capacchione’s method utilizes two-handed writing to allow people to communicate with their subpersonalities and have different subpersonalities communicate directly with one another. Any of these methods can be highly effective, and are a matter of therapist preference.
Presently there are few places for therapists to turn to acquire this entire set of knowledge and skills. Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems is probably the clearest example of one that combines all of these elements (just as its name implies). The IFS model introduces a greater number of subpersonalities than most other models, provides clear explanations of their functions, and teaches a method of applying relational skills to where their relationships are conflicted, damaged, or broken. In doing so, IFS satisfies the criteria for a model and method of healing psychology.
The potential for healing the mind is already at psychology’s doorstep, but it has not been formally welcomed into our home. Psychologists are a family as well, and as such we have conflicts and divisions that may cause us hesitation before we collectively embrace healing psychology as a field of study and practice. Perhaps our greatest divide is between our scientists and practitioners, reflecting the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the objectivity of the brain and the subjectivity of the mind. Our left hand and right hand do not always understand what the other is doing, just as the left and right hemispheres of the brain don’t always know how to integrate their contrasting functions. Every family, mind, and system has the challenging need to integrate its yin and yang opposites in order to be truly whole and healthy. When the field of psychology is ready to become a profession of healing, we will collectively benefit from becoming more whole and healthy as well.
