In our earlier article, Healing - A Spiral Path to Wellbeing, we introduced a concept of cycles of healing described as a spiral path that brings you increasingly closer to spiritual balance, good health, happiness, and success. In this article, we explore how this healing spiral applies to psychology and the health of your spirit or soul.

It seems as if most people must face some problems with their psychological health at some point in their lives. Unfortunately, many people venture into their experiences of psychological healing with fear and trepidation.

Not only do many of our societies, peers, family, and friends still stigmatize those who seek or require psychological healing, but also the experiences of psychological healing can often be painful and traumatic in and of themselves.

Our purpose is not to discuss the stigmatization of people whose psychological healing journeys may have been hindered by social stigmatization or ostracization; however, we will reiterate here that we strongly urge people never to judge or condemn anyone for any reason, including their history of their pursuit of psychological healing.

Our true purpose is to investigate several common psychological states regarded as illnesses, such as depression, alienation, anxiety, delusions, or breakdowns and demonstrate that these processes, typically regarded as illnesses are, in fact, parts of our natural healing processes.

We are designed to heal ourselves.

Psychological problems arise form cognitive dissonance when our minds must resolve a difference between our beliefs and our perceptions.

Differences between our models of reality and our experiences of reality are called cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the foundation for all jokes.

Most belief systems appear to be flawed in various ways. This is because all belief systems derive from human cultures. Humans are prone to making errors in perception and logic. Because of these flaws, it is inevitable that we will experience cognitive dissonance at times.

A healthy person adapts their belief systems to agree with conflicting input through a process of validation where they examine the information that conflicts with their beliefs and then decide to change their beliefs if they determine the new information more accurately reflects the nature of the world they experience.

However, fearful people reflexively defend their beliefs, even when their beliefs appear irrational to other people, often even including themselves.
All people rely upon what they believe they know about the world around them for their survival. When our beliefs are challenged, we may feel personally threatened.

A person who experiences a lot of anxiety or who has developed paranoid traits may be unable to resolve experiences of cognitive dissonance successfully. They may be pre-disposed to always defend their beliefs rather than acknowledge the possibility that their beliefs are somehow mistaken.

Once this condition sets in, subsequent perceptions and cognitive behaviors must all be described consistently with the false beliefs they have chosen to defend.

The process of critical thinking becomes abbreviated; a habit of failing to test the truth of perceptions and beliefs arises and persons in this state become increasingly delusional.

However, all of these delusions are coping mechanisms. They are our means to compensate for any irrational beliefs we are afraid to challenge or change. As such, these coping mechanisms perform a vital role in our psychological wellbeing.

Therefore, delusions are a form of psychological healing, an effort to heal experiences of cognitive dissonance by adapting perception to agree with belief.

Most people behave in this manner.

All beliefs systems are flawed and subject to critical challenges, so all people wind up learning to compensate for their flawed beliefs by filtering their perceptions to exclude anything that challenges or threatens their chosen worldviews.

This is part of what is meant by the concept that the world is only illusion. We condition ourselves to see what we believe we should see, rather than seeing anything as it really is.

This is actually healthy. All people behave this way.

This process is typically only perceived as an illness when our coping mechanisms fail to adequately compensate for the differences between our perceptions and our beliefs in a manner that impairs our health, success, or happiness.

When we decompensate, we experience a mental collapse or breakdown because we can no longer deny the information that challenges our chosen beliefs.

People are very fearful of having a breakdown, however our mental breakdowns can often be some of the most rewarding experiences we are capable of having.

There is a lot of emotional pain associated with most mental breakdowns. Often the pain is overwhelming, and efforts to cope with the pain may cause us to regress, to dissociate from the real events around us and resume an earlier state of mind, one in which we have not yet had to face the unreality of our own beliefs.

All dissociative states are used to protect us from pain. Hence, dissociative states often perform vital roles in our psychological and emotional wellbeing.

When a person has recovered form the initial shock of whatever pain has caused them to retreat into an altered state of mind they may return from their dissociative state and attempt to deal with the underlying causes of their pain more rationally.

Our breakdowns are really another form of psychological healing. In order to change our old, flawed beliefs systems we must tear them down. This is what happens in a breakdown; we break down everything we believe to simpler parts in search of the root causes of our beliefs.

Without our breaking-down processes we cannot rebuild our models of reality, our old models stand in the way, challenging any new models of reality we are trying to adopt.

Please consider. Evolution favors animals who most successfully adapt to their environments.

In the same manner, evolution favors all mental processes that help us to adapt to the worlds we live in successfully. Processes like alienation, depression, anxiety, mental breakdowns, etc. would not have evolved and survived as parts of our human psyches if they did not have valuable purposes that made us more fit to survive as a species.

Alienation and depression must therefore also have healing properties.

As cognitive dissonance increases, we tend to become increasingly alienated and depressed. We seek isolation because our contact with other people distresses us. Contact with other people distresses us because it seems as if everyone consistently challenges our worldviews, making us feel as if we stand alone against the entire world around us.

As our isolation increases, we typically become more depressed. Humans are social animals by nature, and our efforts to protect our beliefs from contamination or challenge by other people sets us up to be in conflict with ourselves.

On the one hand, we are instinctively driven to socialize, we suffer if we fail to meet our needs as social human beings. We become angry with ourselves because we know we are causing ourselves to suffer by isolating ourselves from the people around us who appear to threaten our chosen beliefs.

Anger turned inwards becomes depression. When we consistently direct our anger against ourselves we develop an increasingly hostile attitude toward ourselves that expresses itself as self-sabotage or self-punishment. We condition ourselves to hurt ourselves.

Depression becomes a serious issue when our conditioned responses to hurt ourselves become consistent habitual responses. Anything that upsets us may trigger a new round of self-punishment or self-sabotage.

However, depression always presents us with opportunities to heal.

All human cognitive illnesses result from fear.

Fear of pain, fear of feelings of helplessness, fear of feelings of isolation or fear of depression are at the roots of all of our psychological coping mechanisms.

When we are depressed we are closest to the root causes of the real issues which cause us pain. So depression becomes our opportunity to heal.

Responding from fear and running away from our traumatic memories results in increasingly elaborate compensation mechanisms that may inevitably break down, so it is necessary to learn to respond to fear related to old traumatic memories by embracing whatever we fear, by accepting it.

Over the years we acquire skills and coping mechanisms that enable us to resolve those old traumatic experiences successfully and move on.

However, our belief systems often cripple our recovery because they were adopted to protect us from those painful memories. We blind ourselves to the new strengths we have acquired and fail to test ourselves to see how much stronger we have become. Instead, we may continue to repeat our old cognitive behavior, we may continue to choose to run away.

Once we accept and embrace the source of our old traumatic experiences, we have won the game. We recognize that we are stronger today, than we were when we were younger, when the hurts that conditioned us to be fearful began to drive us to retreat within elaborate systems of belief in order to compensate for pain and suffering we were once helpless to change.

By embracing our depression, we are brought face to face with our fears and can learn to resolve them so that all the subsequent conditioning that finally disabled us form coping with our lives successfully can be healed.

In this manner, many conditions considered to be psychological ailments are really cures for what truly ails us, our fear.

Alienation is part of the process of healing because we require isolation for motivation. The pain of our alienation motivates us to get to the root of our problems.

Aside form motivation, alienation provides us with the privacy we need to reconsider what we should choose to believe.

We require privacy because we are very vulnerable and too easily influenced when we are depressed. We require isolation because we do not know whom to trust to help us through our dark nights of our souls. Isolation gives us a unique perspective, our own perspective.

In isolation, we are free to consider valid ideas that may not be supported by our family, friends, or peers. We are free to remake ourselves in an image closer to our own ideals of who we desire to be. Our alienation therefore serves to protect us like a chrysalis protects the transforming pupae who will soon become a butterfly.

Once we learn how to use these psychological states to our best advantages, we can begin to use them more routinely to help us heal.

We may then go through many periods of alienation, depression, delusions, and break-downs, but each time we will emerge healthier, more rational, more capable of facing our challenges in life successfully.

Each time we repeat a cycle of healing our old wounds and rationalizing our old dependent, faulty cognitive processes we make ourselves stronger, better fit to heal deeper wounds.

This is the meaning of the healing spiral. With each repetition we grow closer to the truth of who we are and the means to exemplify ourselves, to ennoble ourselves and to succeed.

Enjoy!

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