Healing Communities
“The healing of our present woundedness may lie in recognizing and reclaiming the capacity we all have to heal each other, the enormous power in the simplest of human relationships”
~ Rachel Naomi Remen
The Healing Communities Initiative seeks to foster deep healing in individuals, communities, and societies to create a healthier and more resilient world. This is achieved through the development of interventions that address the needs of different groups and contexts using therapeutic tools and resources. Programmes seek to support health and prevent disorder through increasing individuals, groups and communities’ capacity to relate, regulate and process emotions effectively.
Trauma
Trauma is pervasive throughout the world and has negative impact on individuals, communities and society. Throughout the western world, mental health diagnoses are rising amongst all age groups, and mental disorders are now understood to be the largest health challenge of the 21st century. There is a ‘hidden epidemic’ of early life trauma that lies at the root of many psychiatric disorders as well as a wide-range of chronic health conditions. Humans tend to repeat traumatic experience, transmitting it to others, leading to groups and societies that become ‘trauma-organised’. There is a growing realisation that trauma is not just an individual experience but a collective one.
There are signs that various aspects of the human condition in under stress and this is being expressed in rising rates of mental health problems in children and adults. To counter this trend, as a culture we need to develop the person’s capacity to relate socially and emotionally to other human beings through intersubjective communication, processing and regulating of affect.
There is a need to ‘reboot’ mental health approaches in order to address the population-level burden of this problem. A public health approach seeks to balance efficacy with ‘reach’ – getting at higher proportion of the population. Most people who experience trauma never get professional help, so healing practices must move beyond clinical settings to support social health through a socio-cultural model of health which skills and empowers people to support collective well-being. A key aim is to prevent the intergenerational transmission of trauma and risk through supporting secure attachment patterns.
Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy has been criticised for developing a false independence and eroding communal life. The philosophers stone remains the successful and widespread application of psychotherapeutic ideas. Psychotherapy is available in private sectors of high-income societies but it is much more difficult to access within public services and even more so for demographic minorities. Depth psychology has failed to expand its client base beyond ‘the articulate middle-class’ in order to engage with groups in society who struggle to access psychotherapy.
Psychotherapy can offer something beyond the consulting room. The practice of psychotherapy rests on self-reflectivity; it emphasises the centrality of relationships; and it focuses on human lived experience. Psychotherapy is a living craft, a set of relational skills which come to life in conversation with an ‘Other’. To practice this craft is to be with the other, to be attuned and available to the other. It means to demonstrate a positive stance in relation to the other, in a warm and human way. Psychotherapy can support cultural evolution if it can be made ‘exportable’, ‘user-friendly’, and accessible to large parts of the population. The concept of mentalization is a fitting concept that can be used to extend therapeutic practice into the community. Many therapeutic modalities have a vast array of tools and resources that can be offered.
Prioritising prevention
A secure attachment history provides the foundation for coping with adversity, probably due to a combination of being able to draw on internal resources and external social support. Secure attachment equates with emotional health and is the main defence against trauma, while insecure attachment creates a predisposition to later forming psychiatric disorders. These dispositions are being set up in the first thousand days of life. This points to the need to protect the developing brains of infants and young children through aggressive early intervention and prevention initiatives. Healing Communities can offer direction to these interventions.
A resource-based approach
A basic principle of the Healing Communities approach is that everything is oriented towards empowering people through accessing resources that support resilience. The emphasis is on ‘what is strong with you’, rather than ‘what is wrong with you’. Healing Communities abides by the principle of emotional coherence. In emotional coherence the assumption is made that people’s thoughts, feelings and behaviours make sense and are coherent based on their emotional learnings and life experiences.
Healing communities takes a resource-based approach which means that the focus is always upon what strengthens and empowers people. In approaching healing, it has been emphasised that a strengths-based approach should be used rather than a deficit and problem-based approach that emphasises pathology. The primary resource for humans is other humans.
Community
Community is at the core of this model as it is a concept that is critical for both healthy development and healing. In modern societies, community life has broken down and these webs of connections are critical to our survival. This has led to a ‘crisis of connection’ and relational poverty. Globalisation and the destruction of local, traditional cultures has led to a rise in the prevalence of mental illness in the developing world. Trauma can be understood as a chronic disruption of connectedness. Humans have survived and thrived in the face of trauma throughout history through attachment – connection to each other and the social group from cradle to grave. The solidarity of the group provides the strongest antidote to traumatic experience. The social group has traditionally provided a wide variety of ritualised ways for the wounded to put their experience into words. Celebratory and ceremonial rituals and works of art create a way to organise these experiences. There is a need to regenerate the concept of community to support health.
Judy Atkinson writes: “Community is where I can share my innermost thoughts, bring out the depths of my own feelings, and know they will be understood… Communication makes community and is the possibility of human beings living together for their mutual psychological, physical and spiritual nourishment”. This notion of community created the context for traditional approaches to healing.
Traditional healing models
Our ancestors developed rhythmic practices to heal trauma and loss. Amongst aboriginal cultures many common healing principles are present. The core elements in these rituals include: Creating a meaningful narrative within a broader belief system that can make sense of the trauma; the trauma gets re-enacted creatively through the arts in words, dance and song; different somatosensory experiences are employed including touch, and patterned repetitive movements; and all of this occurs in an intensely relational environment with the whole clan participating. This provides a total neurobiological experience that accesses all the different parts of the brain by retelling the story, holding each other, massaging and moving, singing. This template can be utilised today to create interventions that support healing in community. The expressive arts are natural therapies that hold huge potential for healing and are utilised in this model. From ancient times the arts have always been associated with healing self and community.
Knowledge and skills
Interventions seek to equip people with knowledge and skills that support socioemotional health. Knowledge provides an important frame for understanding but the main emphasis is on practicing and building skills (‘learning by doing’) as it is predominantly skills that hold the most potential to create positive impact and change. HC programmes highlight the importance of prioritising ‘experiential knowing’over ‘conceptual knowing’.
The competencies and skills developed in these interventions aim not only to support health and healing but prevent the intergenerational transmission of trauma and insecure attachment patterns which create a risk for the development of disease and disorder.
Foundations
Healing Communities interventions rest on the foundation of developing interpersonal and intrapersonal skill and awareness and regulation skills. These skills are developed primarily through the following methods:
- Mentalizing and related concepts like ‘mind-mindedness’, mindsight and attunement
- Emotion coaching skills and the ‘change triangle’
- The ‘listening and learning’ approach where people are equipped with essential listening skills to support them to listen to and learn about themselves and others
Therapeutic tools
This model draws on a wide range of tools and resources that support regulation and healing:
- Psychosensory exercises like tapping, havening, massage/touch
- Somatic practices like embodiment, orienting, breathwork, resourcing, focusing and grounding
- Intention, attention, awareness and the ‘observing self’
- Attachment theory (the ideal parent protocol) and polyvagal theory (Exercise that activate the vagus nerve and the social engagement system)
- Parts work, inner child/ re-parenting/ inner community and ‘externalising’ practices
- Bilateral stimulation, vocalisation, imagery, eye movements and movement
- The use of rhythm, synchrony, the expressive arts, imagination and play (Movement, sound, story-telling and silence) to create shared regulation.
- Making sense of life story and creating a coherent narrative
Healing communities work is informed by research on change and transformation, in particular, recent research on memory reconsolidation, the brain’s only known mechanism for creating transformational change.
The 3 R’s
Interventions seeks to develop the 3 R’s by optimising Relational capacity, supporting Regulation, developing the capacity for Reflection. Research shows that these three capacities are central to physical, mental and social health. The 3 R’s support the development of growth-promoting environments and cultures that both nurture healthy development and support healing when development has been derailed.
How it works
Healing communities works with groups, communities and organisations to design and implement intervention that support prevention, promotion of health, healing and recovery. Interventions are tailored towards the specific needs of the target population through a collaborative process which seeks to equip people with the tools and resources to create growth-promoting environments. Knowledge and practices from a wide variety of fields is drawn on including psychotherapy, attachment theory, Interpersonal Neurobiology, trauma theory, Contemplative traditions, Indigenous knowledge and other healing modalities.
Each one, teach one
The programme also draws on the ‘each one, teach one’ philosophy to support embedding the skills and practices in communities and organisations. The phrase ‘Each One, Teach One’ is an African proverb that originated in the United States during slavery when Africans were denied education. When someone learned how to read or write, it became their responsibility to teach someone else. The idea is to spread knowledge for the betterment of your community. A similar practice can support a rippling effect with socio-emotional competence.
Model and structure
This model is inspired by a number of educational, therapeutic and coaching approaches that work with groups, including the Sanctuary model, the We Al-Li model, attachment-based groups, restorative practice and other Indigenous practices.
Target groups
All groups can benefit from these interventions but they are particularly important for vulnerable and marginalised groups. Parenting programmes, day-care, schools, prisons, work places and community settings are some of the contexts where these interventions can be applied.