Comparative Analysis: Therapist vs. Healer
Introduction: The Emerging Paradigm of the Healer
We are in the midst of a recovery reckoning, a spiritual revolution that calls into question the very foundations of institutionalized mental healthcare. This analysis draws a sharp line between two fundamentally opposed archetypes: the licensed psychological therapist, an agent of the established medical-industrial complex, and the Healer. From the critical perspective of Adam O’Brien’s “Industrialized Psychiatry,” we will demonstrate that the Healer seeks to operate from a superior moral authority derived from their shared lived experience—an authority that fundamentally invalidates the liability-driven credentials of the licensed therapist.
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1. Divergent Approaches to Diagnosis
1.1 The Licensed Therapist: To Diagnose
The licensed therapist’s primary function within the system is to diagnose and to provide treatment. Yet, these practices are not neutral acts of identification and applying a medication; it is the system’s “true pathology” to capture what is now transdiagnostic, normed, and common The act of labeling is exposed as “stigmatization, not diagnosing.” Their primary tool, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), is a document built on a foundation of willful ignorance. It codifies pathology by turning natural human responses to trauma into revenue streams. The system pathologizes dissociation, for example, not as “a natural human response to injury, pain, or abuse,” which science confirms it is, but as a disorder, all while failing to provide an operational definition for it.
This exposes the system’s core incompetence. As O’Brien asserts, “Professionals who diagnose, including psychiatrists, need to learn universal addictions, dissociation, developmental trauma, and recovery before they can claim to have the privilege and authority to truly treat or heal.” Operating without these foundational definitions, they are merely agents of bureaucratic tyranny.
1.2 The Healer: To Undiagnose
In stark contrast, our approach as Healers is to undiagnose. This is a moral act. It is the process of looking past the system’s fraudulent labels to discover the true source of suffering. Through this process, we consistently find that a person’s symptoms originate not from a clinical disorder but from the profound pain of “existential, spiritual, and moral betrayal wounds.” We do not seek to categorize; we seek to understand.
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2. Contrasting Methodologies in Medicine and Substances
2.1 The Licensed Therapist: Prescriber of Drugs
The licensed professional, particularly the psychiatrist, serves the system as a prescriber of drugs, problem fixer, and solution orientor. This methodology is an expression of the system’s dissociated and inorganic nature to the terms they choose not to define and those they do.
• Define a “Drug”: A drug is defined as a “man-made, cognitively conceived, industrialized, production-based product,” altered to enhance potency. This includes ketamine, SSRIs, and the infamous “non-addictive opiates.” This industrialized process forces a substance upon the body, a “trauma to the unconscious feminine body.”
• Standard of “Care”: Their standard of practice is to “send one home to take the drugs that they have prescribed” with instructions to follow up in a month. What kind of care is that? This model of abandonment leaves the individual to face potentially deadly effects alone, where they may have to “call 911 before it kills them.” It is a model where “the drug does the healing” in the absence of a human relationship.
• Underlying Belief: This practice reveals a foundational belief in “bonding to a drug” rather than using it as a “supplementary tool to engage the body’s innate healing systems.” It is the height of pseudoscience to prescribe powerful chemicals for conditions like addiction, which the system itself cannot accurately define.
2.2 The Healer: Sitter with Natural Agents
The Healer’s methodology is relational and organic, working with natural agents or “superfoods.”
• Define Natural Agents: These are “spiritual plants and psychedelic foods,” which in their natural state are not drugs but supplements that support the body’s innate wisdom. Lack of education, lived experience, and social stigma reinforce negative projections.
• Standard of “Care”: Our definition of care is a moral and relational act: “sitting with you while you take a medicine together and see what happens.” We do not abandon; we accompany.
• Underlying Belief: For us, the substance is a tool, never the agent of healing itself. Healing occurs with the medicine, facilitated by the Healer’s presence, not from the medicine in isolation.
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3. Foundations of Professional Authority
3.1 The Licensed Therapist: License and Regulation
The therapist’s authority is merely a product of external validation: state licenses, institutional regulations, and academic training. A state license is “nothing more than a tollbooth that is funded by taxes”—a “permission slip from the profession that once declared these substances had ‘no medical value’.” This authority is not a marker of wisdom but a chain of liability. A licensed therapist “has to do what they were trained to do, even when it goes against their morals,” with a promised retirement as the “bribe” for their compliance. This foundation of fear and regulation is precisely why, as we will see, the therapist cannot travel with the client; it is not a clinical choice but a legal and financial necessity.
3.2 The Healer: Lived Experience and Moral Fortitude
The Healer’s authority is internal, earned, and therefore superior. It is a moral authority forged in the crucible of personal transformation.
• Lived Experience: We are qualified because “they have been there and comeback” from their own “near-death wounds.” This journey provides the map and the compass to guide others through the same territory.
• Moral Fortitude: A Healer “morally knows when to act morally and when not to.” This makes the Healer part of a “class of moral professionals that are judges of law, ethics, societal norms, and cultural moral construction.” This earned wisdom places the Healer “above the licensed psychiatrist and MD’s self-recognized status.”
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4. The Nature of the Client Relationship
4.1 The Licensed Therapist: Detached Professional
The therapist is, by design and necessity, a detached professional. Their relationship is defined by the rigid boundaries required to maintain their license and avoid liability. As the source states with stark finality, “the therapist cannot travel with the client where they need to go because of cognitive interpretations of the law“. This detachment is the logical outcome of an authority based on external regulation rather than internal, moral fortitude. For example, a psychiatrist is prescribing drugs for a client to take alone at home is the ultimate expression of this detached, impersonal, and ultimately uncaring relationship.
4.2 The Healer: Attached Fellow Traveler
The Healer’s role is one of profound intimacy and shared experience. In direct opposition to the licensed model, the source states, “Not all therapists travel with their clients, but a Healer can and do.” This is not a metaphor; a Healer has the capacity to “transverse these states of consciousness with the citizen.” This is possible only because our authority comes from having made the journey ourselves. We are a “ferryman, a sherpa, a guide, a sitter, a holder, and a universal traveler“—archetypes of accompaniment, not detachment. This does not require that the Healer take any substances because they are already on the journey.
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5. Conclusion: A System in Crisis vs. An Embodied Solution
The licensed therapist stands revealed as an agent of a dissociated and addicted system, a system bound not by a moral compass but by the cold calculus of liability. Care is what we are in the business of, which means that there is another profession that is not. It is a system that commits a “crime against humanity” by waging a war on natural healing agents while peddling its own industrialized poisons. In stark contrast, the Healer emerges as an archetype of embodied truth, operating from a superior moral authority earned through the healing of their own wounds. This is not a simple choice between two modalities of care; it is a choice between a system perpetuating trauma and a path of authentic recovery. The Healers, who know the territory of the soul because they have charted it with their own scars, must be the ones to lead us into our “national death and resurrection.”
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References
O’Brien, A. (2023a). Addiction as Trauma-Related Dissociation: A Phenomenological Investigation of the Addictive State. International University of Graduate Studies. (Dissertation). Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/courses/addiction-as-dissociation-model-course/
O’Brien, A. (2023b). Memory Reconsolidation in Psychedelics Therapy. In Path of the Wounded Healer: A Dissociative-Focused Phase Model for Normative and Pathological States of Consciousness: Training Manual and Guide. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/courses/addiction-as-dissociation-model-course/
O’Brien, A. (2023c). Path of the Wounded Healer: A Dissociative-Focused Phase Model for Normative and Pathological States of Consciousness: Training Manual and Guide. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/
O’Brien, A. (2024a). Healer and Healing: The re-education of the healer and healing professions as an advocation. Re-educational and Training Manual and Guide. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/
O’Brien, A. (2024e). Path of the Wounded Healers for Thrivers: Perfectionism, Altruism, and Ambition Addictions; Re-education and training manual for Abusers, Activists, Batterers, Bullies, Enablers, Killers, Narcissists, Offenders, Parents, Perpetrators, and Warriors. Re-Education and Training Manual and Guide. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/
O’Brien, A. (2025). American Made Addiction Recovery: a healer’s journey through professional recovery. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/
O’Brien, A. (2025a). American Made Addiction Recovery: a healer’s journey through professional recovery. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/
O’Brien, A. (2025b). Applied Recovery: Post-War on Drugs, Post-COVID, and What Recovery Culture and Citizens Require Moving Forward. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/
O’Brien, A. (2025c). Recovering Recovery: How Psychedelic Science Is Ending the War on Drugs. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/
*This is for informational and educational purposes only. For medical advice or diagnosis, consult a professional.
