Memory Theory, Healing, and Practice
“These memories can’t wait!” Talking Heads
Introduction
Memory and the mechanisms by which memory networks operate were probably main sources of interest to early psychological professionals who were curious about their “subjects'”, “patients'”, and “clients'” tales of woes. Creating a new profession out of the medical profession that provided a “talking cure”, they relied on qualitative evidence and the passage of time to support their clinical and quantitative observations (e.g., did it work and how much). Historically speaking, like a man-like-child man-explaining history to his wife that she already knows, psychology’s grandfathers gave birth to the modern male profession of Psychology around the turn of the century in 1880-1900. However, the feminine and qualitative profession of arts, philosophy, and world literature is much much older and contains the same truths as all religions, faiths, and practices.
Industrial psychology has become a religion and the church and therapists have become a substitute for the clergy. Just like the church and birth of Christ, after psychology’s professional birth, they became a societal arm of government and political culture. We imagine that the founders of modern psychology were trying to understand how memory works, how traumatic memory operates, and how the associative memory networks function (e.g., answering questions surrounding the unconscious and consciousness). The reality is that they were looking for new ways to answer old questions. As we all know, answers differ depending on who you pose the questions to and how you ask them.
We now know that the founders of psychology were trying to understand how people could live dissociated from the different types of memory (e.g., somatic, declarative, implicit, explicit, long-term, short-term, or working). This is elaborately explored in our doctoral work (O’Brien, 2023a). As a result of our study and metacognitive analyses (O’Brien, 2023b; O’Brien, 2023c; O’Brien, 2024a; O’Brien, 2024b; O’Brien, 2024c), we are now exploring the existential nature of existence (presence, consciousness, awareness, meta). We have observed that the field of psychology is significantly lacking in intellectual integrity, philosophical theory, and moral development. Our two works on this (O’Brien, 2024b; O’Brien, 2024c) hold our truths for those who want to explore, but you must first explore our foundational documents (O’Brien, 2023a; O’Brien, 2024a).
Orientation
This writing is an effort to help people who report having psychological “issues” or experiences that are dissociative in nature and want to understand why and how to relieve this existential state of concern or stress. It is important for us to note that stress and the symptoms of stress are normal. More often than not, unresolved trauma produces stress responses (e.g., nausea, dizziness, anger, resentment, hurt). These are frequently a result of dissociation and addictive processes that are considered transdiagnostic (O’Brien, 2023a). These symptoms or dynamics cause the need for help. Despite whether or not that help comes in the form of a healing relationship, medication, or fate, the cause of the symptoms of stress exists because one must first get sick or be sick in order to get well. In psychology’s case, you have to remember your last sickness to initiate healing.
We posit that this lack of understanding of mental health and level of awareness is because psychology has not accurately defined addiction; therefore, trauma and dissociation are not defined accurately either; nor is the healing process that they are so eager to know. This sick system has become addicted to/dependent on their role in society as professionals and they do not consciously know it or, at the least, they are unwilling to act on what they say behind closed doors about their professions. This will be destructive to its own end; because the healing process involves tearing to repair, destruction breeds the opportunity for repair. This is why we are advocating for the old but new profession of Healer to be honored by medical and psychological models of care (O’Brien, 2024a). This is because these business models and medical standards of care have been selling things people do not need (e.g., soda), telling them things that are not true (e.g., non-addictive opiate), and requiring compliance and obedience over common sense (O’Brien, 2024c).
With our Path of the Wounded Healer (PWH) approach and Addiction as Dissociation Model (ADM) research, we present a brief synopsis of our take on memory theory, memory healing, and memory practice (O’Brien, 2023b; O’Brien, 2024a). This is an effort to let people know more about our work and what they are getting themselves into with our services, particularly our use of psychedelics, meditation, recovery, spiritual growth, and posttraumatic growth. We use these tools to help people enhance their healing by learning about what is going on with them psychologically, where their experiences are coming from, and what is required for favorable outcomes in any healing process.
In this offering, we present on the noted memory concepts provided in our foundational Healing literature to help establish it as an “evidence-based” profession (O’Brien, 2024a). This is an effort to ensure that we can do it without having to jump through the hoops of certifying what we already require for ourselves: truth. We do not need more regulations, laws, rules, certifications, or degrees; what we do need is people with credentials who follow the regulations, valid laws, ethics, and rules and start doing their jobs, instead of their careers (O’Brien, 2024b; HERE). We are also publicly laying the foundation for understanding how perfectionism, altruism, and ambition addictions already exist, but are not diagnosable because of limitations in “the system’s” professional moral development, degree of healing, ability to think critically, and spiritual growth.
Data
Memory Theory has been presented in the literature at different times over the course of psychology’s history (HERE). With a better understanding of memory and memory systems today (O’Brien, 2023a; O’Brien, 2023c; O’Brien, 2024a), contentions between schools of philosophical thought appear to be language and awareness-based (awareness of self or selves and level of acceptance).
People often believe that those with psychological education can “read your mind” and “predict” behavior – or so psychology would like customers/clients think and believe because it is good for business. What we know as Healers is that psychology has some explaining to do for the direction the 21st century is taking and for the numerous false claims that leave us all with a track record that can only be equated to false advertising and fraud. How can you create a professional healing relationship without some level of self-disclosure or connection to daily life? Based on the amnesic patterns that we have outlined in various writings (HERE), we must define memory healing to preserve our right to share something private with a trusted/licensed professional and not have it go onto our citizen’s/client’s/patient’s/customer’s “permanent record.” Our recent stance on the field of psychology as a pseudoscience (O’Brien, 2024c), a victim of professional gatekeeping and profit motive (O’Brien, 2024b), and committing fraud by their own industry standards (HERE), leads us to once again hold “the system” to our level of recovery (HERE), spiritual development, and the same moral-ethical standards (O’Brien, 2024c) that they required of us (O’Brien, 2024b; HERE).
None of what we have stated means that psychology does not have its place in modern society or does not have honest intentions, but when outcomes are used to justify societal control, substantiate existing power structures, and maintain an addicted status quo, it becomes essential to have a clear understanding of what reality is. When laws and ethics are used to limit citizens’ moral freedom to choose what is right for them, their bodies, their minds, and their children, we live dissociatively in what addiction truly is and what recovery requires. The fact that modern psychology does not have a clear definition of addiction means that psychology, diagnostics, pathology, and the business of psychology (e.g., the law, insurances, and policy) are incomplete and that the laws, policies, and culture around them are off. Our operational definition of addiction reveals why (O’Brien, 2023a) and our solutions are universal (O’Brien, 2024a).
Memory Theory
Our Memory Theory states that our shared and personal reality is based on memory and that memory becomes the body because everything has a past. This also assumes that nothing (no-thing) is something (like how space is not no-thing because it is something) and that it too has a past; therefore, eternity is memory. We can confirm that we know what we know on this plane of existence.
An experience is a feeling and a feeling is an experience that is connected to some event that has happened (memory) or is happening (living memory); this can also be an imprint or impression (e.g., the gist) of what happened. As a result, we contend that memory is the basis of our/all reality and that a difference between “living” and “dead”, “conscious and unconscious”, and all types memory exists. Lived experience imprints reality onto “dead” or non-conscious experiences like our body (because the body is the unconscious; O’Brien, 2023a; O’Brien, 2024c). This is rather important to define because we cannot have one without the other (O’Brien, 2023a).
As an experience is filtered through an observers’/witnesses’ shared experience (mental conceptualization of memory), we can become aware of the different points of view or perspectives that are available. The ability to report on what memory is is based on listening to others share and describe their past experiences (e.g., words used and meaning ascribed). The philosophical point is that memory appears to be the basis of our reality and deserves to be better defined by psychology. As the body keeps the score, memory becomes all that we know, all that we are, and all that there is.
Memory Healing
Memory Healing is memory reconsolidation (O’Brien, 2023a; Ecker et al., 2012), which is a known evidenced-based psychological algorithm that helps unprocessed/stuck memories move from short-term memory into long-term memory storage. This process is what people feel when they put the past behind them. For this, we use the example of last Wednesday’s lunch to model what it feels like to have a memory in long-term storage. When we see the physical body as the psychological unconscious, our body becomes the storage space; our physical beings are living and dying memories that renew as we age and reenact our past in the present. However, when we refer to “death”, we do not mean death like one you may have been led to believe in; rather, like with rings of a tree, the past is still here and cannot go anywhere but here. Death can be conceived as the past that fertilizes the present, in psychological terms. Therefore, the body keeps the score and creates a sort of instruction manual for surviving this realm of existence. Within this physical existence, we feel; therefore, we know. The primary healing service we provide activates our innate healing systems, namely the endocannabinoid system, through mindful intention, memory reconsolidation, and the process of healing oneself.
From a psychological perspective, healing refers to the repair and recovery process of reintegrating unresolved memories or painful experiences through the algorithmic process known as memory reconsolidation (MR; O’Brien, 2023a; O’Brien, 2023b; Ecker et al., 2012). MR alleviates the symptoms of stress and promotes adaptive storage in the memory system so that psychological stabilization can be achieved. Mohammad (2016) states that memories physically become a part of us and our research builds upon this by seeing the body as the unconscious and Time and genetics as forms of memory (O’Brien, 2023a). When reality is distorted and memories are called “altered states of consciousness” or “hallucinations”, we start to see that this is a matter of perspective and, depending on what side you are on, awareness of this may or may not follow. Memory is equivalent to consciousness or, in this case, unconscious awareness and it is the source of qualitative understanding and wisdom. Psychological models that utilize meditation, dual attention, or dual attunement (i.e., practically every therapy in existence) access the adaptive information process (AIP) (Shapiro, 2018), MR (O’Brien, 2023a; Ecker et al., 2012), and mindful dissociation (O’Brien, 2023a).
As Healers listen to others and hear the implicit narrative that people are not sharing, we become attuned to the hidden truths in psychology that are unconsciously expressing themselves in every interaction. Many do not know that this is happening; they come looking for help, direction, or an orientation to what is going on with them. Once this is answered, the healing can begin. Psychology, in all its pretense and whatever people coming to psychology think about it, believes that its knowledge is complete. This relates to truths about what is going on inside people’s minds more so than it relates to defining psychology, but what people coming to psychology forget is that both parties have memory amnesia; therefore, the field lacks the historical context to be making informed decisions. Also, as a result of environmental factors known neurotoxins, poorly educated parents, survival parenting, unconscious shaming, activities that promote head injuries at a young age, and a lack of nutrients in the diet all point to reasons why we are not optimized as a citizenry.
Learning how to perform memory healing is like learning the Heimlich maneuver and, combined with our Meeting Area Screening and Assessment (MASA), PWH approach, Posttraumatic Gym and Spa, and Addiction as Dissociation Model research, we are confident that we are able to help anyone learn self-healing. We are also certain that our methods will safeguard everyone from finding something they forgot. We educate on healing because what we learn from healing is healing.
Practice
Based on our understanding of memory (e.g., memory theory), we posit that everything (and nothing philosophically) is memory because what does not have a past? Time, genetics, and space all have a past so eternity is memory, which leads towards a timeless practice. With the importance of memory healing and theory, one would think that they would be commonly understood in psychological practice. Ecker et al. (2020) discusses the importance of memory reconsolidation and how this essential skill is not readily taught in masters level programs.
Our Memory Theory states that since memories become a part of us, they can be expressed through the activation of theme and association based on imprinted or conditioned material. How memories are stored (traumatic, everyday, priority) or organized (short-term, long-term, somatic, procedural, declarative, and implicit) varies and can be personified or expressed in states of activation, trauma, and reprocessing (reenactments). Memory is where the unconscious gains its knowledge (e.g., cataloged by lived and emotional experience) and this is the consciousness of the unconscious. As a result and in practice, the objective and subjective point of view is relative to the known level of self and their known lived experience (e.g., which self is aware or unaware). This is why our Meeting Area Screening and Assessment (MASA) is important to the developing clinician and field of psychology. It is that which creates distance between psychology and the healing practices that we utilize. People’s psychological organization can be seen using our MASA process, but it is not easily shown or explained to readers. You are going to have to come and experience it at one of our performances/healing events to truly understand for yourself.
Discussion
From our Healer advantage point (O’Brien, 2023c; O’Brien, 2024a; HERE), the professional psychological and therapeutic fields must reevaluate the mixed messages they send, condition citizens into, and espouse to clients and families; or they must start educating clients on what therapy really is and isn’t. This is where the Healer comes in to help define therapy from their outside qualitative perspective. Well, here it is: the body is the unconscious and therefore requires unconscious informed consent (O’Brien, 2024a) for favorable outcomes. Acceptance of this would resolve a lot of conflicts with professionals and clients who feel uncertainty when giving conscious informed consent. By not obtaining unconscious informed consent, safety planning for normal expressions of distress or fantasy or being forced to take medications with low efficacy for conditions that don’t exist should raise alarms for any informed consumer (O’Brien, 2024c).
As a core concept, understanding how memory healing is universal (O’Brien, 2023a; HERE) and how the process works are easy things to teach, but difficult concepts to live with due to professional gatekeeping and incompetence. Therefore, we must highlight the differences between therapy and healing and why it is important to distinguish them as separate.
Therapy is different from healing because healing is about being together with the healing, instead of “fixing” a diagnosis or problem and sending you on your way. The way the field of psychology completely ignores the healing relationship is magical thinking based on irrational beliefs. In therapy, the expert is the “provider” because they diagnose and are held legally liable if something goes “wrong”. Comparatively, in healing, the client assumes an equal level of responsibility for outcomes because we are all in this together. The Healer profession can be similar to other licensed professions, but it differs in its business model setup because it is designed to facilitate a more educator-student dynamic through experiential and implicit teaching. This style helps address developmental trauma, normative dissociation, and existential or universal addictions (not diagnosable conditions).
If there is a goal of the healing profession, it is to prepare for death(s) by creating a meditation and spiritual emotional healing practice that suits the individual, their needs, and communities at large. This provides the opportunity for moral development, spiritual growth, and world healing. Paradoxically, therapists are trained to say that the client is the expert of their experience and that clients already have the answers they seek; comparatively, a Healer knows that there is no difference and there are no answers. This juxtaposition often breeds miscommunication, maintains illegal norms, and is a way of disciplining professions to entrap and gate-keep other professions from doing their ethical and moral responsibilities to clients (O’Brien, 2024b; O’Brien, 2024c). Clinicians legally have to follow ethical guidelines, ethical practice, and established protocols (which is rather impossible in the lived experience of clinical practice, as we have pointed out; O’Brien, 2024b) to ensure that clients remain safe throughout the therapeutic process; and yet, the law does not have to follow the law (O’Brien, 2024b), common sense (O’Brien, 2024c), or Moral-Ethics (O’Brien, 2024d; HERE). How is this fair, logical, or sustainable?
In a common-sense reality, by reacting to a perceived crisis, emergency, or danger with extremes, the powers that be create conditions of disparity and maintain the toxic modern world that they produced. We, and future generations, have to buy into what they sell in order to survive it. Without unconscious awareness, we are consciously unaware because even payment establishes the relational power dynamic of the therapeutic relationship, which can generally be agreed upon, but presents a hierarchical dynamic that requires unconscious consent – or at least an understanding from the conscious self (if there is one available) as to what they are getting themselves into or preparing clients for an outcome (positive or negative) as the result of healing or therapy. For them to pay us to hurt them so that people can feel healing is a concept that needs to be explained better to all layers of the person, which our work does, instead of being a service-oriented transaction that is often equated to fixing what is not broken. Their lack of qualitative reasoning, logic, and awareness allows us to see that our qualitative side has emerged on the right side of history, while theirs is still arguing over what History is and trying to figure out what history isn’t. Plain and simple: History is memory; therefore, your body is a story and that is your unconscious level of awareness (e.g., lived experience).
Healers are experts in the dual nature of both knowing and not knowing an answer. In therapy, there is a manufactured relationship that is transactional. Comparatively, in Healing, there is an honest person who has come back from struggle to help others survive theirs and can tell you about it if need be. Self-disclosure and the lived experience of Healers are so important that they can supersede ethical responsibility. This is because morality is at play and dominates in these situations. These can also be used as methods of assessing and screening (MASA).
As Healers, we invite clients into our lives and memories, just as they invite us into theirs. This is important because you cannot heal without an honest relationship. This is akin to being neighbors, friendly and honest, but with healthy relational boundaries in which the truth can be told without consequence. The Healer profession emerges as an advocation against therapists not being able to tell their clients that the medical model is a ruse, mockery of healing, and a professional way to control the population from revolting against the injustices that they are creating (e.g., the conditions that create the symptoms). Our work is an effort to a) heal undiagnosable addictions like perfectionism, altruism, and ambition, and b) provide a roadmap to heal from developmental trauma, normative dissociation, and our universal addictions. We believe that this is more humane for people suffering from what we see as essential aspects of mental health that are missing from modern industrialized psychological concepts of what now constitutes a mental health “disorder.” Also, their business model and laws have proven to be self-serving to the ruling or privileged class (O’Brien, 2024b).
This is where the concept of “21 rules, but 1 will do” comes into play because a Healer does not need laws to tell them to protect children being abused – they would’ve already done so, simply because it is the moral thing to do. Healers do not diagnose; that would be against the Moral-Ethical Code because diagnoses produce more stigma, separation, classism, and elitism. Medication management is another place where it is necessary to define the Moral Code because people who provide/prescribe medicines and do not sit with clients while they journey cannot possibly know how it affects them. This is why medical doctors should not be prescribing psych meds.
The Healer sits and experiences (through mindful dissociation) their medicine (whatever that is) with the client to see if it is right for them. This is again where modern psychology has failed because a) prescribers are not the ones clients are regularly talking to and b) clients don’t always share the part of their selves-system that experiences the medicine with their provider. Consequently, prescribers gain understanding primarily based on self-report. Our work represents prescribers’ inability to measure their own level of awareness with the Stages of Change (O’Brien, 2023a). While prescriber standards are to send the patient home with their medication to see what happens, our standards suggest that we be with clients when consuming medicine to watch how the unconscious responds. We use our MASA to see if there is agreement and informed approval from the unconscious. In some cases, particularly with prescriber-initiated medications, it is assumed that the client will remain on the medication for the rest of their life. In contrast, a Healer obtains unconscious informed consent before making such an assumption and prior to the client consuming any medicine. Although Healers accept that diagnoses exist, they have a different way of assessing, screening, and conceptualizing the situation altogether.
Clinical psychology sees problems in the solution and Healers see solutions in problems. This is an embodiment of the quantitative and qualitative debate that we’ve resolved in our work (O’Brien, 2024b; O’Brien, 2024c). The debate exemplifies the difference between the two professions’ philosophical orientations and foundations. Healers help people prepare to die by helping them learn what it means to be alive, present, conscious, and in the Now. Since we found resolve around this issue, the rebirth of the Healing profession is now in our collective conscious awareness and will be like the return of the Ghost Dances from Indigenous Peoples or the Oracle at Delphi, where the gas promoted access to different levels of consciousness for the priests. The people who are scared of this type of living or knowledge are those who simply do not understand dissociation, addiction, or what it means to be mentally healthy or healed.
This actuary/observer world produced the death and destruction that we saw in World War I and World War II. It will also be what starts World War III; the wall of addiction denial is so thick that this is the only place their logic can lead, unless checks and balances can regain control. Well-trained people are particularly prone to industrialization, brainwashing, or corporatization and, while they claim to lead with professionalism, based on their track record, we do not wish to follow in their path. From our recovery perspective, change will not happen until people stop following the metaphorical “popular kids in grade school” because they think that they know more than they do. According to McKay and Coreil (2024), professionals can be easily swayed by well-trained professionals because they lack an understanding of research, even though they are trained at a master’s level and specifically took classes in the subject.
We believe that our work highlights the shortsightedness of the system’s educational process, as does the publication of a work that calls a somatic approach “pseudoscientific” (O’Brien, 2024c; McKay & Coreil, 2024; HERE). Such an act is more representative of the system that the authors embody, but nonetheless, they cannot see that by stating this, they show their own level of ignorance and recovery. Their inability to realize this prior to the peer review process and publication is why we, as Healers, see the need to separate from this quantitative dissociated world. Again, which research are we supposed to follow (O’Brien, 2024c)? Which fearless academic leaders speak the truth? We highlight that qualitative research is more reliable and our work here continues to validate the need for Healers to separate from people who do not and will not get “it”F until someone points it out to them. As Sam Beam sings, “the choir is sick of the song but they still got [to] stand.” Or the Talking Heads, “facts are getting the best of them.” Or Bob Marley, “emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds.”
Our implicit observations are that the field of psychology has been shaped by legal precedent, governmental policy, and insurance businesses that have no right to be involved in or influence the healing profession, training, or education. Although there is typically a learning curve to any newly-emerging profession, Healers have always existed, so people are already familiar with us – they’ve just had a difficult time defining us, which is what we are doing here. New professions are like immigrants in a new country; vying for respect and legal representation is necessary because other professions gate-keep and preserve their unchecked rights, power, and control. Since Healers have always been there, we are defining ourselves as a separate profession so the reader can understand how and where we fit into society. This becomes necessary when people do not know or understand something. We have done our best in our work and now we leave it to the world to decide if what we are saying is accurate or not. Because professions have competing interests when it comes to getting their needs met, the need to delineate the differences between these professions is necessary.
Though we all already intrinsically know this, the main difference between Healers and other medical and psychological professions is that one is performing a vocation while the other is embodying their advocation. A person doing a job and someone who has become their profession (e.g., advocation) are going to see things differently. This is also the difference between being book smart and street smart; a distinction that is earned through the transformative process of recovery. Additionally, the theme of therapy is that it is “your” therapy or that the professional is doing something to you. In Healing, it is our work because one must have a relationship with the person/professional and not the industrialized profession.
Healers are individuals that already know who they are. They often operate as separate from the healthcare system because they know that the dangers of the system outweigh any potential benefit of sending clients into it. Additionally, Healers need to work to pay off the debts they accrued when figuring out that they were Healers. That being said, psychology falls short in the important areas of healing, as we highlight throughout our work. Healers fill in the gaps that clinical psychology has missed. Without the industries that are insurance and medical “science” or quantitative reasoning, there would be little need for mental health diagnostics, especially because most do not meet the criteria for medical necessity (O’Brien, 2023c; O’Brien, 2024b; HERE).
We are labeled as “other” by a system that cannot understand who we are and, when we don’t comply with their perfectionist standards or take a risk, they punish us and overcharge to feed their needs or addictions. This wisdom extends to clients who have found Healers; they now understand what this person does for and with them compared to someone who does therapy on, for, or to them. This is the main difference. The Healer-Client relationship is different because, in this case, the provider actually engages in states of active healing with the clients. We go with them and come back. We know what we are doing; it does not always work out, but such is life on a planet that sees death as final. Healers do not believe that death is the final destination. This is another main difference between a Healer and a psychological professional. Culpability and responsibility are important in life and death matters, but the cost is starting to mount up. Since Healers deal with undiagnosable experiences of existential, developmental, and attachment trauma, normative dissociation, and universal addictions, we hold the process of resolving memory as more important than a person’s desired outcomes. This conclusion is because we know that these outcomes are what they were destined to be.
By acquiescing or fawning to other professions’ demands, the spirit or soul of the psychology profession has been lost. Take Tarasoff Law and HIPAA, for example. With Tarasoff Law, the difference is that the Healer would go to the client, call police, and become involved with the healing. In contrast, the therapist would call police and avoid direct involvement. Out of love, the Healer gets involved knowing that they too may suffer harm. This is okay because Healers already know their fate. With HIPAA, the Healer knows that there is no such thing as confidentiality in this day and age because advancements in science and our lived experience show that we are being spied on without our consent (O’Brien, 2024b). Another example: A Healer, only as a last resort, will offer hospitalization for “mental health issues” because they know that the industrialized system can make things worse with incarceration, unjust demands, accusations, misdiagnosis, and unnecessary medication management.
Healers are often also experienced professionals who have come to know the implicit wisdom of qualitative science over quantitative reasonings, deductive philosophy, and cognitive interpretations. These are people who have been through enough to know more than a profession or society that doesn’t know that the body is the unconscious, addiction is dissociative, and that trauma is a normal response to a normal event. The difference between a Healer and a helper, doctor, clinician, therapist, social worker, psychologist, or psychiatrist is their understanding of the words “helping” versus “healing” and “doing” versus “being”. How, why, when, and who is “doing” the “being” with them matters too. The Healer practices being with and there for the wounds that cannot be healed. They sit with the fact that sometimes nothing can be done to help in the end. This is the normal, existential nature of life and death, not the result of diagnosable behavior. In fact, without context, any behavior can be labeled pathological or diagnosable. Comparatively, people who help rather than heal do so out of their own ignorance; they think that they themselves are the ones that hold the power. This is an ego-dominant or egocentric person who thinks they know what it means to have no ego, but have never actually experienced it.
A Healer keeps the boundaries of neighbors and does not separate from the community or hide behind legal precedent or process. We, as Healers, do things differently; things that the observer may not and/or cannot understand. This was highlighted in our dissertation. For example, when we define addiction using the observers’ perspectives only, we miss out on the lived experience, which is a key component to an accurate definition of addiction. We feel that terms should be defined through the combination of multiple points of view and both qualitative and quantitative science. Though Healers practice healing, they can also help people in a way that is different from the help others professionals or psychology attempts to provide. In some cases, a Healer may help by not helping at all (remember, nothing is something too). They may engage with medicines that are known to them and, since Healers do not need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, they have legal, ethical, and moral integrity.
Consumers of psychology intrinsically know the difference between someone who is also a Healer; this is often why people get second opinions. If they meet someone who is not a Healer, they keep looking. People who have problems seek people who believe that they can fix those problems. In contrast, those that go to Healers are people who know they need Healing and not a fix for a problem. As we write all of this, another difference between Healer and clinician emerges: A Healer does things out of love and a clinician acts out of fear. The Healer is the old wise person in the story who already knows the ending. They do not do things out of ego. They are in the profession because they themselves have been in a place where they needed healing. The Healer is the underdog in every story that knows they are right and is just waiting for the writer to realize who they are. We are all Luke Skywalker, but not all of us are Jedi Masters yet. As we see it, the most significant difference between a Healer and a clinician is faith, literally and figuratively, as this is also the difference between Ethics and Morality. At the end of the day, Healers are on one side of the coin when it stands upright. On the other side? Medical “science” and psychology…
We observe that: 1) By the letter of the law (unless they have a medical card), any licensed professional who personally uses cannabis is being immoral, unethical, and illegal because it is not federally legal. Therefore, they are not in compliance with the moral character clause of their profession; 2) Since there are no trainings or education requirements on psychiatric medication management for LMHCs, LSWs, psychologists, LCATs, and LMFTs, theoretically, none of these licenses are legally allowed to talk to someone on psych medication because that would be outside their scope of practice; 3) If any licensed professional is “treating” someone for developmental or attachment trauma, treating anything other than substance and gambling addiction as an addiction (e.g., sex, shopping, Internet, work…), or is treating someone for chemical “imbalances”, they are committing fraud, which would be illegal according to current research and law.
The moral character clause matters. Who has it and who doesn’t? How will we know? The difference between ethics and morals is action. The law needs to start setting a new precedent and it is time for “the system” to do the psychological healing work, not just their careers. Our psychedelic science, research, and evidence is clear enough to make the right moral decision.
A Healer is someone who holds the intention to heal the lost, despondent, intangible, unhealable, existential, betrayal, spiritual, and unspeakable moral wounds. Healing comes from within, so how can anyone “treat” someone else when it is their immune system that does the Healing with the Healer? Therapy assumes that one has the answers inside of themself, which the Healer knows already, plus they know how and where to find the answers within themselves as well. They live this healing truth and they can take people there and back. They are guides and a trusted counsel to those who are needing to go into the nether-lands of our unconscious implicit reality. With our non-judgmental, compassionate, moral, and kind point of view and stance, Healers are able to tell the truth when therapists cannot. Taking for granted that we know the whole story, we are the storytellers of storytellers, history’s history, and the Now of Then. Healers are different from therapists because they can transverse time and space due to their mindful dissociation (O’Brien, 2023a; O’Brien, 2024a).
Our healing approaches and styles are done differently because they come from a different philosophical orientation (O’Brien, 2024c). We are more qualitative than quantitative, and for good reason (O’Brien, 2024c). No one profession can own the legal rights to memory, healing, or memory healing because healing is a universal aspect of our biology and psychological history. The system’s inability to differentiate between professions, processes, and prestige is observable; therefore it is now conscious. Despite this, we predict that nothing will change the outcomes of our fate. Creating separateness and divide between professions is exactly what they did by defining who they believe we are as Healers (O’Brien, 2024c).
Conclusions
O’Brien (2023a) highlights that psychedelics, trauma-informed care, and addictionology have created the framework for reestablishing the healer as a profession by capturing the transdiagnostic status of trauma, dissociation, and addiction (O’Brien, 2023b). Now, we move forward into dissociation, recovery, and healing-informed care. As we do so, we must remember that the same ignorance that tried to buy Natives’ land and relocate, re-educate, and even exterminate Native Peoples to solve the “native problem” still exists within the quantitative logic of bureaucratic reasoning. Only the absence of moral fortitude and heart can produce such logic. We must look at the outcomes of such logic because their reasoning and tactics have also historically been applied to people who use medicines or live dissociated. In 1980, this ignorance labeled PTSD “an abnormal response to an abnormal event” and thought that homosexuality was a disorder. Do we think that we have increased our level of education or understanding since then? Better yet, they still do not have addiction accurately defined and believe that dissociation is a diagnosis because they see dissociation and addiction as problems instead of the solutions that they are.
Solutions
As an open source model and clinical approach, PWH has taught us that regulation with Neurofeedback, classic psychedelics, quantitative EEG analysis, MASA, PWH, and the trauma resolution methods and meditations that we teach are the complete package for most individuals seeking health, hope, and healing.
Future Direction
Experientially, we would like to further explore the correlation between brain states (delta, theta, alpha, beta, gamma), psychedelic healing states, and dissociative parts work in the “meeting area”. Check out our events, cannabis tests, and trainings. Dissociative learning is also an important aspect to the future of our work (HERE). With the concept of living memory versus dead memory, we offer people (participants and professionals alike) a way to come to their own and know it because they know which consciousness they live in, are, or are becoming. The fact is that we are all of these at the same time, but are often unaware of how to maintain that level of functioning or spiritual connectedness. This is because we are often unaware of who is navigating our lives, health, and dying process. How memories die is relevant because what we mean by dead, die, or death may not be readily understood by most readers. This is what the Path of the Wounded Healer is for.
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. (2024b). Diagnostic Privilege: Meta-Critical Analysis. In Healer and Healing: The re-education of the healer and the healing profession as an advocation. Re-educational and Training Manual and Guide. Appendix 2. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/courses/addiction-as-dissociation-model-course/
O’Brien, A. (2024c). Meta-Critical Analysis: The “Science” of Pseudoscience. In Healer and Healing: The re-education of the healer and the healing profession as an advocation. Re-educational and Training Manual and Guide. Appendix 3. Albany, NY: Wounded Healers Institute. Retrieved at woundedhealersinstitute.org/courses/addiction-as-dissociation-model-course/
O’Brien, A. (2024d). Moral-Ethics. In Healer and Healing: The re-education of the healer andhealing professions as an advocation. Re-educational and Training Manual and Guide. Chapter 14. 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/
