Trauma therapy offers shamanic work hard-won knowledge about safety and pace: that safety comes before anything else, that healing goes at the person’s own speed, that nobody should be made to relive what happened, and that some people need skilled therapeutic help as well as, or before, shamanic work. Much of this matches what Therapeutic Shamanism already teaches.
Why does safety come first? #
Because a person cannot heal whilst they feel under threat. Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score, writes: “For our physiology to calm down, heal, and grow we need a visceral feeling of safety.”1 Babette Rothschild opens her book on safe trauma recovery with questions such as this: “Having suffered during the trauma, was it really necessary to suffer again while attempting to heal from it?”2
Shamanic work shares this starting point. The Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer is a place of absolute safety and healing. “It always feels deeply safe, safer then here ever feels. If you do not feel safe, or even just feel uneasy, that is a sure sign of middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer energy.”3 Feeling unsafe in a journey is a sign to go deeper, never a sign to push on. See Is shamanic journeying safe?
Why does healing need to go slowly? #
Because too much at once can overwhelm a person again. Rothschild’s sixth key to safe recovery is “Take Smaller Steps for Bigger Leaps”.4 Peter Levine, who developed the body-based trauma therapy Somatic Experiencing, calls this careful, step-by-step approach titration.
Paul Francis learnt the same as a psychotherapist: his experience as a therapist has really taught him that people “have to face particular issues at their own pace, and in their own time.” Practitioners who “ignore a client’s resistance, and just barge past it” bring something that “at best may feel disrespectful and invasive, and at worst may feel downright abusive”, and often no lasting healing at all.5 Resistance is a part of the person that is frightened of change, and it deserves respect. See What does it mean to work therapeutically with process, parts and resistance?
Do we have to relive what happened in order to heal? #
No. Rothschild is clear that “remembering should never be required by you or anyone else”.6 Her third key to safe recovery is called simply “Remembering Is Not Required”. Shamanic work fits well with this, because it can work without words. “Shamanic journeying can also be highly effective in working with pre-verbal material, given that it is largely non-verbal, and can be very somatic, visceral and embodied.”7
Why does Therapeutic Shamanism insist on knowing our limits? #
Because some work is not for beginners. New practitioners should not try to work with big issues, “such as someone with major mental health issues, or with issues involving powerful and destructive energies such as sexual abuse, or violence for example.”8 Nor is shamanism a replacement for therapy. Paul comes across “a lot of people in the shamanic community who could really do with psychotherapy”, and “Neither is a good substitute for the other.”9
For some people, journeying alone is not advised at all, and an experienced practitioner journeying for them is the safer way. See Is shamanic work safe if I have a mental health condition?
Has Paul needed therapy himself? #
Yes. A series of events left Paul with severe post-traumatic stress disorder, despite all the work he had already done on himself. His therapist likened that earlier work to a good, safe house that was “built on a fault line”. Her reply turned out to be pivotal in his recovery.10 That path is why, as both a shamanic practitioner and a psychotherapist, he is “keen to teach shamanism in a way that is effective and yet manageable”.11 See Why does Therapeutic Shamanism bring shamanism and psychotherapy together?
Is anyone bringing trauma therapy and soul retrieval together? #
Yes. In a 2012 master’s thesis on trauma and soul healing, Karin Stewart set out to build “a bridge between the modern, clinical approaches to trauma issues” and “traditional, holistic perspectives on soul, soul lossSoul-loss. The sending-away of parts of the self in order to survive: through shock or trauma, or (the chief modern cause) exiling our own parts to fit in. With Power-loss, one of the two root causes of shamanic illness. Read the full answer and soul healing”. Following four women through a programme that combined trauma psychotherapy with soul retrieval, she wrote that “a feeling of safety is paramount for this method to be successful”, and that she could not guide clients through soul retrievalSoul retrieval. Finding an exiled soul-part and inviting it home. In the modern psyche the fort-holder who sent it away must consent first, and the retrieval itself is a beginning: the real work is integration. Read the full answer whilst they were not living in safe environments.12 It is a small study, but it arrives where trauma therapy and Therapeutic Shamanism both do: safety first, readiness, and support afterwards. See What happens after soul retrieval and why is integration essential?
