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The Healing Process

The Healing Process


This is a brief psychological overview of the healing process. The image of
healing is best described by Gloria Vanderbilt in "A Mother's Story" when she
talks of breaking the invisible unbreakable glass bubble which enclosed her that
kept her always anticipating loss with echoes of all past losses. She wrote, for
example (Page 3),"Some of us are born with a sense of loss there from the
beginning, and it pervades us throughout our lives. Loss, as defined, as
deprivation, can be interpreted as being born into a world that does not include
a nurturing mother and father. We are captured in an unbreakable glass bubble,
undetected by others, and are forever seeking ways to break out, for if we can,
surely we will find and touch that which we are missing".

This concept of healing was also described by Philip Berman in "If It Is
Not Good Make It So" as changing positively from the unhappy attitude of(Page
48) "we never got the habit of happiness as others know it. It was always as if
we were waiting for something better or worse to happen".

Psychological theory of change suggest it is possible to heal, to break
out of the glass bubble, to develop the attitude of happiness. For example, in
"The Process of Change: Variations on a Theme by Virginia Satir says on Page 89
that "successful change-making turns out to involve struggle, necessitating
skill, tenacity and perspective". The struggle occurs when a foreign element
produces chaos until a new integration occurs which results in a new status quo.
Kurt Lewin echoed this view in saying that an old attitude has to unfreeze, the
person experiments, a new attitude develops and a refreezing occurs.

Janis and Prochasky suggest a person starts in relative complacency, is
presented with challenging information, the person evaluates the new challenge
to habit or policy and reviews alternate policies to create a new policy or
return to the original one,

The psychological theories focus on...