The Inner Healer and the Inner Critic

Should governments be backing what appears to be a spiritual therapy?

Last month, the Colorado Office of Natural Medicine released the draft rules  for psilocybin facilitators, outlining the training they would need to receive to get a license, and how they would be legally expected to provide psilocybin to their clients. . The rules contain this intriguing paragraph on how clients should be prepared before psilocybin session: 

Is it strange that a state office of government should be promoting and legislating on what seems, at first sight, to be a spiritual concept? This would seem to infringe upon the separation of church and state in the first amendment of the US Constitution. Alcoholics Anonymous, which employs spiritual concepts at the heart of its mechanism of change, does not receive state funding for precisely this reason, and court cases have underlined that they shouldn’t. 

James Eshelman, a psychedelic guide and transformational coach, was the person who suggested the concept of inner healing intelligence should be included in the Natural Medicine Act’s draft guidelines. He served on Colorado’s Natural Medicine Advisory Board’s various Subcommittees and helped to establish the state’s second legal psychedelic therapy licensure model and facilitator training curriculum. 

He told us that the concept of Inner Healing Intelligence refers to a “hard-to-define natural intelligence, and perhaps even divine intelligence”, and that clinicians have tried to define it in a way that fits “into the science based modality of clinical therapy”. He believes that inner healing intelligence and similar ideas can help patients empower themselves, allowing them to embrace and remember their “inherent wholeness and wellbeing”.

Eshelman is by no means alone in believing the concept of ‘inner healing intelligence’ is and should be at the heart of many models of psychedelic therapy. It’s at the core of MAPS’ FDA-submitted manual for MDMA psychotherapy and is a widely held idea among psychedelic therapists and guides. So where did the idea come from, what’s the evidence for it, what do leading figures in the field make of it, and does it have a place in state-backed programs? 

The history of ‘inner healing intelligence’ 

As mentioned above, the concept of Inner Healing intelligence plays a central role in MAPS’ manual for MDMA-Assisted psychotherapy. The MAPS manual states:

It is essential to encourage the participant to trust her/his inner healing intelligence, which is a person’s innate capacity to heal the wounds of trauma. It is important to highlight the fact that the participant is the source of her/his own healing. The MDMA and the therapists are likely to facilitate access to, but are not the source of, the healing process.

The idea, then, is that every person naturally possesses the capacity to self-heal and grow. What MDMA (or a psychedelic) does is unlock that intrinsic potential. The manual uses some analogies to get this point across:

The body knows how to heal itself. If someone goes to the emergency room with a laceration, a doctor can remove obstacles to healing (e.g. remove foreign bodies, infection, etc.) and can help create favorable conditions for healing (e.g. sew the edges of the wound close together), but the doctor does not direct or cause the healing that ensues. The body initiates a remarkably complex and sophisticated healing process and always spontaneously attempts to move toward healing. The psyche too exhibits an innate healing intelligence and capacity.

The lead author of the MAPS manual is psychotherapist Michael Mithoefer, who developed the idea of the ‘inner healing intelligence’ as a core mechanism of therapeutic change in a series of articles written from 2010 onwards. (Mithoefer 2013, Mithoefer 2017).  He took the idea from Stan Grof’s Holotropic model of healing, as he and his wife Annie said in a 2014 speech: 

The current growth and success of MDMA clinical trials is part of Stan Grof’s legacy. Stan’s work inspired us to change the direction of our careers. What he and Christina [Grof] taught us about trusting and supporting each individual’s healing intelligence formed the foundation of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in our research.

Stan Grof, by Alex Grey

Stan Grof is a pioneering figure in psychedelic therapy, and is said to have facilitated thousands of psychedelic sessions as a psychiatrist in the Czech Republic and then as a transpersonal psychologist at Esalen. He said in an interview: 

Modern psychotherapy is plagued by an astonishing lack of agreement among its different schools about the most fundamental questions concerning the functioning and the main motivating forces of the human psyche, the cause, nature, and dynamics of symptoms, and the strategy and technique of psychotherapy…If the experts are not able to reach agreement, why not to trust one's own healing intelligence, one's own inner healer. […] The healing then comes from the collective unconscious and it is guided by an inner intelligence whose immense wisdom surpasses the knowledge of any individual therapist or therapeutic school.

It’s an odd theoretical manoeuvre: psychotherapists can’t agree on the basics, so let’s trust Carl Jung’s completely un-evidence-based mystical concept of the collective unconscious!

Grof elaborated that Jung 

saw the task of the therapist in helping to establish a dynamic interaction between the client’s conscious ego and the Self, a higher aspect of the client’s personality…The healing them comes from the collective unconscious and it is guided by an inner intelligence whose immense wisdom surpasses the knowledge of any individual therapist or therapeutic school (Grof 1996, 516). 

Jung himself wrote in Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963):

My life is the story of the self realization of the unconscious. Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation, and the personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious conditions and to experience itself as a whole.

The idea that the mind and body both naturally seek healing and wholeness is quite a common idea, especially in New Age and alternative healing and in transpersonal psychology (the New Age wing of psychology). Claudio Naranjo, the Gestalt therapist who trained the therapists for MAPS’ first trial of MDMA, wrote in The Healing Journey of humans’ ‘organismic self-regulation’: 

 A theme that is intimately related to that of the arousing of the instinctual is that of the liberation of a spontaneous healing and evolutionary process for which we may well continue to employ the old Indian word kundalini…

Naranjo thought this idea of an inner healer or guide was at the heart of neo-shamanic and mediumistic movements in New Age culture: 

The wide recognition that inner or higher guidance currently is receiving is also manifest in a proliferation of clairvoyant advisers and therapists who regard themselves as shamanically guided in their work. Also ‘channelling’ has become prominent in contemporary American culture as a whole. This term makes reference to what happens to people who offer themselves receptively to messages beyond their conscious mind, as in the case of automatic writing and the process behind the writing of books such as Seth Speaks and A Course in Miracles.

Influential New Age teacher Deepak Chopra has also insisted that the mind naturally heals itself, just as bones naturally heal. The Chopra Foundation supports psychedelic research through the Centre for Natural Intelligence, run by psychiatrist Gita Vaid, who insists on the power of inner healing intelligence. Dr Vaid has written: 

Fundamental to this treatment approach is the belief that we are all intrinsically perfect and dis-ease and distress are secondary to being out of an alignment or balance…An associated tenet is the concept of inner healing intelligence—a principle of directed living systems to perpetually re-establish equilibrium, to restore and recover towards wholeness and wellbeing. To activate this innate capacity, one must remove the obstacles that inhibit healing…A welcome aspect of this healing modality is the return of the spiritual component of human experience to medicine as an important ingredient necessary for the cultivation of health. 

Before we turn to the opinions of several psychedelic experts on the theory of inner healing intelligence, we might raise some questions to consider. 

• First, the idea of the ‘inner healer’ works through analogy with the body naturally healing. But does the body always naturally heal? Sometimes it doesn’t. The analogy of bones naturally setting is incorrect - when animals break a bone in the wild, they usually die. Humans need medical interventions for their bones to set - splints, casts, crutches, even metal implants. This New Age idea of ‘your body knows the score’ isn’t always true - that’s why we have modern medicine. 

• Second, if our minds have ‘inner healing intelligence’, why do we get mentally ill, why don’t our minds always naturally heal? Why do patients need to be coached in the idea of ‘inner healing intelligence’, as the MAPS manual clearly states: 

‘we are here to help you trust the healing intelligence’...’we help the client establish a deep connection with their inner guide’. 

MAPS describes this method as ‘non-directive’ but it sounds like a form of spiritual coaching - teaching the client to buy into a certain spiritual framework of trusting their magic inner healer. An Iraq war veteran in a MAPS MDMA trial stated ‘It feels almost like the inner healer or the MDMA is like a maid doing spring cleaning’. 

• Third, if we have ‘inner healing intelligence’, why do we need drugs? 

• Fourth, if we have an inner healer, do we also have an inner destroyer? In fact, Shannon Carlin, head of therapist training at MAPS, has called the ‘inner critic’ the ‘destructive counterpart to the inner healer’.  So the idea of different parts within our psyche competing for healing or destruction can take us back to the medieval Christian idea of the angels and devils within our nature. 

• Fifth, if this is a spiritual concept, like the Soul, Self, or Inner Genius, is it appropriate for it to be promoted through state bodies? Would it be appropriate for state bodies to promote Reiki, or Pentecostal faith-healing, or Islamic Ruqyah healing, or Alcoholics Anonymous? Can the concept of ‘inner healing intelligence’ be secularized in the way that mindfulness has been, or does it thereby lose some of its magic?

Below, we asked several psychedelic experts their opinion of ‘inner healing intelligence’, including Inna Zelikman of Recovery Without Walls; Ingmar Gorman of Fluence; Max Wolff of the Mind Foundation; Matthew Johnson of Johns Hopkins Medical School; Bill Brennan of the EMBARK model; and Nese Devenot of Harvard. We also have a sneak peek at a new paper from Imperial that suggests the more people believe in ‘inner healing intelligence’, the more healing they experience in psychedelic therapy sessions.