Have you ever been gas-lighted ? *to gaslight someone is a term that came from the movie Gaslight. People can lose their mind when other people deny their reality. After that experience, you may never have trusted sharing your real feelings. You may have learned to mask, repress, and hide how you really feel because you “shouldn’t feel that way.” That experience is frighteningly common. It isn’t just about training, highly academically ‘qualified’ therapists, gurus, and famous workshop facilitators can hurt their clients too. Then what is it?
It is about the intention of creating a business. When we are aligned with our deepest sense of purpose, what we embody is offering space for wholeness, instead of fixing someone.
The Holistic Happiness Academy’s approach towards therapy means that the whole self can be present in the interaction allowing people to safely experience and heal trauma at a deeper level. In a world inundated with quick fixes and ‘courses’ for everything, a holistic approach is engaging and heart-full.
One of the greatest myths about therapy is that you can go to a person, talk to them for a few sessions and then expect that you are done with the healing you need. This myth is perpetuated because of a mental health model which is all about the expert in charge. In fact, your journey may have just begun. That may be something we have to figure out ourselves. One of the reasons is that it can take a while before we acknowledge that something is wrong with our mental health. Before we get here, we may have already gone through many traumas and done many karmic things that we regret because of our traumas. We may have tried all sorts of ways to get rid of that feeling. We may feel lost and helpless about our pain, unable to make it go away. By then it is already quite late and it will take time and effort to help us feel good in our bodies again.
Our system’s mental health paradigm is ‘fix them, when they break’, instead of ‘prevent it, so that we stay resilient’. Our schools, our societies are full of mentally unhealthy beliefs and expectations. As a global world, we live with chronic feelings of sadness, inadequacy, envy, anxiety, fear and rage. We call this competitiveness normal and even desirable, rather than recognizing that this sense of separation from others comes from a deep insecurity because of which we can justify hurting and harming others. In fact, we name our chronic sense of insecurity, ‘security’ and justify conflict, war and exploitation of our natural resources. On the side of what passes for correction, we rely mostly on right-wing religion, which gives us a false sense of identity and fills us with superstition, racism, and hate. The educational institutions, the University tries to mediate and provide a safe space for our human experience, but it is limited in terms of personal development and self-exploration because much of education has become about which course is ‘popular’ ‘sells’, rather than which course elevates the human condition.
Our world is therefore in a state of spiritual disconnection and physical insecurity. Naturally, an individual’s state of emotional security and integration will be challenged, since our emotional self is denied safe expression or validation in our environments. Must we all become therapists to heal ourselves? Must we turn to religion with its political power plays to find hope, but what is much more important, must we cry alone in our despair?
When we awaken to the reality around us, we see that we are not alone, that, in fact, we are all crying, except that we have learned to hide it better. What can help us find contentment? I became passionate about finding an abiding sense of contentment, a bedrock within the chaos, that was stable, that did not rely on anyone else to change, for us to change. Our healing approaches must be multi-faceted because our reasons for discontent and trauma are multi-faceted. There must be an integrative approach that recognizes the totality of our beingness, because learning does not happen with just the brain and in fact, we need to integrate our mind, body, and soul for a totality of experience, so that we truly remember who we are and access our own individual power in creating our experience.
