Emotional healing vs. the law
Emotional healing vs. the law
How we stripped healing from the law, and now need to bring it back in
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Emotional healing, throughout human history, is spiritual as fuck. What does that mean for secular society?
Even today, every emotional healing method I can think of has religious origins. A few examples:
As this article argues, Freud’s creation of psychotherapy was inspired by his Jewish background. It ties psychotherapy methods to Kabbalistic inquiry, where an expert helps someone grow by witnessing their inner conflict. Freud combined this with the 1:1 format of Catholic confession.
Somatic, or body-based, therapies often come from Chinese and Indian spiritual practices. Examples include yoga, acupuncture, breathwork, and Qigong. They often focus on balancing and cultivating “life force,” otherwise known as Qi or Prana.
Meditation, guided visualization, and other methods of “going inside” are drawn from spiritual practices. They're particularly developed in Buddhism. Christian "desert fathers" also practiced these methods extensively.
Pharma started as herbalism administered by spiritual healers. The latest drug revolution, psychedelics, is taken directly from indigenous spiritual practices.
None of these points are that spicy by themselves. Healing has gone hand in hand with spirituality for the vast majority of human history.
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Stripping emotion from the law
But here’s the rub. America is built on secularism. We take pains to keep the law separate from spirituality. The consequence of this is that we’ve stripped out emotional healing from many aspects of the law as well.
Take the rituals involved with getting arrested - there’s handcuffs, jail, a hearing, and prison. From a legal justice perspective, these rituals might make sense. From an emotional healing perspective, they suck. During a recent men’s group retreat I listened to a formerly incarcerated man describe the whole legal process to me as a Rite of Passage into degradation, and how that affected his psyche.
To be clear, I think it’s fine and good that legal hearings are trying to optimize for truth more than emotional release. My issue is that we make no space for emotional healing alongside the other priorities. In fact we keep it away with a ten foot pole. For example:
Perpetrators and victims often await trial feeling isolated and in fear. Often their primary support is a lawyer, and that's it.
Folks in prison are cut off from their support network. If they break the rules, they're even further cut off in solitary confinement.
Those coming out of prison get a handshake and their clothes back. No ritual accepts them back into the community.
This has consequences. The national 5-year recidivism rate is 79 percent.
And it’s not just prisoners who suffer from this mindset.
We become legal adults by turning 18. But without any kind of ritual to step into that responsibility, many of us remain immature well into our later years.
Baby showers and weddings, while emotional and beautiful, often focus on having a good time. The emotional preparation for stepping into another phase of life is often done alone or with one’s partner, if it’s done at all. This also creates loneliness.
Funerals tend to focus on honoring the dead, but not grieving the dead. I’ve written more about that here.
How to add emotion back in
Can we provide for emotional release and support alongside legal rituals? This is a core challenge for America. Traditional rituals take hundreds of years to materialize and take root in a community. Establishing new rituals is not easily done.
I think a lot of folks dream of government one day dealing with this problem. But we live in a pluralistic, secular society that prizes individualism. By design, it won’t.
I don’t have a grand solution here. But I do see little solutions.
The men’s group All Kings, for example, holds “going in” ceremonies for members who are going into jail. This serves two purposes: 1) The man can ask questions about prison to men who’ve been inside before 2) The man gets explicit commitments of support from community members while he's inside. This helps to keep his connection with community strong while he’s inside.
The writer and therapist Francis Weller has a community that regularly hosts grief workshops for those looking to process sorrow, and to train those looking to bring those rituals to their own communities.
There is a longstanding alliance between young moms and Facebook groups. Because it’s the Internet, some of these groups can feel less like a support group and more like a debate camp. But still, they’re important communities at a critical stage.
These are tiny examples in the face of a huge need for emotional healing. But I think that’s where solutions come from - from specific communities taking care of their own.
For myself, the shift I'm trying to make is not demanding that these spaces and rituals exist in more places. It's to figure out how I can be of better service to my own people.
I don’t know. Could be the move.
Johnny, I spent two years working in the Supreme Court in the Northern Territory of Australia - one of the most "litigious" jurisdictions in the world. Your point was painfully (gut-wrenchingly) apparent there. Not to mention the cyclical nature of the offending (by individuals and between generations). I would love to continue discussing this. Grief workshops sound like a powerful ancillary tool for the criminal justice system.