***Calling Each Other Names: Part 2

There are many names we give to caregivers and careseekers. These labels often reflect deeply-held, often unconscious attitudes around health an illness. They also may determine the nature of care that is given and received. Varieties of names are reviewed in Part 1 or this article, including Respant (responsible participant), doctor, therapist and coach. Below are more options for these relationships in treatment settings.

Teacher
In many of the CAM modalities that promote self-healing, the caregiver is more a teacher than a therapist. Respants are instructed in lifestyle changes, meditations, relaxations, imagery exercises, and other self-healing approaches that they practice on their own.

I have come to perceive myself primarily as a teacher or guide in most of my interactions with my psychiatric psychotherapy clients. In addition to instructing them in their options with various medications, I often introduce self-healing approaches - particularly acupressure techniques that are rapidly and potently effective in dealing with stress reactions, pains, and allergies.

Healer and Healee
There are people we call healers who have gifts of intuitive awareness and abilities to facilitate wholistic changes in body, emotions, mind, relationships and spirit. I was pleased to find 191 scientific studies of healing, which I review in my book, "Spiritual Healing: Scientific Validation of a Healing Revolution." In Western society, many healers and their patients have modeled aspects of their interactions on the conventional medical system. Healers are perceived as intervening to identify problems and provide the necessary treatments. This mode of interpreting healing is reinforced by the media, who like to headline unusual cures that occasionally result from healings. Some healers promote this perception of healing, thriving on a sense of power, providing their healing as a medical doctor would perform surgery, with every bit as much ego inflation.

Recipients of healing are often called healees. In following the medical model, healees are often passive, expecting healers to provide whatever is necessary for dealing with their problems.

Self-healers
There is a trend toward encouraging healees to take more responsibility for self-healing among progressive healers. These caregivers model their interactions after those of CAM practitioners who empower people they treat to activate their self-healing abilities, encouraging them to be respants. (Conversely, many CAM practitioners are integrating spiritual healing with their CAM modalities. It is not uncommon to find massage or bodymind therapies combined with Reiki or Therapeutic Touch.) Within this definition of healing, treatment is viewed by many as a boost to healee energies rather than as a cure for their problems provided by the healer. Others view this respantifying process as helping people to connect with their innate healing wisdom, with their higher selves, with spiritual guidance, or directly with the Infinite Source. If the your are interested in self-healing, you may be interested to read my book, "How Can I Heal What Hurts?" In this volume I explain how we get ourselves into health problems and how we can learn to understand and address them through varieties of self-healing approaches.

While this is a growing trend, the term healer carries entrenched nuances of passivity that can hinder the shift towards healees taking charge of their lives and dealing with their problems themselves. Healers have not found an alternative to this word that feels comfortable. Consider the following alternatives.

Patient
Patients expect doctors to diagnose their problems and prescribe treatments to fix them. The very term, patient, suggests someone who patiently waits for someone else to intervene on his or her behalf.
Doctor: "What's your problem?"
Patient: "You're the doctor. You should tell me what's wrong!"

Client
Many CAM practitioners refer to the people they treat as clients. This shapes the conceptualization of their relationship, acknowledging that people have choices in selecting therapists and that therapists are in advisory and teaching roles.

In summary
If you are a careseeker, you may wish to consider the bottom line: How much responsibility you are willing to take for your own health care? This is not to suggest in any way that you need to be able to assess and treat any and all problems you have. Rather, it is to invite you to explore the vast self-healing potentials you have for identifying stresses and residues of traumas from the past that may be contributing to your problems; for taking steps to deal with these; and to seek out the caregivers who are right for your needs and preferences.

If you are a caregiver, consider how best you can identify, encourage and amplify the vast self-healing capacities of those who seek your help.