PSYCHO-MEDICAL-SPIRITUAL therapy is an integrative therapy. It includes achievements in numerous approaches in psychotherapy as well as the following domains: psychology, western preventive medicine, Chinese medicine, studies in healthy eating and in taking care of one’s fitness, health sciences, quantum physics, the philosophy of living the good life, household finance and lastly, knowledge based on the Bible and – partly – on Buddhist wisdom, as some of its aspects have a lot in common with the messages conveyed in the Bible.

IT ASSUMES THAT A HUMAN BEING IS A MULTIDIMENSIONAL ENTITY AND TAKES INTO ACCOUNT THE CLIENT’S MENTAL, COGNITIVE, EMOTIONAL, BODILY AND SPIRITUAL SIDE.

PSYCHO-MEDICAL-SPIRITUAL THERAPY combines three perspectives on working with every client.

1. Psychological – includes the Client’s needs, emotions, feelings, moods, beliefs, the key aspects of their life and their psychological problems.
2. Medical – includes preventing diseases which come about as a result of some psychological problems; perceives a person from the point of view of their body, mind and spirit; analyses various psychological patterns that result in physical and mental illnesses and encourages the client to take responsibility for restoring their mental and physical well-being. Among others, it takes into account: healthy eating, physical and breathing exercises, meditation, ways of dealing with stress, faith in health and every person’s inner power in their bodies’ self-healing process.
3. Spiritual (spiritual intelligence)– includes the most profound human values and needs (such as love, warmth, goodness, intimacy,  touch, dignity, freedom, recognition, spending time with kind and positive people, being valuable and useful), making good use of one’s intuition and reaching our inner hidden resources and talents. It involves working on one’s character, hope, self-belief and believing in others. Also, it takes into account the Client’s relationship with God or Higher Power (however they understand it).

Considering the patient’s spiritual aspects in therapy has two aims: firstly, gradual treatment of the spirit tormented by: sadness, degradation, humiliation, despair, powerlessness, emptiness, suffering, identity confusion, gloom, melancholy, anger and fear, and secondly, also giving the Client more strength so that in their later life they are able to solve their problems by themselves and find the right path – one which will serve them best in attaining the essence of humanity and achieving various aims.

Both spirituality and spiritual intelligence are very important resources and are of significant help in coping in life. They give hope against hope and make a person open up to kindness and love, despite having been hurt many times in the past. They help to overcome one’s own limitations with the result that the client can accomplish their life objectives, mission, needs and values. They are a crucial factor in healing and recovering from illnesses. Moreover, they facilitate coping with depression, fears, strong tensions and deep solitude and help to step out of the state of being narcissistically introverted.

Physical, emotional and mental problems always (and I repeat, always) correspond to some spiritual problems. Every bodily symptom has its own spiritual counterpart (e.g.: problems with the spine tie up with intellectual overload, too much responsibility, having no support, fears or guilt, while tension and headaches – with too much thinking, overly high ambitions and too high expectations from oneself and from others).

There is even an adjective ‘absent-minded’, which implies the idea of retreating from the real world for some time.

Many physical illnesses have their roots in the spiritual sphere and derive from: long-term, destructive attempts to adjust to the surrounding world coupled with the inability to affect it just to get by (often at the cost of losing the ability to be yourself and your freedom); feeling misunderstood for a long time; being mocked, ridiculed, alienated and criticized (sometimes just for being sensitive and feeling things that other people don’t feel or seeing what they don’t see), which can lead to frequently being confined to the world of your painful moments, destructive and irrational thoughts, unrealistic images, recurring images which are full of negativity and evil, nagging, tiresome and contradictory inner voices and thoughts such as: ‘I am alone in this world’ or ‘Nobody loves me’.

Also, there are physical illnesses which have a spiritual basis: cardiovascular diseases (coronary artery disease, chest pains), respiratory diseases (asthma, allergies), problems with: digestion (ulcers, incessant stomach aches, digestive disorders), the spine (pains and overstrain) and the skin (hives, psoriasis, allergies, atopic dermatitis), sleeping disorders, obesity, diabetes, addiction to alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, work, sex, shopping, and finally eating disorders.

Healing our spiritual sphere is connected with: treating ourselves well, i.e. with refusing to ignore our own thoughts and emotions; detecting what we really want and don’t want in life, what we can influence and what we can’t and then expressing it verbally; keeping in touch with our own feelings (i.e. discovering and releasing them) and satisfying our emotional needs; learning to protect ourselves from psychological violence by saying ‘no’ and releasing our suppressed anger; noticing signals coming from our body (tension, fatigue or burnout); the awareness of having an influence on the shape of our life, on people and on situations; maintaining balance between concentrating on our will and wishes and attending to the needs of others; getting to know ourselves so that we don’t forcibly adjust to what doesn’t serve us; feeling that what we are doing has a meaning and a purpose; searching for the truth about ourselves and about life; feeling that we have an actual impact on our life; putting our life and the surrounding world in order; believing in ourselves and some higher power (however the Client views it – God, angels, the saints or other); willingness to liberate ourselves from doubt and entering the path of searching; the development of self-awareness and becoming more humble; letting our psychological wounds heal through therapy; strengthening the capacity for independent thinking and the feeling that we can’t affect reality; giving ourselves the right to freedom and to dignity and the right to exist; liberating ourselves from the victim syndrome and the ‘I don’t want to feel anything so I don’t suffer later’ pattern.

Healing our spiritual sphere lets the Client move on and follow their own path. Very often it also helps to combat various mental and physical illnesses.

Thanks to working with my Clients, reading relevant literature and talking to many people, I have come across hundreds of ways to develop one’s own spirituality. They often involve: spiritual practices (prayer, meditation, studying the Bible in order to get to know God, Jesus and the reflection of God’s nature in us); yoga, esotericism, New Age, working with one’s energetic state, Reiki, shamanism, life crises, Buddhism, Zen,  physical and mental illnesses, life losses, suffering, pain; getting back on one’s feet after hitting rock bottom because of: addictions, self-destructive behaviour, joining subcultures which are harmful to our mental and physical health, pointlessness of life; lastly, having reached the highest points of consumerism and hedonism and displaying total selfishness. Each and every one of us has their own unique path of spiritual development that they have to take to reach their spiritual goal. My spiritual goal on my long path of development was getting to know God and Jesus who are my teachers and guides.

Developing our spirituality (or spiritual intelligence) doesn’t like: deadlines, tasks, commitments, lecturing, comparing ourselves to others, accusing, condemning, threatening, exclusion or feeling superior and wiser. It likes silence and a peaceful place in which we can consider the question: Why am I in this world? What is my life mission? Who will be my teacher and guide on the spiritual life? What do I want to be the essence of my life? What in my life is really mine and what is just created by the world I’m living in? What do I love about my life? The more things we love, the better we feel. Is my spiritual development the right one, or maybe it is an escape from my fear and other unpleasant emotional states and from responsibility for my life? Doesn’t it cause greater states of fear, anxiety or neurosis and doesn’t it strengthen my guilt too much? Doesn’t it, by any chance, increase my narcissism, feeling superior and ‘really unique’ when compared to others?

A PERSON’S SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT (OR DEVELOPING THEIR SPIRITUAL INTELIGENCE) SHOULD ALWAYS GO HAND IN HAND WITH THEIR PSYCHOLOGICAL GROWTH; OTHERWISE, THERE IS A SERIOUS RISK OF DEVELOPING VARIOUS MENTAL DISORDERS. PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT ALONE, I.E. WITHOUT THE SPIRITUAL ONE, MIGHT MEAN REDUCING ONE’S SELF-IMAGE.

Applying psycho-medical-spiritual therapy is based on changing the Client’s way of thinking, perceiving and acting so that they can start enjoying the sunny side of things despite having experienced psychological pain and spiritual suffering (in fact, at a given moment in life, it’s often hard to change everything that weighs us down at once). If we want to allow ourselves to introduce some significant or radical changes in our life and to start living a better life that benefits our physical and mental health, this form of therapy serves expanding our consciousness and building good relationships with ourselves and with others.

When I use it, I employ 3 basic elements (GAS):

GOODNESS, i.e. your individual resources, talents, knowledge, skills, personality traits, behaviour patterns and life energy

ACTIVITY, i.e. improving yourself with the help of all your assets

STRENGTHENING, i.e. feedback given to you by the therapist, your loved ones and other people who are supporting you

Importantly, this type of therapy relies on changing the client’s harmful habits and pre-programmed, irrational fixed beliefs that we constantly recreate and reapply due to what we think, do, say and feel.

“What defines a life which is good, well-lived and rich in experiences is not the lack of negative experiences and emotions. It is how we cope with the challenges and difficulties, how we react to them and how we transform them” (J. Czapiński (ed.), Psychologia pozytywna. Nauka o szczęściu, zdrowiu, sile i cnotach człowieka, PWN,  Warsaw 2012, translated by Anna Wiechecka).

A crucial part of psycho-medical-spiritual therapy is using, to our best advantage, our own resources in dealing with pain, fear, frustration, anger or other emotions and revisiting everything which stops us from moving forward and which badly affects our mental and physical health, i.e.: difficult past situations, repetitive patterns, opinions and actions that are harmful to the Client. It is often the case that, before moving on, we have to confront and feel our psychological pain, “defrost” all the frozen feelings in our body, let go of our entire pain in a crying session and finally forgive ourselves and others.

“Effective management of trivial stress is linked to the prevalence of positive thoughts and emotions, while coping with serious traumas successfully requires concentrating on painful feelings and rethinking the bad information first. Consequently, it is connected with a higher incidence of negative thoughts and emotions” (J. T. Larsen et al., Czerpanie korzyści z niepowodzenia: o zaletach współpobudzenia emocji pozytywnych i negatywnych [in:] Czapiński (ed.), Psychologia pozytywna. Nauka o szczęściu, zdrowiu, sile i cnotach człowieka,  2012, p. 309, translated by Anna Wiechecka). Expressing negative emotions may be beneficial for our health in difficult situations, whereas suppressing our emotions has a bad impact on our physical and psychological well-being.

As has been demonstrated by many empirical studies, inner happiness has its source in the ability to deal with life challenges and difficulties. Moments like these reveal our strong suits.

Therefore, another important aspect of this therapy (apart from the very introspection and giving vent to various emotions) is making the Client focus on the good and the beneficial in everything that happens to them, channelling their actions into solving stress-related problems and giving many positive meanings to life events and situations.

This therapy aims at the Client’s well-being. It is connected with instilling in them beliefs and convictions that: might serve them in regaining health or keeping healthy, won’t result in constant inner conflicts, might positively affect their disposition as often as possible and won’t often cause feelings and emotions that could potentially be a burden, such as: sorrow, fear, sadness, hatred, resentment and rejection.

Fixed beliefs that have been programmed in us make other people act towards us in a way our subconscious expects them to. Let me give you an example. We are quite often unable to accept other people’s love and goodness, having been programmed to think: ‘I don’t deserve other people’s love, kindness and attention.’ Another common case is not respecting ourselves and letting others do us harm because of our deep-rooted belief that we don’t deserve to be treated well.

Many people are unable to live their daily life without constantly experiencing: chaos, loneliness, pessimism, alienation and isolation, fear, anger, pain, sorrow, discouragement or feeling deserted. They have moments in which they close themselves off from the outside world, blame others, feel wronged, are hyperactive, upset, overwhelmed, preoccupied, take offence, criticise themselves and others, hate, are jealous, ashamed, worked up, doubt themselves, deny the truth, fight with other people or enter into conflict. At times they also are impatient, feel cheated and betrayed, unhappy, exploited and used, feel like a victim and find themselves addicted to people and substances. All of that often happens for reasons which are independent of them. In psycho-medical-spiritual therapy, we devote time to all those emotional states, moods and feelings that the Client considers the greatest burden.  

Together with my Client we also work on their low self-esteem and self-worth. We diagnose their false self-esteem and discover the true one, which raises their assessment of themselves. We also devote time to discovering the Client’s new feelings.

Psycho-medical-spiritual therapy always aims at improving my Client’s well-being.

Psychological well-being includes: possibly rewarding relationships with others; the ability to embrace the fact that a profound relationship with another person can never be separated from a combination of negative and positive emotions (and the former often prevail); being in control of our emotions most of the time; having life objectives; self-improvement and spiritual development; accepting changes; self-respect connected with being aware of our positive and negative character traits; coming to terms with our past; being aware of our own physical limitations; finding strength in struggling with life adversities; getting back on our feet after difficult experiences; the ability to come to grips with losses; personal development which is possible thanks to: firstly, going through traumatic experiences and secondly, rising to various challenges; finally, being guided by healthy convictions and beliefs.

Psycho-medical-spiritual therapy integrates the eclecticism of all the most important and most effective methods and approaches in therapy (e.g.: the psychodynamic approach, humanistic-existential therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy and systems psychology) and the most recent academic achievements concerning helping the patient. Therefore it guarantees viewing each Client as a separate individual and taking their development (physical, psycho-emotional, spiritual and social) into consideration. It is especially effective when dealing with e.g.: existential or psychosomatic problems, human relationships, fears, anxieties, depressive states and solving internal conflicts.