Holistic Therapy: Unlock Your Inner Harmony and Discover the Transformative Power of Holistic Therapy

Lisa Shouldice
Feb 25
3 min read

Our team thinks of Holistic Therapy is an integrative treatment that is co-created and individualized to meet your needs. Holistic Therapy honours all of your parts to treat the physical, mental and spiritual elements in your mental health plan, ensuring your healing is optimal and in line with your goals.

I think of the Medicine Wheel teachings to make sense of this, after spending time in Aboriginal communities, learning to create culturally relevant care.

The Medicine Wheel places the understanding of ourselves in 4 quadrants: Emotional, Mental, Physical and Spiritual.

Most of us find there are places we live in this wheel, comfortable places, Ex. Physical, as you are an athlete. In order to take care of all of your parts, you may need to mindfully ensure bringing in care in other areas, some possibly less natural to you. Ex. Mental, you may want to fit in time to take a course or read a book.

This way of understanding can be used to make a therapy/healing plan as well as ensure self-care along the way.

Many therapists use and are trained in a myriad of approaches to create a Holistic Therapy plan for your healing and your life.

Holistic Therapy: Emotional

Emotion-focused therapy is a therapy approach that coaches you to access and sit with all of your feelings.

Sitting with feelings in a safe, contained way allows for full processing, the symptoms that bring you to therapy are managed Ex. Anxiety.

It allows for frozen, numb and dissociated feelings, due to trauma and grief, to be healed by coming through the amygdala, processed through the neocortex, or executive/logical parts of the brain.

This treatment mitigates trauma symptoms Ex. Flashbacks. Once feelings are fully processed, we can also change unwanted patterns and make healthier decisions.

Self-care:

Getting/receiving support from community is an example of a self-care piece found in this quadrant. This allows you to focus on others outside of yourself, build community and practice your newly strengthened emotional intelligence.

Holistic Therapy: Mental

Cognitive-Behavioural therapy techniques support controlling the negative thoughts that plague many of us. They isolate the core “hot thoughts” behind the spiraling negative thoughts, in session with you. Ex. I am not worthy of love.

There is then an extensive series of ways to control those thoughts, redirect and manage them.

Your therapist may do some of these exercises with you in session. They may assign them between session as well. They may also gently guide you in reframing thoughts and ensuring they stay realistic, not catastrophized or generalized beyond their scope.

Self-care:

Journaling is a way to write down tough thoughts, triggers and work to reshape them.

This also allows you to find patterns Ex. I am most hard on myself after spending time with my critical father.

Holistic Therapy: Physical

Somatic Therapy teaches us to listen to our body in treatment. Your therapist will coach you to learn new awareness in various parts of your body.

Your body also holds old feelings, grief and trauma that can be processed through and healed in your therapeutic sessions.

You will find this is a like a muscle, in that, your skills/ability to use your body to get new emotional information will strengthen, becoming more natural.

This approach processes trauma and targets chronic pain.

Self-care:

Yoga can be used in your careplan to get to know your body, build insight into where you hold tension and release it.

Holistic Therapy: Spiritual

Spirituality is a part of the self that needs to be included in your healing plan if you identify as spiritual in any way.

Mindfulness Therapy is an approach that combines many techniques to offer you a healing experience that builds awareness in all of the ways your system processes Ex. Behavioural exercises, body scans, breathing exercises….

This is with the goal of fully bringing you into the present moment to break cycles of anxiety and depression. You will learn to simply observe in yourself what was previously disturbing, leading to less emotional reactivity. Ex. Hard thoughts. It may feel like bringing a mindfulness meditation way of being into your everyday life.