I realized I have been trying to spread the news of Spiritual Psychology for 32 years. For the past 10 years, I have been writing these articles, now numbering in the hundreds. It is exciting to share something that drastically impacted my life, and because of it, I transformed from a drug addict to owning my own mental health clinic. The tools I present aren’t new to the industry, with the exception of placing spirituality into the mix. It isn’t religious or voodoo; it is simply the application of love to our hurt that heals.

If you haven’t heard the terms self-care, inner child work, reparenting, or having a positive attitude, then I am glad I can share these with you. Each day, these concepts describe the bulk of my practice. Why people keep going through the same problems over and over again is the main concern of Spiritual Psychology. A lot of what Spiritual Psychology does is help a person realize that problems aren’t meant to remain forever. They are there for information only, and once decoded and processed through, we are free. Thus, this is the aim of this article—using some of the tools of Spiritual Psychology to free your mind, your heart, and your soul. Who knows, maybe in doing so, your physical body can heal, too.

In 1999, I graduated from the University of Santa Monica with my second master’s degree in Counseling Psychology. Before this, I received a master’s degree in Applied Psychology / Spiritual Psychology from the same university. We, as a student body, learned amazing concepts, tools, and approaches that we practiced on each other, and by the time we graduated we were already seasoned therapists—probably better than many therapists out there—because Spiritual Psychology takes you on a deep dive into the pain that began in your past and helps you create a relationship with the younger part of you that went through that painful experience and heal.

When I first moved up to this area, I opened a residential treatment facility on San Juan Island. The first of its kind, we helped people address their core wounds with love and had incredible results. Though there were pitfalls in such a short-term approach. What we students worked on for a minimum of two years, I expected one intensive month of treatment would suffice—but boy, was I wrong. The same national rates of relapse took place, so I decided to open an outpatient facility where people could have more ongoing care, in hopes of anchoring the concepts into their daily lives, and suddenly, our results drastically improved.

Core wounds were having the most results at Basic Steps Mental Health Outpatient. In school, my core wounds began with the abuse of my father at an early age. Growing up, there wasn’t a time when I wasn’t anxious, guarded, and found it hard to trust or feel worthy enough for anything good to come my way. I had a bad habit of sabotaging myself when things improved because I believed others deserved it more than me. This eventually led me to living on the street and becoming addicted to drugs. I feel that if this once-homeless and drug-addicted person could heal through Spiritual Psychology, why couldn’t others?

I am sure it is not uncommon for a doctor to believe that their approach is the best, but I do. I personally know this: “When love is applied to hurt, we heal.” I began using this Spiritual Psychology slogan at the first mental health urgent care center in the country, where, for 11 years, I treated over 7,000 people! I witnessed miracles taking place regularly at a place where the most debilitating mental health issues were on display. These people healed, too!

To heal others, I had to continue to heal myself. Self-care is crucial in mental health treatment. Creating a loving relationship with yourself has incredible results, and if there is something you can take away from this article, it is the fact that if you work hard on proving your love to yourself and continue to renew that relationship on a daily basis, miracles in therapy take place!

Thank God I got out of that lifestyle and discovered that our brain can actually heal, and that I found the university. I learned that I can’t beat myself up enough to make things better. Or, to put it another way, you can’t find light through the darkness.

How, then, do you start? Here are the basics: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Each one of these levels within yourself needs to be addressed. It isn’t a one-time thing. Just because you exercised for half an hour doesn’t mean the body has improved, though half an hour each and every day is the minimum of physical care we ask.

You mostly know how to nurture the body—diet and exercise top the list. What I tend to focus on in treatment is addressing the mental and emotional levels because, in these two areas, quick results can be found.

Do your negative thoughts outweigh the positive thoughts? That is a concern.

“If you think you can, if you think you cannot, you’re right.” —Henry Ford

To free your mind of negativity and despair, utilize free-form writing. With free-form writing, simply get out some sheets of paper, grab a pen, and start writing down what your thoughts are in this moment. Let the words flow and try to keep writing them down. Once the thoughts fade, don’t reread the paper but rip it up and/or burn it. Purge all of these undigested concepts out of your mind once and for all. This can be a great sleep aid at the end of the day.

Grounding is another concept that works with releasing unneeded thoughts. Here, you simply place your bare feet on the earth and allow the electricity of your thoughts and feelings to be grounded into the soil. Twenty minutes a day can do wonders. This, along with drinking plenty of water, is also very grounding.

Each day, I see people tormented by their own thinking, trying to make believe that others are making them feel bad. A little clue: we are the ones making ourselves feel bad. Though, to process through this, therapy can be of great help because we aren’t one-dimensional. To be honest, a great deal of issues have confronted us our whole lives, and if you get angry, anxious, overwhelmed, dependent on substances, or even dependent on drama in your life, these need to be addressed daily in order to fully process through them—both mentally and emotionally.

I think this is why I like working with couples or families, because the problems we have in relationship to others give us clues into the unresolved emotional issues at the heart of our personal disorder. You can easily see your dynamic in others if you know what to look for.

Object Relations Therapy believes all mental illness has its roots in early childhood experiences. At the heart of emotional healing is that wounded child within us, and when we apply love to that part, we heal.

“But I would rather die than face my emotions,” one woman said to me. It seemed extreme at the time, but I have to admit I had the same feelings, vowing to never deal with my father’s abuse. Thank God I dealt with it, and my life forever changed.

In family therapy, many clients blame others in their family for their problems. The first tool we learned in school was “owning projections.” Freud believed a person had an ego, or a fragile part of themselves, that made them believe they were all-powerful and that others were less than them. He believed we projected (like a film projector) our unwanted thoughts and feelings onto others. “You are an asshole!” we may blurt out. Freud would want you to own that projection and realize that you were judging yourself.

Psychology is the science of relationships, and since the most important relationship we have is with ourselves, all efforts must be made toward loving ourselves. How are you with you? And here is a clue: our relationships mirror our relationship with ourselves.

To love others, we have to love ourselves. It isn’t wrong, narcissistic, or selfish—unless that is all you do and you don’t consider others. “Take care of yourself first, and after doing so, then take care of others.” Do you like you? Do you think you are a good person who is worthy of the goodness that life has to offer? Here is the core issue. If you don’t like or even love yourself, will others? Do you find yourself sitting in judgment of others? If so, you are actually judging yourself. To free yourself of depression, anxiety, and overwhelm, the first step is to open up to the possibility that you are a good and worthy person.