Healing Our Land-Based Trauma
Indigenous Wisdom reshaping evidence-based psychotherapy to heal our planet.
MEET NATE CHARACH
Dr. Nate Charach is a psychiatrist working in Toronto. Over the last couple of years, he has started psychia-tree groups – a branch of mental health treatment to foster compassion, empowerment and connection to address our collective challenges. These groups integrate concepts from Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects with his group psychotherapeutic skills.
After completing his psychiatry residency at the University of Toronto in 2016, he studied at the Earthship Academy. He finished a Permaculture Design Certificate at The Living Centre in 2018, and completed a Work That Reconnects Facilitator Training in 2023/24. He graduated from Dennis Windego’s first training cohort for Land-Based Focusing Oriented Therapy – the first Indigenous-led evidence-based psychotherapy.
He nurtures his inspiration from his Paw Paw trees in his backyard edible forest garden.
READINGS FROM: Richard Katz's “Indigenous Healing Psychology”
First Reading - Problems To Be Fixed Rather Than Potential To Be Fulfilled
Katz begins…
“Mainstream psychology focuses on human and social problems and pathologies and how to fix them or, in a more positive vein, how to make things better. The clinical fields are psychology’s most popular professional pathways, exerting a large influence on what is researched and studied, and their primary clinical expertise is in dealing with neuroses and psychoses rather than growth and actualization.”
Katz goes on to say…
“But there are three important consequences of psychology’s emphasis on problems and pathologies. First, psychology is committed to finding something that is broken in order to fix it or make it better; personal neuroses and social dysfunctions are targeted.
In the effort to find worthy subjects to work on, there is a second consequence: medicalization. Ordinary life issues and challenges are labelled as medical problems or mental illnesses and therefore must be fixed and fixed by the appropriate professional – namely, a psychologist or other mental health worker…
A third consequence of this focus on problems and pathologies is that psychology overlooks enormous areas of human potential. Certainly dealing with life’s challenges, including those severe enough to become mental illnesses is a necessary element of such growth and development. But when psychology emphasizes fixing problems, the creative potential in human development can become an afterthought.”
Second Reading - Our First Psychologists*
We all have our roots in Indigenous peoples or the first peoples to inhabit the different parts of the earth – we all come from a place first inhabited by our distant ancestors, who live primarily as hunter-gatherers. As these first people gather together, they engage in the human concerns of community building, interpersonal relations, and spiritual understanding. Being human means to ponder the meaning of their lives and the lives of others. Without that self-reflection and delving into the meaning of their existence, survival is not possible. These first people of the various lands engage in the defining concerns of psychology. As such they are our first psychologists.
Within Indigenous cultures, these first psychologists are more accurately considered healers or elders. Psychology and psychologists are terms emanating largely from a particular historical and Western-cultural context and are thereby connected to a particular set of roles and functions. Indigenous healers and elders perform roles and functions that overlap sufficiently with that particular Western-oriented set to also be considered as psychologists, but most important, since elders’ and healers’ roles and functions go beyond those of the conventional psychologists, they can offer insights into enhancing that conventional approach. These Indigenous knowledge keepers are not psychologists as defined by some contemporary professional accrediting body, but psychologists as a validated by the tasks and challenges of living well….
Though typically not labeled as psychologists, these Indigenous elders and healers are living and doing psychology. As Ratu Civo put it, ever so simply: “We try to understand our world, that’s just what we do.” These Indigenous elders and healers, whose voices are ignored or disregarded within mainstream psychology, can offer a key to our search for ways toward healing psychology, toward what can be healing psychology.