How culture connects to healing and recovery Fayth Parks TEDxAugusta

[Music]

I grew up in Atlantic City, New Jersey,

in a family with South Carolina roots.

Here's a photo of my great Aunt Clara,

great Uncle Henry, a neighborhood friend and me.

I'm the one looking intently at the homemade biscuits.

As a little girl,

I remember Aunt Clara tucked me into bed

and battled my childhood measles with hot cups of tea made from sassafras root,

or gave me relief from common cold symptoms

with a tablespoon mixture of whiskey and rum poured over rock candy and fresh lemon rind.

As I grew older, stories with themes of hope and redemption with Bible scripture,

humor, wisdom and care --

helped me make it through life's challenges whether they were measles or emotional struggles.

I'm sure you remember similar stories from your own family.

How do you think culture connects to healing and recovery?

You may think they're unrelated and many health practitioners would agree.

But a conventional medical model constructs healing as a blend of a health practitioner's expertise

and a patient's role in connecting to a belief system

that promotes good thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

So let me say that again.

Healing and recovery include a patient's role in connecting to a belief system

that promotes good thoughts, feelings and behaviors.

Yet conventional medicine routinely overlooks the role of culture in this process.

As a consequence, healing traditions are often minimized as legitimate partners.

Instead, we should appreciate the role traditions play as medicines connecting herbs and ointments,

words and sayings, and a variety of sensory experiences.

You see, if we paint healing traditions with the broad brush of superstitions and stereotypes,

we are not getting an accurate picture of cultural practices.

So I took what I learned from my aunt Clara and I recognized that on the one hand,

there's conventional medicine which provides us

with the best science has to offer as the mechanics of health.

And then on the other hand, there's healing traditions.

People are bringing and trying to claim their agency when they integrate cultural practices.

Researchers have found connections between the brain and our immune system.

It turns out our brain and immune system communicates.

Moreover, researchers at the University of Wisconsin

found changes in the brain associated with positive affect for meditators as compared to non-meditators.

So the best practice connects conventional medicine to cultural patterns for healing and recovery.

The best practice is an integrated process that's closer to local life.

So I took what I learned from my aunt Clara, as I said to you before,

and now I'm a psychologist whose passion about exploring the role

that culture plays in aiding individual and community agency in situations of psychological and social need.

I'm interested in healing traditions where individuals integrate elements individually

and combined to empower their personal transformation

and communities use them to challenge distorted ideas about their humanity.

I'm especially interested in the importance of the mind in recovery

because our behavior rises to the expectation of our beliefs.

So in a research study about 15 years ago,

I found that African-American healing traditions had four structural elements or themes.

This discovery validated the lessons I learned from my family were cultural patterns of thinking and behavior.

And these were time honored, reasoned ideas.

The first element is spirituality.

I'm not talking about religion. Because religion is a particular system of faith. I'm talking about spirituality.

An awareness of an other-worldly dimension to human experience and a personal connection with that world.

Spiritual consciousness motivates a commitment to a higher life purpose. Spirituality is foundational.

It shapes our personal psychology by awakening awareness of our personal strengths.

Those strengths within ourselves and others and our strengths include love,

compassion, creativity, hope, gratitude, justice, just to name a few.

I was about 8 or 9 years old when I observed my Grandma Nan preparing to attend a Sunday women's day service.

I recall her crisp white cotton dress contrasted against her maple brown skin.

And my little eyes watched closely as she placed a white lace handkerchief

so that it peeked from the dress pocket just below her left shoulder.

She put on her white gloves and put her bible under her arm

and then she held my face closely and reminded me to be good.

My grandmother's words, I reflected on as I became an adult

and she often said, be good, to me.

But now I know that she meant, be of good character, be of good service and be good to myself.

Goodness was a spiritual affirmation and she believed

that I could survive the challenges that I'd face as a black woman.

If I developed an active spiritual practice.

So my grandmother's women's day annual Sunday service was an act of spiritual practice and a ritual activity.

So the second element is ritual. Ritual is a series of actions performed in a prescribed order.

There's ritual cleansing such as Limpia and Latina culture and the Native American sweat lodge ceremonies.

But there are also group rituals and it's in these rituals

that a person belongs as a member of the whole community and finds support and hope.

So as you can see on the slide, in Goligichi culture,

African-American communities located along the coastal shores of North,

South Carolina, Georgia and northern Florida,

these communities still preserve features of West African cultural ties.

The ring shell is an important ritual in Goligichi culture.

It's a collective performance of bonding and support using the body and rhythm.

In this video clip, you'll see an example of a ring shell.

Shouters are moving in a circular pattern counterclockwise while stepping in harmony.

And this particular shout skillfully instructs on how to watch the stars to see when

and in what direction to run to freedom.

[Singing and chanting]

So. -- spirituality and ritual are the first two elements.

Has anyone ever said just the right words to inspire or encourage you?

The third element is the power of words.

Among traditional cultures, speech is a source of power and wisdom.

And words are believed to provide and to produce the outcome when a speaker activates them by their intention.

Here's an example.

So if words are spoken in conditions of anger and resentment,

then we experience that outcome. On the other hand, if words are spoken in love and kindness,

then we see that experience.

According to the Pew Research Center,

55 percent of Americans pray every day.

And for years researchers have been studying prayer as a common complement to conventional medicine.

Moving forward, the last element is dreams.

Can you recall ever having a creative idea resulting from a dream or solving a problem?

Dreams are our connection to the unconscious mind and their meanings vary.

There's a ray of information imparted about our experience through our dreams.

Our dreams are full of metaphors.

And there's an endless list of dream interpretations passed down through generations by oral tradition.

For instance, if you're flying upward in a dream,

it's a metaphor for rising to the next level in some area of your life.

In native American culture, totem animals or guiding spirits may appear in a dream.

To bring you a message.

And if your totem is an eagle, the eagle may deliver a message about a problem or issue in your life.

While studying healing traditions, in such places as Senegal,

Brazil, China, Tibet and Thailand,

I recognized they shared structural elements found in my study on African-American healing.

While I'm not saying this is a final set, I posit that these four elements:

spirituality, ritual, the power of words,

and dreams as an age old blueprint for harnessing personal strengths.

For instance, a team of researchers from the United Kingdom

examined a psychosocial care project for Tibetans in exile in Darsalorma,

northern India who had been tortured.

They found that the clients and staff believed that the care project provided a much needed service.

And that it effectively combined western psychological approaches with local cultural and religious practices.

For example, the western practitioners incorporated relaxation methods with clients derived from Buddhist practices.

Their knowledge of Buddhism and sensitivity to Tibetan culture showed respect for a different way to shape healing.

Healing traditions integrate social connections, beliefs,

and practices as multi-faceted medicines;

recognizing culture's connection to healing can employ traditions

as tools to help people recover spiritual and emotional balance.

So modern medicine and culture can partner to support our human potential

for power responses to disease and illness.

Healing traditions play an important role as legitimate partners in this process.

For those people who keep close ties to their cultural identity.

Thank you for listening.

{Applause.}.