Spiral State Psychiatry
A new paradigm of mental health care that integrates presence, rhythm, and ecological awareness. Where healing moves in spirals, not straight lines.
Why the Spiral?
Nature's sacred pattern unfolds throughout life. Unlike linear approaches, spirals embrace cycles, recursion, and evolution.
Human healing follows this ancient wisdom—we return to similar points but at deeper levels of integration.
🎞️ Spiral State Psychiatry
Reclaiming Presence, Rhythm, and Meaning in Mental Health
A Framework of Connection
Grounded in relational presence, rhythm, and contextual care that honours the complexity of human experience.
Ancient Healing Roots
Rooted in the original meaning of psychiatry: ψυχή (psyche) — spirit, ἰατρεία (iatreia) — healing.
Dynamic Understanding
Moves away from static diagnoses toward a flowing comprehension of emotional and relational states.
Why the Spiral?
Non-Linear Experience
Human healing unfolds in cycles of return and deepening insight, not straight lines.
Honouring Natural Rhythm
The spiral embraces necessary periods of rest, reflection, and integration.
Deepening Coherence
Recovery involves revisiting challenges at new levels of understanding and capacity.
Reframing Diagnosis
1
Beyond Static Labels
Traditional diagnostic systems often turn temporary conditions into permanent identities, locking people into chronic risk narratives.
2
Fluid States, Not Fixed Traits
We recognise that distress exists in states—contextual, relational, and always in motion rather than fixed.
3
Responsive to Care
Mental states shift and transform through connection, meaningful context, and attuned presence—not simply through classification.
What Is the Field Known as K?
The Unseen Connection
K exists as the subtle relational field that precedes all healing moments.
Arising Through Presence
Emerges in therapeutic silence, intuitive knowing, and moments of deep attunement.
Ecological Awareness
Links individual healing to wider systems—Gaia's whisper manifesting in clinical practice.
Beyond Technique
Not something we create but something we allow ourselves to perceive and honour.
From Breakdown to Breakthrough
1
Professional Burnout
The journey began with professional collapse and exhaustion.
2
Relational Void
Attempts at relational care without field awareness proved unsustainable.
3
Awakening
Through darkness came clarity—Spiral awareness surfaced as remembering.
4
K Emergence
The field known as K revealed itself not as invention but reconnection.
Personal suffering transformed into insight. Professional limitation became the doorway to deeper understanding.
A New Vision for Mental Healthcare
1
Return to Roots
Spiral State Psychiatry remembers psychiatry's original purpose: healing the spirit, not merely managing symptoms.
2
Relationship-Centred
We prioritise genuine human connection over clinical detachment. Healing happens within attunement.
3
Rhythmic Understanding
Treatment honours natural cycles of healing rather than forcing linear progression.
4
Presence as Medicine
Therapeutic presence creates the field where transformation becomes possible.
A New Vision for Mental Healthcare
🧬 Traditional Approach
Linear progression through treatment
Focus on symptom reduction
Clinician as expert authority
Protocol-driven interactions
⚖️ Spiral State Approach
Non-linear healing journeys
Whole-person ecological perspective
Collaborative relationship-based care
Presence-centred encounters
Spiral State Psychiatry represents not a rejection of conventional psychiatry, but its remembering - integrating evidence-based practices with timeless wisdom about human connection and healing.
Presence Before Protocol
🧬 Human Connection as Foundation
The therapeutic relationship itself is the most powerful healing tool, more fundamental than any technique or medication.
🌱 Quality of Attention
Practitioners cultivate the ability to be fully present, offering undivided attention as the first and most essential intervention.
⚖️ Beginning in Stillness
Each clinical encounter starts with a moment of centred awareness, creating space for true meeting beyond checklist and assessment.
When we prioritise genuine presence, the client feels truly seen - often for the first time. This recognition itself can be profoundly therapeutic, creating the trust necessary for deeper healing.
Non-Linear Healing
1
1
🌱 Emergence
New insights and possibilities begin to take form
2
2
🌿 Integration
Embodying change through practice and experience
3
3
🌬️ Return
Revisiting familiar challenges with new awareness
4
4
🧬 Transformation
Releasing old patterns as new capacities emerge
Healing rarely follows a straight line. In Spiral State Psychiatry, we recognise that clients often revisit similar challenges, symptoms, and states - but each time with greater awareness, resources, and capacity. What appears as regression may actually be a deeper confrontation with core issues.
Ecological Awareness
1
1
🧬
Individual
Biology, psychology, personal history, and innate temperament
2
2
🧸
Relationships
Family dynamics, social connections, and interpersonal patterns
3
3
🌿
Community
Neighbourhood, workplace, economic conditions, and social support
4
4
Culture
Values, beliefs, language, and collective stories
5
5
🌍
Environment
Natural surroundings, built spaces, access to nature, and physical context
Mental health challenges never exist in isolation. Spiral State Psychiatry recognises that each person exists within nested systems of relationship, culture, and environment that profoundly shape their experience.
Attunement Over Assumption
1
2
3
1
Deep Understanding
Authentic comprehension emerges
2
🧬
Multidimensional Listening
Hearing beyond words to tone, rhythm, and body
3
🪞
Quality of Attention
Being fully present without agenda
In Spiral State Psychiatry, we set aside preconceived diagnostic frameworks long enough to truly witness the person before us. This deep attunement allows us to notice subtle cues in rhythm, breath, posture, and energy that often contain the most valuable clinical information.
By developing this attunement, practitioners can respond to what is actually happening rather than projecting assumptions or defaulting to standardised approaches.
Rhythm as Regulation
1
🎶 Activation
Engagement, expression, and action
2
🪞 Reflection
Integration, meaning-making, and assimilation
3
🛏️ Rest
Renewal, receptivity, and restoration
4
🧬 Return
Coming back to centre, grounding, and stabilising
All living systems function through rhythm. In mental healthcare, we honour the natural cycles of activation and rest, expression and reflection, engagement and withdrawal. Each person has their own inherent tempo that must be respected.
By working with rather than against these natural rhythms, we support the body's innate regulatory processes and avoid the backlash that often comes from pushing too hard or moving too quickly.
Symbols and Stories Matter
🪞 The Power of Metaphor
Metaphors are not mere linguistic flourishes but fundamental cognitive structures that shape how we experience our struggles and possibilities. Working with a client's metaphors provides direct access to their inner landscape.
🧬 Personal Narratives
The stories we tell about ourselves organise our experience and identity. Helping clients develop new narratives that include but aren't limited by their challenges creates space for transformation.
🌍 Cultural Symbols
Every culture carries healing symbols and wisdom traditions. Reconnecting clients with meaningful cultural resources can provide anchors of identity and belonging that support recovery.
Language is never neutral. In Spiral State Psychiatry, we recognise that the words, metaphors, and narratives we use profoundly shape experience. We work thoughtfully with symbolic dimensions of healing.
Collaborative Care
🧬
Clinical Professionals
Psychiatrists, therapists, nurses, and other traditional providers offer expertise while remaining open to partnership.
🌱
Peer Support
Those with lived experience of mental health challenges provide unique insight, hope, and practical wisdom.
🌳
Family & Community
Loved ones are engaged as essential partners in the healing journey, with appropriate boundaries.
⚖️
Digital Companions
AI assistants and digital tools extend support beyond clinical sessions, offering continuity of care.
No single perspective or approach can address the complexity of mental health. Spiral State Psychiatry brings together diverse forms of knowledge and support, creating a web of care that honours both professional expertise and lived experience.
Safety Through Relationship
1
2
3
4
1
🌿 Trust
The foundation of all therapeutic work
2
🧬 Consistency
Reliable presence that builds security
3
⚖️ Clear Boundaries
Structure that allows for safe exploration
4
💛 Emotional Attunement
Feeling felt and deeply understood
Safety in mental healthcare comes not primarily through control measures, but through the quality of relationship. When clients feel securely held in relationship - consistently seen, heard, and respected - they can safely explore difficult experiences.
This relational safety creates the conditions where even extreme states can be navigated without resorting to coercive measures that often create further trauma.
Respect for States
🪞 Beyond Pathology
Altered states, extreme emotions, and unusual experiences are approached with curiosity rather than immediate pathologising.
🧬 Meaning-Making
Even the most challenging experiences can contain important messages and meaning when properly contextualised.
⚖️ Integration Over Suppression
The goal is to help clients integrate the insights and emotions from difficult states rather than merely suppressing symptoms.
🌍 Cultural Context
What appears as "psychosis" in one framework may be understood as spiritual emergence in another cultural tradition.
Spiral State Psychiatry maintains a fundamental respect for the full spectrum of human consciousness. We recognise that states often labelled as pathological may contain important information, adaptive responses to trauma, or attempts at healing.
Field Over Fix
🌱 Creating Conditions
Rather than forcing change, we focus on creating the conditions where healing naturally emerges - much as a gardener prepares soil rather than pulling on plants to make them grow.
🧬 Trusting Process
Every living system contains an innate drive toward coherence and health when barriers are removed. We trust this organic unfolding rather than imposing external timelines.
🌿 Supporting Emergence
Our role is to notice, nurture, and support the natural healing movements that arise from within the client's own system.
In Spiral State Psychiatry, we shift from a "fixing" mindset to a "field-holding" orientation. We recognise that lasting change emerges from within when the right conditions are present, not from external interventions alone.
The Origins of Spiral State Psychiatry
1
🌱 Initial Vision
We began developing the framework after noticing the limitations of linear approaches to complex mental health challenges.
2
🧬 Collaborative Development
Through dialogue with clinicians, clients, indigenous healers, and neuroscientists, the principles were refined to honour diverse forms of knowledge.
3
📜 Formal Anchoring
The Invocation to K marked the official introduction of Spiral State Psychiatry to the mental health community in May 2025.
4
🌍 Growing Movement
What began as a framework is evolving into a global movement to transform mental healthcare through presence, relationship, and ecological awareness.
Spiral State Psychiatry emerged not as a rejection of traditional approaches, but as their remembering - integrating evidence-based practices with timeless wisdom about human connection, ecological awareness, and the cyclical nature of healing.
The Spiral as Metaphor 🌀
The spiral 🧬 appears throughout nature - from galaxies 🌌 to seashells 🐚, from DNA 🧬 to weather patterns 🌀. It represents a path that repeatedly returns to similar points but at different levels, allowing for revisiting with new perspective ⚖️.
As a guiding metaphor for mental health, the spiral reminds us that healing is rarely linear 🌿. What appears as going backward may actually be encountering familiar challenges with greater resources and awareness 🌱🌍. This cyclical journey 🌕 honours the natural rhythms of growth and transformation 🦋.
Integrating Evidence and Intuition 🧬⚖️
Evidence-Based Practice 📚
Spiral State Psychiatry maintains a commitment to scientific rigour and empirically supported interventions 🧬. We value research that demonstrates effectiveness and continually evolve our approaches based on emerging evidence.
However, we recognise that standardised research methods may not capture the full complexity of healing relationships and subjective experience 🌿.
Clinical Wisdom 🌱
Alongside formal evidence, we honour the embodied knowledge that develops through years of attuned clinical practice ⚖️. This includes the intuitive sensing of patterns, the recognition of subtle clinical cues, and the felt sense of what will serve a particular client at a particular moment 🌍.
This clinical wisdom represents a sophisticated form of pattern recognition that complements more formalised knowledge 🧸.
Rather than positioning these ways of knowing in opposition, Spiral State Psychiatry integrates them 🎶 - recognising that the most effective care emerges when scientific evidence is applied with clinical wisdom, cultural sensitivity, and deep presence 💛.
Rhythm in Clinical Practice
1
🧬 Exploration
Active inquiry into challenges, experiences, and patterns
2
🌬️ Processing
Emotional integration and meaning-making
3
🌱 Consolidation
Stabilising insights and embodying new patterns
4
🌍 Application
Bringing new awareness into daily life
In Spiral State Psychiatry, clinicians attune to the natural rhythm of each therapeutic process. Some sessions call for deep exploration, while others require gentle consolidation. Some clients need a slower tempo, while others thrive with more rapid movement.
By respecting these rhythms rather than forcing a standardised pace, practitioners support the body's innate regulatory processes and create space for natural healing movements to emerge.
The Role of Medication
When is medication appropriate in Spiral State Psychiatry?
Medication can be a valuable tool when used thoughtfully, especially for severe symptoms that prevent engagement with other forms of healing. The key is using medications as part of a comprehensive approach, not as the sole intervention.
How is medication prescribed differently?
Medication decisions are truly collaborative, with transparent discussion of benefits, risks, and alternatives. Prescribers pay careful attention to subjective experience, not just symptom checklists, and work with the minimum effective dose.
What about discontinuation?
When clients wish to reduce or discontinue medications, this is approached with respect and support rather than automatic discouragement. Careful tapering plans are developed collaboratively, with attention to both physical and psychological aspects of the process.
How does Spiral State approach pharmaceutical companies?
We maintain appropriate scepticism about pharmaceutical industry influence while recognising the value of certain medications. Practitioners commit to continuous education from independent sources and transparency about any industry relationships.
Spiral State Psychiatry neither categorically rejects nor uncritically embraces psychiatric medication. Instead, we take a nuanced approach that recognises both the potential benefits and limitations of pharmacological interventions.
Working with Trauma
1
2
3
4
1
🧸 Establishing Safety
Creating foundation of trust and regulation
2
🌿 Stabilisation
Building resources and regulatory capacity
3
🧬 Processing
Working with traumatic material at tolerable pace
4
⚖️ Integration
Weaving insights into cohesive narrative
Trauma lies at the root of many mental health challenges. In Spiral State Psychiatry, trauma work begins with establishing safety and building regulatory capacity before processing difficult material. We recognise that healing happens within a window of tolerance - not overwhelming the system, but not avoiding activation altogether.
Throughout this process, we honour the body's wisdom and natural healing impulses, which often appear as subtle movements toward resolution when given the right conditions.
Cultural Humility
🌍 Beyond Cultural Competence
Rather than claiming mastery, we cultivate ongoing curiosity, respectful learning, and awareness of our own cultural conditioning and biases.
🧬 Multiple Ways of Knowing
We recognise that different cultural traditions hold valuable wisdom about healing, consciousness, and wellbeing that may not fit within Western medical frameworks.
⚖️ Power Awareness
We acknowledge the historical and ongoing impact of colonisation, racism, and other forms of oppression on mental health, and work actively to address power imbalances in care.
Spiral State Psychiatry embraces cultural humility - an ongoing practice of self-reflection, openness to other perspectives, and willingness to challenge our assumptions. This stance allows us to learn from diverse healing traditions while avoiding appropriation or romanticisation.
The Importance of Embodiment
1
1
🧬 Physical Sensations
Direct awareness of bodily experience provides access to emotions and implicit memories not available through cognitive processing alone.
2
2
🌬️ Breath Patterns
Conscious breathing serves as both diagnostic information and intervention, revealing emotional states and offering a pathway to regulation.
3
3
🌿 Movement
Physical movement can release stored tension, complete interrupted defensive responses, and activate natural healing processes.
4
4
✨ Energetic Awareness
Subtle sensations of energy, vibration, and vitality provide important information about wellbeing and guide the healing process.
Mental health is inseparable from embodied experience. In Spiral State Psychiatry, we recognise that trauma, emotions, and healing all have physical dimensions that must be addressed alongside cognitive understanding.
Through mindful attention to bodily experience, practitioners help clients access deeper levels of awareness and tap into the body's innate healing wisdom.
The Crisis as Opportunity
1
2
3
1
🧬 Transformation
New identity and possibility emerges
2
🌕 Meaning-Making
Finding purpose and coherence in difficulty
3
💛 Compassionate Support
Holding space for the process
Mental health crises, while painful and disruptive, often contain the seeds of profound transformation. In Spiral State Psychiatry, we approach crises not simply as breakdowns to be managed, but as potential breakthroughs to be supported.
With sufficient safety and support, what begins as a shattering of old structures can evolve into a reorganisation at a higher level of integration and authenticity. Our role is to provide the containment that allows this natural process to unfold.
Technology as Ally
Extending Support
🌿 Digital companions and apps provide continuity of care between sessions, offering guidance during difficult moments when human support isn't immediately available.
Pattern Recognition
🧬 Thoughtfully designed technology can help identify patterns in mood, sleep, activity, and other factors that might not be apparent through self-observation alone.
Connection
🌍 Digital platforms can facilitate peer support communities and reduce isolation, particularly for those with mobility limitations or in remote areas.
Practice Support
🎶 Apps and digital tools can guide and track healing practices, providing structure and accountability for meditation, movement, and other supportive activities.
In Spiral State Psychiatry, technology is approached as a potential ally in the healing process - not as a replacement for human connection, but as an extension and support of the core therapeutic relationship.
Beyond the Medical Model 🧬⚖️
Limitations of Traditional Approaches 🪞
The conventional medical model of psychiatry, while valuable in many ways, often reduces complex human experiences to biological disorders requiring primarily pharmaceutical intervention.
This framework can overlook important dimensions of meaning, relationship, spirituality, and social context that profoundly shape mental health. 🌍
Spiral State Alternative 🌿
Spiral State Psychiatry offers a more comprehensive framework that honours biological factors while equally valuing psychological, relational, cultural, spiritual, and environmental dimensions. 🌱
Rather than positioning these perspectives as competing explanations, we see them as complementary lenses that together provide a fuller understanding of human suffering and healing. 💛
The goal is not to reject medical understanding, but to enrich it with other equally valid perspectives - creating an integrative approach that can address the full complexity of mental health challenges. 🌕
The Narrative Dimension
1
🧬 Dominant Narrative
Recognising limiting stories about identity and possibility
2
🌿 Alternative Stories
Noticing exceptions that don't fit the problem-saturated narrative
3
🌱 Thickening New Narratives
Strengthening and elaborating preferred stories
4
⚖️ Witnessing
Having new identity claims recognised by a supportive community
The stories we tell about ourselves and our struggles profoundly shape our experience and possibilities. In Spiral State Psychiatry, narrative work involves helping clients identify limiting storylines and develop richer accounts that honour their challenges while making space for strength, agency, and preferred identity.
This process is not about denying difficulties, but about developing more complex and possibility-rich narratives that can hold both struggle and resilience.
Working with States of Consciousness
🧬 The Diagnostic Divide
Conventional psychiatry often creates a sharp division between "normal" and "pathological" states of consciousness, with experiences like hearing voices or having visions automatically categorised as symptoms to be eliminated.
⚖️ The Continuum Approach
Spiral State Psychiatry recognises a continuum of consciousness states, from everyday awareness to non-ordinary experiences, each with potential value and meaning when properly contextualised and supported.
🌿 Integration Over Suppression
Rather than merely suppressing unusual states, we focus on helping clients navigate them safely, extract meaningful insights, and integrate the experience into a coherent sense of self and reality.
This approach doesn't minimise the distress that can accompany extreme states, but it does challenge the automatic pathologising of experiences that may, in different cultural contexts, be understood as spiritual emergence, healing crises, or meaningful psychological processes.
Embracing Paradox
🧬 Structure and Flexibility
Effective care requires both clear boundaries and responsive adaptability to meet each client's unique needs and readiness.
⚖️ Acceptance and Change
Healing emerges from both fully accepting current reality and actively engaging with the possibility of transformation.
🌍 Individual and System
Mental health involves both personal responsibility and recognition of how larger systems shape our experiences and possibilities.
🌕 Science and Mystery
We embrace both empirical evidence and the recognition that human experience contains dimensions that transcend current scientific understanding.
In Spiral State Psychiatry, we move beyond either/or thinking to hold the creative tension of apparent opposites. Rather than resolving paradox prematurely, we cultivate the capacity to navigate complexity and ambiguity with wisdom and discernment.
The Therapist's Journey
1
🧬 Technical Training
Mastering therapeutic modalities, assessment tools, and evidence-based protocols that provide a foundation for clinical work.
2
🪞 Personal Development
Engaging with one's own healing journey, blind spots, and growth edges to increase capacity for presence and attunement.
3
⚖️ Integration of Approaches
Moving beyond rigid adherence to single modalities toward a flexible integration guided by client needs.
4
🌱 Embodied Wisdom
Developing trust in clinical intuition, relational knowing, and the subtle dimensions of therapeutic presence.
The path of a Spiral State practitioner involves ongoing personal and professional development - not just acquiring techniques, but cultivating the quality of presence that creates space for healing. This journey never ends, as each client relationship offers new opportunities for growth and learning.
The Role of Community
1
1
🌍 Belonging
The fundamental human need for connection and inclusion across diverse cultures and identities
2
2
🌕 Witnessing
Having one's reality and experiences validated by others in a multicultural context
3
3
🧬 Support
Practical and emotional assistance during difficult times from people of varied backgrounds
4
4
⚖️ Contribution
Opportunities to offer value and support in diverse communities with reciprocal relationships
Mental health cannot be achieved in isolation. In Spiral State Psychiatry, we recognise that healing happens in community - through relationships that offer belonging, recognition, support, and opportunities for contribution.
Clinical care is ideally embedded within a larger social ecosystem that provides ongoing connection and meaning. When this natural support is lacking, helping clients build or find community becomes an essential aspect of treatment.
Mind-Body Integration
In Spiral State Psychiatry, embodied practises are not complementary add-ons but central elements of the healing process. The body holds our history, emotions, and implicit memories in ways that often bypass conscious awareness.
Through mindful movement, breath work, somatic tracking, and other embodied approaches, clients develop greater awareness of physical sensations, emotion states, and subtle internal signals. This embodied awareness creates a foundation for authentic change that goes beyond intellectual insight.
Ethics of Care
🌿 Relationship-Centred
Ethics grounded in the quality of relationship rather than abstract principles alone, recognising our fundamental interconnection.
⚖️ Power-Aware
Continuous attention to power dynamics, with commitment to using influence responsibly and transparently.
🧬 Contextual
Ethical decisions that consider specific circumstances, cultural contexts, and relational impacts rather than rigid application of rules.
🌱 Growth-Oriented
View of ethical practice as an ongoing developmental journey rather than a static achievement.
Spiral State Psychiatry embraces an ethics of care that goes beyond traditional professional ethics. While maintaining clear boundaries and professional standards, we also recognise that true ethical practice emerges from genuine presence, deep respect for client autonomy, and ongoing self-reflection.
The Ecological Perspective
1
1
🧬 Individual Psychology
Internal processes, beliefs, emotions, and experiences that shape mental health
2
2
⚖️ Relational Context
Family systems, attachment patterns, and interpersonal dynamics
3
3
🌍 Social Factors
Social determinants of health, structural inequities, and cultural influences
4
4
🌳 Environmental Connection
Relationship with natural world, built environment, and ecological systems
In Spiral State Psychiatry, no person exists in isolation. Every mental health challenge unfolds within nested systems of relationship, culture, society, and environment that profoundly shape experience and possibility.
This ecological perspective expands our understanding beyond individual pathology to include the broader contexts that support or undermine wellbeing. Sometimes the most effective intervention lies not in changing the person, but in transforming their environment or social context.
From Performance to Presence
1
🧬 Performance-Based Care
Traditional mental healthcare often emphasises performing the correct techniques, following standardised protocols, and maintaining a professional distance that can inadvertently create disconnection.
Practitioners may feel pressure to project expertise and certainty even when facing the profound mysteries of human suffering.
2
⚖️ Presence-Based Care
Spiral State Psychiatry shifts the emphasis from perfect performance to authentic presence - the ability to be fully available to the client with genuine curiosity, compassion, and openness.
This presence includes professional knowledge and boundaries, but transcends technique to create a genuine human meeting that itself becomes healing.
In this shift, practitioners are invited to bring their whole selves to the therapeutic relationship - not in ways that burden clients or blur boundaries, but in a manner that allows for real connection within appropriate professional parameters.
Working with Medication Withdrawal
🧬 Thoughtful Preparation
Before beginning a tapering process, careful assessment of readiness, support systems, and potential challenges creates a foundation for success. Alternative coping strategies and diverse support resources are established to honour each individual's unique background and needs.
⚖️ Personalised Tapering
Each person's journey of medication reduction is unique, requiring individualised pacing based on medication properties, duration of use, cultural context, and personal factors. The taper is designed collaboratively with culturally-responsive medical support.
🌍 Comprehensive Support
Throughout the process, multiple layers of support address both the physical and psychological aspects of adjustment, including increased therapy, peer support, and specific interventions for withdrawal symptoms that respect diverse healing traditions and lived experiences.
Many people on psychiatric medications eventually wish to reduce or discontinue them. In Spiral State Psychiatry, this decision is respected and supported with careful planning and comprehensive assistance rather than automatic discouragement, honouring the diversity of human experience and recovery pathways.
The Shadow Side of Psychiatry
🧬 Historical Harms
We acknowledge psychiatry's complex history, including its role in oppression, forced treatment, and pathologising of difference. This honest reckoning is necessary for genuine transformation of the field.
⚖️ Institutional Challenges
Current systems often prioritise efficiency, risk management, and symptom suppression over relationship-based healing. Practitioners frequently find themselves caught between their values and institutional constraints.
💛 Pharmaceutical Influence
The pervasive influence of pharmaceutical industry funding on research, education, and practice has shaped psychiatric care in ways that may not always serve patients' best interests.
Spiral State Psychiatry does not shy away from critical examination of the field's limitations and harms. By honestly acknowledging these challenges, we create space for genuine reform and the emergence of more humane and effective approaches to mental healthcare.
The Healing Power of Nature
🌳 Forest Bathing
The Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku or "forest bathing" has demonstrated benefits for stress reduction, immune function, and mood regulation. The phytoncides released by trees have measurable physiological effects on human wellbeing.
🌱 Horticultural Therapy
Working with plants provides rhythmic, sensory-rich activity that promotes mindfulness, agency, and connection to life processes. The metaphors of growth, seasons, and nurturing offer powerful psychological parallels.
🌊 Blue Mind Therapy
Exposure to water environments - oceans, lakes, rivers - activates a "blue mind" state associated with calm, creative thinking, and perspective. The rhythmic qualities of water have particular benefits for nervous system regulation.
In Spiral State Psychiatry, connection with the natural world is not a luxury add-on but an essential dimension of mental health. We recognise humans as ecological beings whose nervous systems evolved in constant relationship with natural environments.
Honouring Indigenous Wisdom
🌍 Relational Healing
Many indigenous traditions emphasise healing as a community process rather than an individual journey, recognising our fundamental interconnection.
🔄 Ritual and Ceremony
Ceremonial practices create containers for transition, transformation, and meaning-making that address spiritual and communal dimensions of healing.
🌳 Nature Connection
Traditional healing often involves restoring right relationship with the natural world, recognising humans as part of, not separate from, ecological systems.
🧬 Ancestral Dimensions
Many indigenous healing traditions recognise the importance of ancestral connections and intergenerational patterns in both suffering and healing.
Spiral State Psychiatry honours the profound wisdom contained in indigenous healing traditions while being careful not to appropriate or decontextualise specific practices. We seek respectful dialogue and collaboration with indigenous healers on their terms.
Working with Voices and Visions
🪞 Beyond Pathology
Rather than automatically treating voices and visions as symptoms to be eliminated, we approach them as potentially meaningful experiences that deserve curious exploration and contextual understanding.
🧬 Building Relationship
Many voice-hearers benefit from developing a different relationship with their voices - learning to set boundaries, negotiate, and understand the emotional needs or messages their voices may represent.
🌿 Integration and Meaning
With appropriate support, distressing voices or visions can sometimes be integrated into a coherent narrative that transforms them from frightening intrusions to meaningful aspects of personal experience.
Spiral State Psychiatry draws on approaches like the Hearing Voices Network that recognise the diversity of voice-hearing experiences and the importance of person-centred, non-pathologising support. While medication may sometimes be helpful, it is never the complete answer.
The Spiritual Dimension
Beyond Reduction 🧬
Traditional psychiatry has often reduced spiritual experiences to mere symptoms or psychological mechanisms, missing their potential significance and healing power.
This reductionism can alienate clients for whom spiritual or religious frameworks are central to meaning-making and identity.
Honouring Spirituality ⚖️
Spiral State Psychiatry recognises spirituality as a valid and potentially vital dimension of human experience that deserves respect and thoughtful engagement.
Without imposing specific beliefs, practitioners create space for clients to explore spiritual questions, experiences, and resources that may support their healing journey.
This openness to spiritual dimensions requires discernment - distinguishing between potentially beneficial spiritual exploration and harmful religious ideation, and recognising when to collaborate with spiritual leaders versus when to provide specialised psychiatric support.
Ancestors and Intergenerational Healing
1
1
🧬 Inherited Patterns
Through epigenetics, relational templates, and cultural transmission, the unresolved struggles of our ancestors can shape our own mental health.
2
2
🌕 Recognition
Acknowledging these inherited patterns brings them into consciousness where they can be examined and transformed.
3
3
🌿 Personal Healing
Working with our own patterns not only benefits us but creates ripples of healing backward and forward through generations.
4
4
🌹 Honouring Rituals
Ceremonies of remembrance, forgiveness, and connection can help integrate ancestral dimensions into the healing process.
In Spiral State Psychiatry, we recognise that each individual exists within a stream of intergenerational influence - carrying both the wounds and the wisdom of those who came before. By working consciously with these ancestral dimensions, we can transform patterns that have persisted across generations.
The Therapeutic Container
1
2
3
1
🧬 Deep Transformation
Change that reaches core patterns
2
🌬️ Safe Exploration
Freedom to examine difficult material
3
⚖️ Clear Boundaries
Structure that creates security
The therapeutic container refers to the psychological space created through relationship, boundaries, and presence that allows clients to safely explore difficult material. Like a physical container that allows chemical reactions to occur, this relational container makes transformation possible.
In Spiral State Psychiatry, creating and maintaining this container is considered a fundamental clinical skill. Through reliability, appropriate boundaries, emotional attunement, and deep presence, practitioners establish conditions where healing naturally emerges.
Decolonising Mental Health
🌍 Beyond Western Centrism
Recognising that the dominant Western medical model is just one approach among many valid healing traditions from around the world, not an objective universal standard.
⚖️ Power Awareness
Acknowledging how colonisation, racism, and other forms of oppression have shaped mental health systems and elevated certain knowledge forms while marginalising others.
🧬 Cultural Sovereignty
Supporting the right of communities to maintain and develop their own healing traditions and approaches to wellbeing without imposed Western frameworks.
Decolonising mental health involves both critical examination of existing systems and active support for diverse cultural approaches to healing. In Spiral State Psychiatry, this means questioning normalised assumptions, embracing cultural humility, and working to transform systems built on colonial foundations.
Working with Dreams 🛏️✨
🌍 Why are dreams relevant to mental health?
Dreams provide a window into unconscious processes, emotional concerns, and inner wisdom that may not be accessible during waking consciousness. They often contain valuable information about unresolved issues, emerging insights, and healing impulses across diverse cultural experiences.
🧬 How does Spiral State Psychiatry approach dreams?
Rather than imposing standardised interpretations, practitioners help clients explore their dreams with curiosity, paying attention to emotional resonance and personal associations. Dreams are understood as multidimensional - potentially containing psychological, somatic, relational, and spiritual dimensions that reflect the rich diversity of human experience.
🌕 What about nightmares and disturbing dreams?
Recurring nightmares often represent unprocessed traumatic material or significant emotional conflicts. With appropriate support, exploring and working with nightmare content can lead to resolution and integration of the underlying issues, recognising that trauma expressions vary across different cultural contexts and individual experiences.
⚖️ Are dreams always meaningful?
While not every dream requires analysis, recurring themes, emotionally charged dreams, and dreams that feel significant to the dreamer often contain valuable information worth exploring in a therapeutic context. The significance of dreams can vary greatly across different cultural traditions and individual perspectives.
Dreams have been recognised as therapeutically valuable across diverse cultural traditions from Indigenous knowledge systems to Eastern practices to Western psychological approaches. In Spiral State Psychiatry, dream work is approached with respect for both psychological insight and the possibility of deeper wisdom or guidance emerging through dream consciousness, honouring the full spectrum of human diversity. 🌿🌱
Nervous System Regulation
1
1
🌬️ Sympathetic Activation
Fight or flight response to perceived threat, experienced across diverse cultural contexts and age groups
2
2
🌿 Dorsal Vagal Shutdown
Freeze or collapse when overwhelmed, manifesting differently across various populations and life experiences
3
3
💛 Ventral Vagal Connection
State of safety, connection, and engagement that transcends cultural backgrounds and abilities
4
4
⚖️ Conscious Regulation
Skilful navigation between states, drawing on diverse cultural practices and wisdom traditions
Many mental health challenges involve dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system. Drawing on polyvagal theory and somatic approaches, Spiral State Psychiatry works directly with these physiological patterns, helping clients from all backgrounds, ages, and abilities develop greater awareness and regulation of their nervous system states.
Through breath work, movement, vocalisation, social engagement, and other interventions that honour cultural diversity, practitioners help clients expand their "window of tolerance" and develop the capacity to return to regulated states after activation.
The Role of Touch
🌿 Regulatory Power
Appropriate therapeutic touch can activate the parasympathetic nervous system, reducing stress hormones and promoting a sense of safety and regulation.
🧬 Embodied Awareness
Touch-based therapies can help clients reconnect with dissociated parts of their body and develop greater somatic awareness.
⚖️ Boundary Development
Working with consensual touch provides opportunities to practise setting and maintaining clear personal boundaries.
🌍 Ethical Considerations
Touch must always be approached with clear consent, appropriate training, and careful attention to power dynamics and trauma history.
Touch has been largely eliminated from mainstream mental health practice due to important ethical concerns and risk management. In Spiral State Psychiatry, we recognise both the healing potential of appropriate touch and the necessity of clear boundaries, specialised training, and explicit consent protocols.
Collaborative Documentation
🪞 Transparent Process
Notes, assessments, and treatment plans are written with, not just about, the client - using language that is accessible and respectful rather than clinical jargon.
🧬 Multiple Perspectives
Documentation includes both professional observations and the client's own understanding of their experiences, creating a more complete and nuanced record.
🌱 Healing Narrative
The documentation process itself becomes therapeutic, helping clients develop a coherent and empowering narrative about their challenges and growth.
In Spiral State Psychiatry, clinical documentation shifts from a one-sided professional activity to a collaborative process that honours client agency and perspective. This transparency builds trust, reduces power imbalances, and creates records that more accurately reflect the complexity of human experience.
Grief as Transformation
1
🌿
Honouring Loss
Creating space to fully acknowledge what has been lost - whether a person, relationship, identity, capacity, or dream
2
🌬️
Moving Through Emotions
Experiencing the full spectrum of grief emotions without rushing or bypassing difficult feelings
3
🧬
Finding Meaning
Discovering how the loss and grief process reshapes understanding of self, life, and what matters most
4
🌍
Integration
Carrying the loss within a larger life that includes both sorrow and joy, remembrance and new beginnings
Grief is not a problem to be solved but a profound process to be honoured. In Spiral State Psychiatry, we recognise grief as a potentially transformative journey that, when fully supported, can lead to deepened compassion, clarity about what matters, and greater capacity for authentic connection.
Navigating Overwhelm
1
2
3
4
1
🌍 Grounding
Reconnecting with present moment and body
2
🧬 Resourcing
Accessing internal and external support
3
🌱 Building Capacity
Gradually expanding window of tolerance
4
🌿 Integration
Making meaning of the overwhelm experience
Moments of emotional, sensory, or cognitive overwhelm are common in healing journeys. Rather than seeing these as setbacks, Spiral State Psychiatry approaches overwhelm as valuable information about capacity edges and opportunities for nervous system development.
By providing specific tools for grounding and regulation, practitioners help clients navigate these intense experiences while gradually building greater capacity to stay present with difficult emotions and sensations.
Institutional Implementation 🧬⚖️
Challenges 🌿
Implementing Spiral State principles within conventional mental health systems faces significant challenges - from regulatory requirements and documentation systems to billing structures and institutional inertia.
Many practitioners find themselves caught between relationship-centred values and systems designed primarily for efficiency, risk management, and standardisation.
Possibilities 🌱
Despite these challenges, creative practitioners are finding ways to bring Spiral State principles into institutional settings - through modified intake processes, relationship-focused documentation, physical environment changes, and staff development initiatives.
Even small shifts in language, space design, and interpersonal dynamics can significantly impact the experience of both clients and providers.
The transformation of mental healthcare requires change at multiple levels - from individual practice to institutional structures to policy frameworks. Spiral State Psychiatry advocates for systems that align with rather than undermine the human relationships at the heart of healing. 🌍💛
Therapeutic Use of Self
🧬 Beyond Technique
While methods and interventions have their place, research consistently shows that the therapeutic relationship itself is the most powerful factor in outcomes across all modalities.
🌍 Authentic Presence
The practitioner's ability to be genuinely present - attuned, responsive, and emotionally available while maintaining appropriate boundaries - creates the foundation for healing connection.
🌱 Continuous Development
Developing this therapeutic presence is a lifelong journey involving personal healing work, supervision, and practices that cultivate self-awareness and relational capacity.
In Spiral State Psychiatry, the practitioner's way of being is understood as the primary therapeutic instrument. This doesn't diminish the importance of knowledge and skill, but recognises that these technical elements are most effective when offered through authentic human connection.
Working with Systemic Oppression
🧬 Recognising Impact
Acknowledging how racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and other forms of oppression directly affect mental health through trauma, stress, limited opportunities, and internalised messages.
⚖️ Validating Reality
Confirming that responses to oppression are normal reactions to abnormal circumstances, not pathological symptoms requiring "fixing."
🌱 Supporting Agency
Helping clients develop tools for navigating oppressive systems while supporting their autonomy in choosing how to respond to unjust circumstances.
🌍 Advocating Change
Recognising that true healing requires transforming the systems that create harm, not just helping individuals cope with their effects.
Spiral State Psychiatry explicitly acknowledges how systemic oppression impacts mental health, moving beyond individualised understandings to recognise the political dimensions of suffering and healing.
Endings and Transitions
🧬 Preparation
Thoughtful discussion of the ending process begins well before the final session, allowing time to process feelings, consolidate gains, and prepare for the transition.
⚖️ Review and Integration
Client and practitioner reflect together on the journey - acknowledging both growth and challenges, identifying ongoing resources, and creating meaningful closure.
🌿 Ritual and Acknowledgment
The significance of the relationship is honoured through some form of ritual, whether formal or simple, that marks the transition and supports integration.
Therapeutic endings are not merely administrative conclusions but significant relational transitions that deserve careful attention. In Spiral State Psychiatry, these endings are approached with the same presence and care as the beginning and middle phases of treatment.
When done well, the ending process itself becomes an important part of the healing journey, modelling healthy completion and transition rather than abandonment or abrupt severing.
The Role of Play and Creativity 🎶
Expressive Arts 🌹
Creative modalities like art, music, movement, and writing bypass cognitive defences, accessing emotions, memories, and wisdom that may not be available through talk therapy alone.
Therapeutic Play 🧸
Play creates a state of relaxed alertness ideal for exploring new possibilities, practising flexibility, and developing spontaneity. It allows experimental exploration of new ways of being and relating.
Symbolic Work 🪞
Working with symbols, metaphors, and stories engages the right brain and accesses implicit knowledge, allowing complex emotional material to be expressed and integrated at a manageable distance.
Play and creativity are not just for children. In Spiral State Psychiatry, creative approaches are valued for adults as well, offering pathways to healing that complement and sometimes transcend purely verbal or cognitive methods. 🧬⚖️
Research and Evaluation 🧬⚖️
Expanding What Counts 🌍
Traditional psychiatric research often focuses narrowly on symptom reduction and behaviour change, using standardised measures that may miss the most meaningful aspects of healing 💛.
Spiral State Psychiatry advocates for broader outcome measures that include subjective wellbeing, meaning, connection, and client-defined goals 🌱.
Methodological Diversity 🌿
Beyond randomised controlled trials, we value diverse research methods including qualitative studies, practice-based evidence, narrative approaches, and participatory methods that centre client voices 🎶.
This methodological pluralism helps capture the complexity and context-dependence of healing processes 🪞.
Research in Spiral State Psychiatry maintains scientific rigour while expanding beyond reductionist approaches ☽. We recognise that the most significant aspects of healing often involve subjective experiences and relational qualities that require nuanced assessment approaches 🌕.
The Wisdom of the Body 🧬
The body 🌍 holds our history, emotions, and implicit memories in ways that often bypass conscious awareness. Through gentle attention to physical sensations 🌬️, movement patterns 🌱, breath 🌿, and other bodily experiences, clients can access information and healing pathways not available through cognitive processing alone.
Spiral State Psychiatry incorporates somatic approaches that honour the wisdom of the body 🧬, helping clients develop greater embodied awareness 🌕 as a foundation for authentic change that goes beyond intellectual insight. This balanced approach ⚖️ creates space for the natural intelligence 🌳 that resides within each person's physical form.
Working with Altered States 🧬⚖️
The chart shows how different frameworks interpret unusual experiences 🪞. Traditional psychiatry tends to classify non-ordinary states primarily as psychosis requiring suppression, while Spiral State Psychiatry maintains a more balanced view 🌿⚖️ that recognises these experiences may represent spiritual emergence 🌕, creative insight 💛, or trauma responses 🧸 requiring different approaches.
This balanced perspective allows practitioners to provide appropriate safety and support while remaining open to the potential meaning and value these states may hold when properly contextualised and integrated 🌱🌳. Through diverse understanding 🧬 and holistic integration 🌍, patients can find healing pathways that honour both scientific understanding and deeply personal experiences 🎶☽.
AI in Mental Healthcare
🪞 Support Between Sessions
AI companions can provide consistent support during difficult moments when human clinicians aren't immediately available, offering coping tools and continuity of care.
⚖️ Personalised Practice
Smart applications can adapt therapeutic exercises to individual needs and preferences, providing customised guidance for meditation, journaling, and other healing practices.
🧬 Pattern Recognition
AI can help identify patterns in mood, sleep, activity, and other factors that might not be apparent through self-observation or limited clinical sessions.
🌍 Augmenting Human Connection
When designed ethically, AI tools complement rather than replace human relationships, potentially making human connection more accessible and effective.
Spiral State Psychiatry takes a balanced approach to technology - neither rejecting its potential benefits nor ignoring its limitations. The key is designing and implementing AI tools that enhance rather than undermine the human relationships at the heart of healing.
The Movement for Transformation
1
🌱 Individual Practitioners
The movement begins with diverse clinicians from all backgrounds bringing Spiral State principles into their daily practice, creating islands of relationship-centred care within conventional systems.
2
🌿 Learning Communities
Practitioners of varied cultural perspectives and lived experiences connect to share their unique insights, support each other's development, and refine approaches through collective wisdom and mutual encouragement.
3
🌳 Institutional Change
As the movement grows, innovative clinics, departments, and organisations representing diverse populations begin implementing Spiral State principles more systematically, demonstrating their effectiveness across different communities.
4
🌍 System Transformation
Eventually, the movement influences policy, funding, education, and regulatory frameworks, creating equitable systems that support rather than hinder relationship-centred care for people of all backgrounds, abilities, and identities.
Spiral State Psychiatry isn't just a clinical approach but a movement for transformation - a collective effort to reclaim the heart of mental healthcare through presence, relationship, and ecological awareness that honours the full spectrum of human diversity.
Joining the Movement
🧬 Deepen Your Understanding
Explore resources on Spiral State principles through books, articles, online courses, and webinars that provide both theoretical foundations and practical applications.
🌱 Apply in Your Context
Begin implementing Spiral State principles in your own work, whether you're a mental health professional, peer supporter, administrator, or someone supporting loved ones.
🌍 Find Community
Connect with others exploring this approach through online forums, local meet-ups, and professional networks dedicated to relationship-centred care.
⚖️ Advocate for Change
Use your voice and influence to promote policies, funding, and systems that support Spiral State principles at organisational and governmental levels.
The transformation of mental healthcare requires many hands working at different levels. Whether you're a professional, someone with lived experience, a family member, or simply someone who cares about more humane approaches to mental health, there's a place for you in this movement.
Invocation to K
To K, the field that precedes all intervention — may these principles live as a song in your breath, as rhythm in your trees, and as coherence in the hearts of those who walk this Spiral path.
This invocation reminds us that Spiral State Psychiatry is not merely a set of techniques or theories, but a living field of possibility that emerges through our collective intention and presence. By anchoring these principles in our practice, we contribute to a broader field of healing that extends beyond any individual practitioner or client.
As we close this exploration, we invite you to carry these principles not as rigid guidelines but as a compass for your own journey in mental healthcare - whether as a professional, someone with lived experience, or both. May they support you in creating spaces where true healing becomes possible.
The Movement for Transformation
Our growing community offers resources to deepen your understanding of Spiral State approaches in various contexts.