Psychological and Psychospiritual
Paths to Self-Healing
Psychological healing is the restoration of personal wholeness.
Spiritual healing is the restoration of wholeness with the Divine.
Psychospiritual healing is the use of Divine love to restore personal wholeness.​
Psychology and spirituality have long been uneasy bedfellows—if they dare to share a bed at all. A deep divide persists between the two, often rooted in mutual distrust. Psychology has earned its professional legitimacy by aligning with the paradigms of science and medicine—fields that require their subject matter to be observable, measurable, and evidence-based. Spirituality, by contrast, resists such quantification. As a result, it has remained suspect—or entirely dismissed—in much of modern psychological thought.
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This division is both unfortunate and unnecessary.
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Psychology and spirituality each offer valuable tools for healing. On their own, they can both be effective. Together, they can be even more transformational. Psychology has long acknowledged the importance of spirituality in mental health. However, meaningful integration remains limited. Few training programs or clinical frameworks provide clear models for combining the two, and psychospiritual therapy remains loosely defined and inconsistently practiced.
In my first book, Whole Mind Healing (Kandle, 2020), I presented a model and method for self-healing grounded entirely in psychology. It represented the culmination of what I had learned over 31 years as a clinical psychologist. But in 2024, an unexpected spiritual awakening in my own life paved the way for integrating spirituality and psychology to make the self-healing process more robust than the psychological model alone. This shift resulted in my second book, Handbook for Psychospiritual Healing (Kandle, 2024), which provides a simple and clear model for this integrated healing process. Though a mere 50 pages in length—the model and method are powerful. Its brevity reflects how simple self-healing can be.
Some visitors to Free Self-Healing (FSH) may feel hesitant about the psychospiritual path. For some, the word "spirituality" evokes discomfort—especially if associated with the distrust of organized religions.
Others may worry that it sounds too “woo woo.” But before you dismiss this path, consider the following:
The spiritual material within FSH is not drawn from any organized religion. Nor is it anti-religious. If religions are like oceans, lakes, and rivers, spirituality is the water that they are all made of. Although their forms may be quite different, their essence remains the same.
While many religions are oriented toward salvation as their goal, the spirituality presented at FHS is oriented toward health as the goal. The Divine, as understood here, is simply unconditional love—free from judgment. This definition allows anyone to access spiritual healing through whatever representation of the Divine resonates most deeply with them.
Importantly, the spiritual perspective offered at FSH is nonjudgmental, nondoctrinal, and nonindoctrinating. It is one that recognizes the common ground shared by all souls, and is thereby inherently unifying. If your religious beliefs include a loving Divine presence, you will likely find that the psychospiritual content here is not only compatible, but affirming of your core beliefs. For those open to exploring this path, I encourage you to consider Handbook for Psychospiritual Healing. It distills what is central to the healing process: that unconditional love is the most powerful medicine for unifying and healing the mind, heart, and soul, as well as for unifying us with the souls of others.
Although there is no universally agreed-upon definition of spirituality, for the purposes of FSH, the following is offered:
"Spirituality is the natural human instinct to seek experiences of Divine love and unity."
As you will find through both the psychological and psychospiritual approaches at FSH, personal healing results from the use of love to restore unity and harmony—within ourselves, between ourselves and others, and across as many dimensions of existance as possible.