More on Story-Telling: The Cambodian Healer

Phaly Nuon is a Cambodian survivor of Pol Pot’s killing fields of the 1970’s. An educated woman who managed to disguise her origins and her learning in order to survive the mass murder of the educated classes, she witnessed the rape and murder of her teenage daughter and the starvation of her baby. She survived for three years in the jungle, trying to protect her two surviving children, living in isolation, hiding and eating only what she could forage in the jungle. She and one child walked out of the jungle. Her baby died.

While in the refugee camps following the war she noticed many women whose mental state made them virtually inert, unable to care for themselves or their children. Their PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) was going to kill them and their children. She set out to help them and developed her own system of psychotherapy which was remarkably effective. This woman has been on the short list for the Nobel Prize many times for her work with these depressed women as well as the development of an orphanage (the Future Light Orphanage), which the recovering victim/survivors run.

Phaly Nuon has a three part system of therapy (which actually has at least 5 parts).

1. She teaches the women to forget their atrocities. 2. Then she teaches them to work. Some of the work is with orphans who have lost their parents in the war. 3. Then, she says, I teach them to “love.’

Interestingly both she and Andrew Solomon (¬The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (http://www.noondaydemon.com/biography.html ). fail to notice that the first step is not the first step. The first step in her system of therapy, as Solomon recounts this, is the telling of the story of their ordeal. And then the re-telling.

I quote Solomon:
"First, she would take about three hours to get each woman to tell her story. Then she would make follow up visit to try to get more of the story, until she finally got the full trust of the depressed woman. "p.36

"Forgetting,"  involves getting them involved in their present life.

Step two, work, is an important part of that. And step three, teaching them to love, is all about focusing on relationship. The women that Phaly Nuon has ministered to have formed a healing community. Just as a footnote, Freud thought the ability to love and to work were the hallmark of mental health.   Evidently Phaly agrees.
There is another step, by the way. This is teaching the women to give manicures and pedicures to each other (!) This is the final phase and as a lover of pedicures myself, I can testify to the healing potency of this process, which is both intimate and impersonal.

This step, perhaps, represents the importance of engaging the body, in the healing process

This story, I believe reinforces the importance of story-telling in healing. Phaly took it as a starting point and created something truly amazing.

I first heard Andrew Solomon tell this story on the Moth broadcast on WNYC. Here’s the link: http://www.themoth.org/

For more on Phaly: http://emailfosterparents.org/PhalyAutobio.htm

Life is about Healing

Creation myths, stories of how the world and humanity came to be,  mythic though they be, give one a template from which one can usefully contemplate meaning, the meaning of one’s own life or the human endeavor in general. The biblical story of the 7 days of creation and the story of Adam and Eve present us with a tale that features paradise and the loss thereof, and a view of ourselves as  temptable, given to sin, and in need of redemption. There are many sub stories there, but I take those to be the main themes.


I prefer the mystical version of the creation story, featured in Jewish Mysticism (Kabbalah) in which in the act of creation, the divine light is accidently fractured (G_D is not perfect!) and scattered throughout the world. Each human soul possesses a shard of that light and the purpose of human life is to raise that shard/spark to the heavens, thereby healing the divine Cosmos. Healing is the purpose of life—to heal ourselves, to heal others, and to the heal the Cosmos. Besides not being perfect, G_D needs us.

If I had known this story early on perhaps it would have been my inspiration for training to do the work I do, psychotherapy. But I did not know the story until recent years, and my choice was driven by family and individual forces, largely outside of my awareness at the time. As I contemplate closing down my psychotherapy practice, my thoughts are very focussed on what this all has meant for me: can I really stop doing the work I have done for 4 decades? will it impoverish my life? will my days still have meaning for me? am I making a terrible mistake?

At present I have not even the whisper of an answer to these questions. Only a dim sense that is time to look for other ways to live my life.

But the coming end to my work as a therapist has made me philosophical about “healing.” I have come to believe, perhaps I have been taught by my patients, that the healing principle, the urge toward self mending is buried deep within, is part of the human soul in probably all cases. I have come to see my job, the job of psychotherapy as one in which I join my patients in the task of moving the trash out of the way. If one can dispose of enough trash the essential impulse toward wholeness arises. That job is never easy and often not very successful, but when it is, the patient’s heal themselves, they know the path. I do not.

I work with a lot of traumatized individual—people suffering from chronic PTSD, individuals whose life histories are replete with betrayal and the horrifying suffering that only other human beings can mete out. Mostly I have found that my spirit has been both repaired and enlarged by doing this work. People get better, very slowly, very painfully through the agency of a trusted, steady, and sturdy relationship as well as through the melting and processing of previously frozen memory “icebergs.” 

Surprisingly, yet frequently, there is a spiritual element that sustains them through their suffering and that element plays a large role in promoting the healing.  Its as if the Kabbalistic creation myth comes closer than others in describing the very real process of healing that takes place on an individual, human level. 

I am not always up to my job, assisting others in "raising the spark".  I have at least my share of failures as a therapist. But 40 years of doing my job has left me, foolishly or wisely, believing that life is about healing.