You can try a new type of massage or read a chiropractor’s online reviews, but how do you really know when a healing modality is right for you? This new column, from tech and wellness journalist and meditation coach Laura K. Cowan goes in depth with local healers to give you a behind the scenes look at what they really do to help people relax and heal.
Marcia Haarer — Realization Process Psychotherapist and Senior Teacher
(Authors Note: Since childhood, I have searched for healing for everything from migraines, to PTSD, to a severe back injury that was diagnosed as impossible to heal. With each injury or illness, I found a way through with the help of good medical care and many supportive healers—often out of the mainstream—who could help me get my life back. Eventually, I was diagnosed as having PTSD from psychological childhood abuse and a rare connective tissue disorder. My healing journey was long, and I needed a lot of gentle support to calm my body and untangle myself from a lot of harsh situations.
In short, I have had an extremely long road to wellness, and that makes me the person a lot of people come to for advice on certain types of healing modalities that might help their situation. I am not a doctor, but I am a journalist experienced at telling the stories of people’s professional expertise in little understood fields from technology to wellness.
On my long healing journey, I worked for a couple of years with a unique therapist I wanted to introduce you to, because her perspective on healing might not only help you, but spark ideas of what is right for your own healing journey. Her name is Marcia Haarer, LMSW, and she labels herself a “Realization Process Therapist.” I sat down to talk with her about what this means.)
Marcia Haarer told me when we sat down, “I have been a therapist for 40 years, since my first job in community health. Ten years ago, I would have labeled myself a trauma-based therapist or an EMDR therapist.” In 2010, Haarer started training with popular life coach Judith Blackstone in her embodiment method. “She is a psychologist who created a set of practices to help people experience the mindful field of consciousness that unites us and everything else in our bodies with the environment,” Haarer explained. “In many ways, this is an ordinary sort of thing. Many of us attune to this field in nature. Standing in front of a beautiful tree, one can feel unity with nature, and it’s restorative for us.”
EMDR is an increasingly popular trauma therapy that allows a practitioner to walk a client through a traumatic memory while working with eye movements to unlock trauma that is frozen in the body. This allows processing and release of tension to heal the trauma rather than just talk about it until it has less emotional charge. EMDR and similar therapies are based in the theory that we somatize or lock traumatic memory into our muscles and bodily structures involved in the traumatic event, and that accessing the memory while performing different types of movement can release that frozen state of overwhelm from the body as well as the mind. It’s hard to explain beyond just saying that before this therapy, my memories of the past were loops of near-death experiences and misery and tension, and after, they became part of a smoother narrative of everything I had overcome.
The Realization Process ties into this EMDR or other trauma therapies because it helps the individual have a sort of self-led aha moment that is shepherded by the therapist to happen in a safe space. Haarer explained the concept this way. She once worked with a woman who had been held up at gunpoint, and she felt frozen in fear because at the time it wasn’t safe for her to move the gun out of her face. Haarer said that working with her client to realize the power of not moving the gun away in that situation to keep herself safe allowed her to regain a sense of agency in her own life. She paired that with practicing moving an artificial gun physically out of her face with her hand to unlock the protective movement in her body, which led to profound relief and the ability to move again in her own life and stand up for herself.
Haarer said that this processing isn’t just for fear either. “Sadness can be metabolized,” she explained. “I posed this question,” Haarer said of one young man she helped. “What if your depression isn’t fixed? What if it has an original emotion underneath it?” The young man discovered the feeling had roots in his mother’s depression during his childhood. He could visualize connecting with his mother in this unified field of consciousness that connected them through space and time and was able to disentangle her depression from his need to fix it. “He may always feel some sadness about his mother’s depression,” Haarer said, “but he can also feel love for himself.”
Haarer said that, “in a sense, we inherit our parents’ traumas. [Add] our own traumas, and we create holding patterns” that we use to cope. “If I make myself invisible, that bully on the playground can’t hurt me as much,” she said as another example. “Then I make myself invisible as an adult, too.”
“In Realization Process therapy, you learn to attune to this mindful field within the vertical core of the body… where we are uniquely ourselves and unified at the same time,” Haarer explained. “I find it’s the safest space to live from, because it’s where we are most resourced…. We don’t just live in a field of oxygen—we live in a field of consciousness.”
Haarer said her favorite thing about being a therapist is “creating a lasting aha experience with a client. As a therapist, I am let into the most intimate experiences of a person’s life. If in the midst of that suffering and ‘stuckness’ we can make a connection that the client wasn’t aware of before, that she didn’t know was possible, then we’ve created the experience that real change is possible and right here, in this moment.”
A good therapy match, according to Haarer, looks like this:
You feel like you’re working hard.
You have a feeling of relief, you feel lighter.
There is some sort of aha experience, and you are learning something new about yourself, what’s possible, and becoming more skillful.
Marcia Haarer, LMSW, is seeing patients virtually and can be reached by phone at (734) 668-6854. You can learn more about her services at marciahaarer.com.
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Having watched the moon set with the sun’s rising, the ancient lunar goddess Hekate is on my mind. And near the Huron river path this morning, a pokeweed plant reaches upward offering a message and posing a hieroglyphic sign as she raises her arms in slender scarlet sleeves. Fresh green pendants nestle beside fully ripe ink-purple fruit on her supple limbs where she drapes luxurious flowing tresses, trailing glossy clusters from slender stems. Wildly flowering, the goddess and plant step from forest edge as one to emerge into the waking world. Hekate dances within her chosen ally pokeweed, just as ancient Greeks thought nymphs ensouled their trees in mutual lifelong union.