Bridging Worlds: Traditional Wisdom and Modern Therapy for Healing – Soul Retrieval in a Modern Age

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how healing really happens. Not just symptom relief or short-term coping—but actual shifts in how people relate to themselves. What I keep noticing in therapy and in conversations with people across cultures is this: whether we’re talking about reparenting, processing trauma, or practices like soul retrieval, we’re often doing something very similar. We’re helping parts of a person come home.

In therapy, we might use chairwork or schema therapy to dialogue with different parts of ourselves—especially the ones stuck in fear, shame, or silence. These parts often formed in childhood, shaped by unmet needs or painful experiences. When we give them voice, we also give them a new experience: someone (often the adult version of ourselves) listening with care. It’s a kind of reparenting—offering safety and nurture where before there was confusion or hurt.

Though I’m not formally trained in parts work like Internal Family Systems (IFS), I’ve seen the concept resonate deeply with clients. Even simply naming “a part of me feels scared” or “a part of me wants to disappear” creates space for compassion and perspective. It helps people see that they are not broken—they are made up of many parts, each trying to protect or express something important.

What fascinates me is how this mirrors healing traditions far beyond the therapy room.

Growing up, I remember my grandmother from China, talking about children who had a fright—maybe they saw something scary or got hurt—and how their spirit could leave temporarily. She would softly call their name, coaxing them back. “Come back to us,” she’d say, gently, as if the child’s soul needed help returning to the body. It was a kind of everyday ritual, a way to say:

You’re safe now. We’re here.

This image has stayed with me. Especially as I see how clients, decades later, still carry moments of disconnection like that. Sometimes the language we use is psychological—dissociation, trauma responses. Other times it’s more spiritual—feeling “not all here” or like “a part of me got left behind.” But whatever the words, the work is about helping those parts return.

In shamanic traditions across the world, this is often called soul retrieval. A healer or shaman might enter a trance or use drumming to locate the lost soul part and bring it back. The details vary, but the heart of the ritual is strikingly familiar: calling the missing part home, welcoming it back into belonging.

Among the Sami people of northern Europe, there are traditions of using song (joik) and ritual to help someone reconnect with parts of themselves lost in grief or trauma. In Navajo healing ceremonies, chants and sand paintings are used to restore harmony and call back life energy. And in rural Chinese villages, like those my grandmother knew, the call to the frightened child is both literal and symbolic.

What these traditions have in common is a non-pathologizing view of suffering. They don’t start with, “What’s wrong with you?” They start with relationship. Something happened. Something got lost. Let’s call it back. There is no diagnosis—only a relational, cosmological story that this person lost coherence or beauty. This framework resonates deeply in trauma work: we move from “there’s something wrong with you” to “I witness your suffering; let’s co-create a way back.”

In modern therapy, especially when using schema therapy or experiential techniques like chairwork, we can hold space in a similar way. We let people speak to the scared child inside, or to the critical voice that’s been running the show. We don’t judge those parts. We’re curious. We ask: What does this part need? What was it trying to protect?

There’s something deeply validating about realizing that healing doesn’t have to be a solo journey, and that it’s always been communal—whether in the form of a village elder, a family ritual, or a therapist bearing witness.

The research supports this too. Schema therapy, developed by Jeffrey Young, has shown significant effectiveness in treating personality disorders and chronic trauma (Farrell & Shaw, 2012). It works in part because it helps clients reparent themselves—developing a healthy adult mode that can care for and comfort the vulnerable child modes. Similarly, studies on somatic and experiential therapies show how powerful it is to engage the body and emotions directly (Van der Kolk, 2014).

Of course, these practices differ in method and worldview. Soul retrieval comes from a spiritual and animist understanding of the world, while modern therapy tends to lean on neurobiology and attachment theory. But I don’t see them as mutually exclusive. I see them as languages pointing to the same mystery: the human capacity to fracture under stress—and to heal through connection.

The key, I think, is resonance. Some people connect with the metaphor of inner parts. Others are moved by ritual. Some need the structure of evidence-based protocols. Others find meaning in dreamwork or ancestral healing. There’s no one way. My role as a therapist is not to prescribe, but to attune—to help people notice what resonates for them.

I’ve sat with clients who felt silly talking to a chair at first, but ended up in tears reconnecting with a younger self who had been waiting years to be seen. I’ve also met people who felt a sudden shift after naming aloud what they lost: “I left a part of me behind when that happened.” Sometimes that naming is the beginning of everything.

So, whether we call it reparenting, parts work, trauma integration, or soul retrieval, I think we’re often doing the same thing. We’re helping people remember who they are, reconnect with what they carry, and reclaim the parts of themselves that got left behind.

Healing, in that sense, isn’t about fixing. It’s about welcoming. It’s about calling the frightened, silenced, or shamed parts back into the circle. And as I’ve learned from my grandmother, from clients, and from traditions across the world: when we call, those parts often hear us.

References:

• Farrell, J. M., & Shaw, I. A. (2012). Schema therapy for borderline personality disorder. Wiley-Blackwell.

• Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin.

• Bisson, J. I., Roberts, N. P., et al. (2019). “Psychological therapies for chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in adults.” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.

• Harner, M. (1980). The Way of the Shaman. Harper & Row.

• Sallinen, V. (2003). “Sami Shamanic Rituals.” Journal of Circumpolar Studies.

• Schwartz, R. (2013). Internal Family Systems Therapy. Guilford Press.