Is Shamanic Counselling Like Psychotherapy? Closer Than You Might Think.

Two Traditions, One Territory

At first glance, shamanic counselling and psychotherapy look like they belong to entirely different worlds, one rooted in ancient ritual and journeying, the other in modern clinical training and evidence-based technique. But look more closely at what each is actually doing, and the distance between them narrows considerably.

Both are, at their core, structured ways of accessing what lies beneath ordinary conscious awareness, the subconscious, or unconscious mind, the parts of a person's experience that talking alone doesn't always reach, and both working directly with what's found there.

Carl Jung and the Shamanic Roots of Active Imagination

Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, developed a technique he called active imagination, a method of entering a receptive, imaginal state and engaging directly with images, figures, and material arising from the unconscious mind. Jung used this technique extensively in his own inner work, most famously documented in his Red Book, and it became a foundational tool in Jungian analysis.

What's less widely known is how closely this active imagination resembles shamanic journeying. Researchers and clinicians who have studied both traditions side by side have noted that Jung's active imagination is, in essence, a shamanic technique translated into psychological language, with the same movement into an altered, receptive state, the same engagement with what arises, the same principle that the unconscious holds material the conscious mind cannot always reach directly.

Jung himself was influenced by his encounters with shamanic and indigenous healing traditions, and spent much of his career building an intellectual framework, archetypes, the collective unconscious, and individuation, that gave Western psychology a language for what shamanic traditions had already been working with for millennia.

Soul Retrieval and What Psychotherapy Calls Integration

The parallel goes further than active imagination alone. Shamanic traditions describe soul loss, a part of a person withdrawing or fragmenting at a time of trauma or overwhelm, and soul retrieval as the process of finding and welcoming that part back.

Modern psychology describes something remarkably similar: dissociation as the protective withdrawal, and integration as the therapeutic process of reconnecting a person with the parts of themselves, memories, emotions, aspects of identity, that were split off in order to survive difficult experience.

Different language, same essential mechanism. One tradition frames it using words such as soul, journeying, and spirit; the other frames it as the psyche, the unconscious, and integration. What both are describing is the same fundamental human process of dissociation for protection and eventual return and integration.

Why This Matters If You're Considering Shamanic Counselling

If you've been drawn to shamanic counselling but have hesitated because it feels unfamiliar, unscientific, or disconnected from more conventional therapy, it may help to know that the two are not as far apart as they first appear.

Shamanic counselling, practised well, is not a departure from psychological understanding, it's a different route into the same territory that psychotherapy has been mapping for over a century, using tools and language that predate psychology by thousands of years.

This is part of why I trained in shamanic counselling and neuro-linguistic programming. My work draws on NLP, transpersonal therapy, and shamanic counselling because I've found, in practice, that they are speaking to the same underlying human experience from different angles, and that some people find their way into that experience more readily through one route than the other.

Which Route Is Right for You?

Some people want a structured, conversation-led process - talk therapy, NLP, working directly with thought patterns and beliefs. Others are drawn to a more spiritual, symbolic route into the same territory, journeying, drumming, working below the conscious mind through a different door.

Neither way is more valid than the other, both are working with the same unconscious material, simply using different maps to get there.

If you're not sure which approach is best for you, a free conversation is a good place to talk it through, book via my scheduling calendar or contact me, Geraldine.

You can also read more about shamanic counselling here.