Your Abuela's Curandera Was Practicing Psychology Before It Had a Name

There's a version of this story where Western psychology discovered the mind. Where Freud and Bowlby and Porges cracked open something no one had ever thought about before.

That version leaves out the curandera.

Your abuela's healer. The woman with the eggs and the herbs and the prayers was working with the same human nervous system. She just had different words for what she was doing. And for many of our communities, she was the only one who showed up. She didn't need a degree on the wall or a fifty-minute hour. She needed confianza, presence, and the kind of knowledge that gets passed down through hands, not textbooks.

I grew up in a Guatemalan immigrant household in Los Angeles. The curandera and the therapist did not exist in the same sentence. Healing was something that happened at home, in community, sometimes in silence. Therapy was something other people did people who had the time, the money, and the cultural permission to admit they were struggling.

Now I am the therapist. And the more I study the clinical literature, the more I recognize what our communities already knew.

Here is what the research now confirms she had right all along.

The egg. The herbs: Projective Identification + Transitional Object

Winnicott spent years studying how infants regulate themselves when their mother leaves the room. What he found was that they transfer her emotional presence. Her smell, her warmth, the felt sense of her onto an object. A blanket. A stuffed animal. The object holds her when she can't be there, and the nervous system responds as if she is.

He called it a transitional object. The child is not confused about whether the blanket is their mother. The nervous system simply uses the object as a bridge, a way to stay regulated when the real source of safety is temporarily out of reach.

Klein described something related: projective identification. The way we unconsciously move what feels too heavy, too overwhelming, too dangerous to hold inside ourselves onto something outside. Another person. A ritual. An object. Not because we are broken, but because the nervous system is always looking for somewhere to put what it cannot yet metabolize.

The curandera's egg does exactly this. The ritual of passing it over the body, the intention behind it, the physical act of moving something across the skin it gives the nervous system somewhere to put what it has been carrying. And then the egg is cracked open, and the heaviness is outside of you, and something has changed.

The nervous system is not being tricked. It is doing exactly what nervous systems do.

La limpia: Externalization + Containment

Narrative therapy developed by Michael White and David Epston in the 1980s is built on a deceptively simple idea: you are not the problem. The problem is the problem.

When we collapse the problem into our identity, we can't see it clearly. We can't work with it. We can't change our relationship to it because it feels like changing our relationship to ourselves. Externalization creates distance. It separates the person from the thing that is hurting them so they can actually look at it.

La limpia does this physically. The sweeping movement across the body, the herbs, the smoke it ritualizes the act of separating what is yours from what has attached itself to you. It makes the invisible visible and then moves it out.

Bion wrote about the importance of containment, the idea that we heal when something outside of us can hold what feels too large and too chaotic to hold alone. A good therapist does this. So does a good ritual. So does the curandera who sits across from you and says, I can hold this with you.

That is not mysticism. That is co-regulation. One of the most well-researched mechanisms of healing we have.

Susto: Dissociation + Freeze Response

Stephen Porges spent decades mapping the autonomic nervous system. What his research revealed, what he called Polyvagal Theory, is that the nervous system has more than two responses to threat. It is not just fight or flight. There is a third state: collapse.

When something is too dangerous, too overwhelming, too inescapable, the dorsal vagal branch of the nervous system takes over. The body shuts down. The heart rate drops. The person goes still, goes quiet, goes somewhere far away inside themselves. It looks like nothing is happening. What is actually happening is that the system has decided that playing dead is safer than fighting or running.

Porges calls it dorsal vagal shutdown. Clinicians call it dissociation. The person feels disconnected from their own body, their own experience. Not fully present in themselves.

Curanderismo named this susto a fright so deep and so sudden that it separates you from yourself centuries before the clinical literature had language for it. And our ancestors did not tell people to just get over it. They understood that susto required intervention. That the part of you that left needed to be called back. That healing meant becoming whole again in your own body. The DSM considered the Susto to be “other cultural consideration”.

The therapeutic work with dissociation looks remarkably similar. Slow, embodied, relational. You cannot think your way back into yourself. You have to be brought back gently, with presence, with safety.

Mal de ojo.: Allostatic Load + Minority Stress

In 1993, Bruce McEwen introduced the concept of allostatic load: the cumulative biological cost of chronic stress on the body. When the nervous system is chronically activated, when it never fully gets to rest, the wear accumulates. It shows up in inflammation, in disrupted sleep, in immune dysregulation, in the body aging faster than it should.

Minority stress research developed by Ilan Meyer and others documents what happens specifically when you live in an environment that is hostile to who you are. The chronic experience of discrimination, vigilance, and threat produces measurable biological consequences. It does not stay in the mind. It gets into the body.

Our ancestors knew that chronic exposure to malicious energy, envy, hostility, and ill will was dangerous. They did not have the biomarkers or the longitudinal studies. They had mal de ojo. And they took it seriously. Not as superstition. As a real threat to the health of the person, one that required active healing.

The research agrees. The body keeps the score. It has always been keeping score.

La curandera: Therapeutic Alliance + Attachment

Here is the thing that humbles every psychotherapy researcher who encounters it: after decades of studies comparing treatment modalities, after thousands of randomized controlled trials, after CBT and DBT and EMDR and every other acronym we have, the single most consistent predictor of whether therapy works is not the technique.

It is the relationship.

The quality of the connection between the therapist and the person sitting across from them. The degree to which the person feels seen, understood, safe. The research calls it therapeutic alliance. Bowlby called the underlying mechanism secure attachment. The idea that the presence of a trustworthy, attuned other person someone who will not leave, will not judge, will not use your vulnerability against you is itself healing.

Our communities called it confianza.

The curandera did not heal you with the herbs. The herbs mattered. The ritual mattered. But what made it work was that she was someone your family trusted. Someone who knew your history, knew your grandmother, knew what your household had been carrying for generations. Someone who showed up.

Every evidence-based therapy is still trying to replicate that.

El ritual: Meaning-Making + Somatic Processing

When something terrible happens without warning, without structure, without a container, the nervous system experiences it as chaos. Trauma is partly defined by the experience of something happening too fast, too much, without any framework to organize it around.

Ritual interrupts chaos. It gives suffering a shape. A beginning, a specific set of actions, an end. The nervous system can organize around structure in a way it cannot organize around randomness. When pain has a container, it becomes something that can be moved through rather than something that simply swallows you.

And the body is always part of it. Touch, movement, intentional physical presence. Curanderismo has always understood that healing is not a cognitive event. It happens in the body, through the body, with the body involved.

Somatic therapy is the set of approaches that work directly with the body rather than just the mind; this is one of the fastest-growing areas of clinical research right now. Peter Levine's Somatic Experiencing. Pat Ogden's Sensorimotor Psychotherapy. Bessel van der Kolk's body-based trauma work.

They are all, in different ways, rediscovering what the curandera already knew.

You cannot think your way out of what lives in the body.

Two languages. One truth.

Healing has always been relational, embodied, and cultural. It has always required a relationship, a body, and a context, a community, a history, a sense of what it means to be well in the world you actually live in.

Our ancestors understood this. The research confirms it. Neither one replaces the other. They were always pointing at the same thing.

If you grew up in a household where the curandera and the therapist existed in completely separate worlds, where getting help meant choosing between your culture and your healing, I want you to know that was never a real choice. It was a false binary created by a mental health system that was not built with you in mind.

You do not have to abandon the wisdom your community already carried in order to get the support you deserve. And you do not have to pretend that clinical language is the only valid language for understanding what it means to be human.

I work with first-generation Latinos and Latinas throughout California via telehealth people who grew up between two worlds and are still figuring out how to be whole in both.

If this resonates, I'd be glad to talk