Who holds the authority for healing?
Is it the therapist, the method, the diagnosis, the research—or the person actually living the experience?
That question opens a fascinating conversation on Be Well with Michelle Greenwell with writer and conceptual artist Mark A. Michaels. Mark’s work examines fundamental paradigm dilemmas within traditional psychotherapy and contemporary psychedelic therapy, with particular attention to the ways authority, expertise, and healing are defined.
Drawing from his forthcoming preprint, Binaries, Multitudes, and Beyond, Mark brings an unconventional perspective shaped by writing, conceptual art, self-examination, critical inquiry, and a willingness to question ideas that healing culture can sometimes take for granted.
When Expertise Becomes Authority
One of the most compelling ideas in our conversation is the distinction between expertise and authority.
A therapist may have tremendous expertise in psychotherapy. A physician brings medical knowledge. A facilitator may have years of education and experience with particular approaches. Yet the individual also brings an essential form of knowledge: the lived experience of being themselves.
What happens when those different forms of knowing meet? Can professional knowledge support someone without automatically overruling their observations? Can we receive guidance while continuing to question, notice, choose, and participate?
Mark’s perspective gives us an opportunity to explore what happens when therapeutic authority is deliberately decentralized and the individual is encouraged to engage critically with the process rather than simply submit to a model or interpretation.
Do We Always Need Something to Fix?
Our conversation also considers the language surrounding healing. Terms such as trauma, triggers, dysregulation, patterns, blocks, and healing journeys can provide useful ways to describe experience. But could continually searching for what needs healing also influence how we understand ourselves?
Instead of always beginning with What do I need to fix?, what might happen if we occasionally began somewhere else:
What do I want to do with my life?
That shift—from fixing toward noticing, choosing, creating, and participating—becomes an important thread throughout the episode.
SoulTEA Harbour: Come Home to Your Heart
Our CommuniTEA pause comes near the beginning of this conversation with SoulTEA Harbour from the Cape Breton Tea Company.
The intention for the tea is:
“Balance and Flow is possible when we open to be present for our true heart’s desires. Come home to your heart.”
For this episode, we bring particular attention to anise and cardamom. The distinctive sensory presence of anise invites us to notice, while the warmth and complexity of cardamom encourages us to linger with the experience rather than rush through it.
The idea of a harbour also becomes a metaphor for the conversation. A harbour can provide shelter. It can be a place to pause, gather resources, and find our bearings. But the harbour does not have to determine our destination.
Perhaps expertise can work in a similar way—providing knowledge, perspective, support, and safer navigation while allowing the individual to remain an active participant in deciding where they are going.
Therapy, Psychedelics, Creativity, and Critical Inquiry
Mark and I explore these questions through several different lenses, including psychotherapy and contemporary psychedelic therapy. Psychedelic experiences raise particularly important questions about vulnerability and interpretation: when someone has a profound experience, who gets to decide what that experience means?
At the same time, decentralizing authority does not mean abandoning expertise, ethical responsibility, safeguards, or appropriate support. The more interesting question may be how we make room for both.
Mark’s life as a conceptual artist adds another dimension. Art reminds us that two people can encounter the same painting, music, story, or creative experience and discover something entirely different. We discuss whether creativity can make room for forms of personal discovery that do not require someone else to immediately interpret the experience for us—and whether humour and irreverence can sometimes loosen the grip of certainty.
What Would You Notice?
This episode also offers an experiential invitation. Think of something you have been trying to change, improve, heal, or fix about yourself and consider:
What do I believe needs fixing?
Where did I learn that this needed fixing?
Whose definition of “better” am I using?
If nobody else were interpreting this experience for me, what would I notice?
There does not have to be an immediate answer. The opportunity is to become curious about what you observe.
From Recipient to Participant
Ultimately, our conversation moves beyond therapy. What if people did not have to wait until something was wrong before learning how to observe, question, choose, experiment, create, and respond?
What changes when we stop thinking only in terms of being a patient or client and recognize the possibility of becoming an active participant in our everyday wellbeing?
And that leads to the question at the heart of this episode:
If we remove the expert from the centre of the healing process, what belongs in the centre instead?
Discover More from Mark A. Michaels
Mark A. Michaels is a writer and conceptual artist exploring authority, expertise, healing culture, psychotherapy, psychedelic therapy, creativity, and personal agency. His forthcoming preprint, Binaries, Multitudes, and Beyond, uses narrative analysis and critique to examine these questions through the lens of his own journey.
To reach Mark please go to: https://markamichaels.com/ Or locate him on IG: https://www.instagram.com/markamichaels/
Listen to the full episode of Be Well with Michelle Greenwell to hear Mark share more about his work and where you can follow his writing, art, and the release of Binaries, Multitudes, and Beyond.
As you listen, pour yourself a cup, become curious about what you notice, and return to the SoulTEA Harbour invitation:
Come home to your heart.