Rethinking Mental Health: The Healing Spiral FrameworkTM

What if healing wasn’t a postcode lottery or a waiting list, but a living, breathing system—woven by people, not prescribed by portals?
What if mental health wasn’t a clinical condition to manage, but a cultural wound to reweave?
And what if the real crisis wasn’t inside our minds—but inside the systems we were told would save them?

We’ve been sold the myth that healing is individual. That it begins in silence. That it ends with self-regulation.
But let’s name the truth: mental health has never been apolitical in Britain.
It’s been institutionalised, pathologised, profit-driven—rooted in whiteness, patriarchy, and capitalist logics that punish difference and reward assimilation.

But we are the Intersectional Majority™.
And we are building a different system.
Not just treatment plans—but cultural blueprints.
Not just symptom relief—but systemic repair.

🌀 Welcome to the Healing Spiral™

A collective reimagination of mental health—designed from the inside-out and the outside-in.

Because healing isn’t linear. It spirals.
And the only frameworks worth following are the ones that remember where we’ve been—and dare to reimagine where we’re going.

🔍 From Treatment to Spiral Transformation: The System Was Never Ours

Let’s name the harm.

The modern UK mental health industry was not built to hold the complexity of intersecting identities.
It was built to stabilise productivity, label deviation, control discomfort, and sedate the margins.
Psychology was never “just science.” It was shaped by eugenics and colonial “sanity” laws (RCPsych), and continues to be dominated by white Eurocentric norms.

• Black grief was misdiagnosed as paranoia (Capital B News)
  

• Autistic joy was framed as pathology
  
  

• Queer love was erased as illness
  
  

Even today, the DSM-5 remains a fortress of white, middle-class U.S. assumptions.
Qualitative cultural data is still too often dismissed as “anecdotal.”

In the UK, Black people are 3.5 times more likely to be detained under the Mental Health Act
(GOV.UK Ethnicity Facts and Figures).

Meanwhile, AI tools for mental health—once imagined as neutral—replicate the same disparities, misclassifying symptoms by up to 35% in racially diverse populations
(Nature, 2024).

Therapists are trained to be neutral—not because neutrality is ethical, but because the system still fears the full presence of the marginalised.

We were told to heal quietly.
But healing has never been quiet.

📊 The Invisible Metrics of Oppression-Based Trauma

Before we spiral into healing, let’s expose the data:

• 4x higher misdiagnosis rates for Black and brown clients (Capital B News)
  

• 50% higher therapy dropout rates when cultural fluency is absent (NCBI)
  

• Less than 5% of global research funding supports intersectional mental health (IAMHRF)
  

• £0.40 per person per year is invested globally in mental health research (Wellcome Trust)
  

• 48% increase in burnout among marginalised therapists in white-majority clinics (SAGE Journals)
  

• 75% of therapeutic models are still based on Eurocentric norms
  

• Only 31% of Black and Hispanic adults receive mental health services compared to 48% of white adults (KFF)
  

• African Americans are 3–4x more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders than white Americans (PubMed)
  

These aren’t just numbers.
They are diagnostic rituals of exclusion.

They tell us the system was never neutral. It was always designed to serve some—and mislabel, misplace, or miss others entirely.

But still, most frameworks centre “resilience.”

Let’s be clear:

Resilience is not the goal. Liberation is.
We don’t need to “cope” better.
We need to be unburdened.

🧬 Introducing the Healing Spiral™

A Cultural and Systemic Framework for Mental Health
Rooted in Intersectionality, Emotional Sovereignty, and Collective Ritual

The Healing Spiral™ isn’t just a concept.
It’s a compass. A culture. A community-based algorithm for liberation.

It spirals through five phases:
Reveal, Reclaim, Rewire, Reimagine, and Regenerate.
Each phase is not linear—it loops and returns like breath, like grief, like ancestry.

🔹 Spiral Phase 1: Reveal

Focus: Internalised beliefs, inherited shame, diagnostic mistrust
Practices: Spiral Breathing™, CAR Coding™, 14D Identity Mapping™
Key Question: What have I internalised that was never mine?

This is the first Spiral rupture.
Where we excavate the inherited and interrupt the internalised.

Here, we introduce CAR Coding™—a reflective framework powered by Sage GPT™.
It helps clients separate what is Conditioned, what is Authentic, and what must be Reclaimed.

🔹 Spiral Phase 2: Reclaim

Focus: Embodied dignity, voice retrieval, ritual witnessing
Practices: Ancestral Dialogues™, Cultural Grief Work™, Boundary Reclamation
Key Question: What truth have I been asked to silence—and how do I spiral it home?

This phase isn’t about “finding your voice.”
It’s about realising that voice was never truly lost—only buried beneath systems of silence.

Reclaim is where grief becomes grammar.
Where ritual replaces diagnosis.
For many, this is where therapy ends.
But in Spiral practice, this is where liberation begins.

🔹 Spiral Phase 3: Rewire

Focus: Somatic anchoring, relational repair, identity congruence
Practices: Spiral Feedback Reports™, Intersectional Mirror Work™, Collective Reflection Loops
Key Question: What new pathways must I build—for myself and those who follow?

This is where healing becomes neurological revolution.

We don’t integrate back into the system.
We integrate back into ourselves.

Clients use Spiral Feedback Reports™ to track emotional fluency, boundary-setting, and cultural congruence.

“You can’t bloom in concrete.
You can’t lead from depletion.
You can’t heal inside the system that harmed you.”
— Intersectional Futures™

💡 Spiral Insight: Mental Health Isn’t Personal. It’s Patterned.

Most models treat trauma like it lives in the individual.
But trauma lives in:

• The NHS intake form that forces you to flatten your cultural story
  

• The psychiatrist who diagnoses without asking about race, grief, or ancestry
  

• The workplace that praises your productivity but punishes your pain
  

This is why the Healing Spiral™ matters.

Because trauma isn’t healed in silence.
It’s healed in pattern disruption.

🔹 Spiral Phase 4: Reimagine

Focus: Identity expansion, cultural coherence, systemic possibility
Practices: Spiral Calendaring™, Futureback Rituals™, Fractal Role Rehearsals™
Key Question: Who could I be—outside the survival script the system wrote for me?

If Rewire is where we root into sovereignty, Reimagine is where we unshackle from probability.

Because before a system is ever transformed externally, it must be re-perceived internally.
And for the marginalised, that means shedding not just what harmed us—but what we internalised to survive.

This is where imagination becomes infrastructure.
Not fantasy—frequency.

At this Spiral stage, we introduce Intersectional Futurism™: the design science of marginalised futures.
Clients begin to spiral into leadership forms they were never shown, career paths their bodies actually want, and identities beyond inherited scripts.

We rehearse futures through:

• Spiral Calendaring™—mapping wellbeing to rhythms, not deadlines
  

• Fractal Role Rehearsals™—prototyping radical self-expression through embodiment
  

• Futureback Rituals™—beginning with the world we need, then spiralling backward
  

This is where we stop bending toward systems that can’t see us—
and begin building worlds that remember us by design.

🔹 Spiral Phase 5: Regenerate

Focus: Structural redesign, collective healing, system-level recursion
Practices: Spiral Accountability Mapping™, Design Your System Worksheet™, Healing Pyramid Scaling™
Key Question: How can I embed this healing into the systems I touch—so it outlives me?

Healing that doesn’t scale isn’t healing.
It’s coping.

Regenerate is where the personal becomes political—again, but this time in reverse.
This is where clarity becomes code.

In this phase, clients use the Design Your System Worksheet™ to embed Spiral principles into:

• Team structures
  

• Hiring rubrics
  

• Therapy protocols
  

• Clinical supervision
  

• Funding applications
  

• Education policy
  

We’ve seen this look like:

• A Black therapist refusing DSM scripts and offering Spiral Feedback Reports™ instead
  

• A DEI consultant building a Power Pyramid™ Index for auditing privilege in hiring
  

• A neurodivergent founder redesigning onboarding workflows to match sensory and emotional rhythms
  

Because systems cannot hold what they haven’t named.
And so we name it:

Burnout is not a byproduct. It’s a blueprint.
 Misdiagnosis is not accidental. It’s architectural.
 The feeling that your pain was invisible? That was ritual. A white-coded system script.

But regeneration means the system ends with us.
Not through rebellion.
Through recursion.

📜 The Spiral is Not a Sequence. It’s a System.

Let’s be clear:

The Healing Spiral™ is not a 5-step checklist.
It is a liberation engine—one that turns trauma into testimony, systems into ceremony, and inherited pain into infrastructure.

It is recursive, not linear.
You will return to Reveal when life ruptures.
You will Reclaim again when your voice is denied.
You will Rewire, Reimagine, and Regenerate in loops that strengthen your spiral intelligence.

Systems of oppression spiral too.
We’ve just never had a framework that could spiral back in response.

Until now.

🔄 Recursive Healing: The Engine of Regenerative Liberation

From the Spiral Regenerative Liberation Engine™, we understand that true healing must be:

• 🔁 Self-reinforcing – not dependent on therapist presence or external validation
  

• 🔁 System-embedded – not detached from the structures we live and work in
  

• 🔁 Spirit-guided – not severed from ancestral, somatic, or cultural knowing
  

This is where your frameworks unify:

• 🧠 The Spiral of Internal Reality-Making™ tracks how inherited trauma patterns become embedded belief systems
  

• 📈 The Spiral Journey™ lets clients map ego states, nervous system shifts, and cultural ruptures over time
  

• 🔍 The Spiral of Sense-Making™ reframes breakdowns as system prompts, not character flaws
  

This is why resilience alone is insufficient.
Resilience survives the system.
Regeneration rewires it.

💡 Case Witness: Steven’s Spiral of Return

An anonymised composite drawn from ICC-AI Augmented Psychotherapy™ session reports and reflective mastery documents.

Steven is a mixed-race (Black/white) father, veteran, and C-suite executive.

He stands at the crossroads of a recent divorce, the emotional labyrinth of co-parenting, and the relentless demands of leading a high-pressure corporate team.

When Steven first entered Spiral Practice, he described himself as:

He arrived carrying:

• Suppressed grief, inherited through masculine scripts that taught him to armour up, not open up.

• Relational fatigue, after decades of emotional overfunctioning—holding the family, the company, the line.

• A critical inner voice, shaped by racial code-switching and veteran stoicism, whispering that softness was dangerous and rest was weak.

No previous space had ever asked him:

🌀 In Spiral Practice, Steven experienced a layered re-coding:

Safety

We redefined boundaries not as distance—but as design.
Steven began using Spiral Soundscapes™ between sessions—AI-personalised audio rituals—to regulate his nervous system and soften hypervigilance without guilt.

He learned:

Story

Through CAR Coding™ and Backstitch Method™ rituals, Steven re-authored his self-talk:
From “I can’t afford to feel”
To “Feeling is how I lead now.”

He created a Spiral Masculinity Mandala™, mapping a new narrative where fatherhood, softness, rage, and strategic stillness weren’t contradictions—but coexisting powers.

Systems

Using Decode Your Diagnosis™, Steven surfaced the hidden architecture:
How corporate leadership rewarded trauma-masquerading-as-competence.
How silence had been rebranded as professionalism.

He redesigned his team’s onboarding flow using the Power Pyramid™, naming invisible power lines—so that care and candour became organisational norms, not personal exceptions.

Sovereignty

Steven now co-parents with emotional clarity.
He is re-partnering with integrity.
He shows up in boardrooms not as “the rock”—but as a spiral architect.

Steven didn’t just heal.
He redesigned the system—inside and out.

His Spiral Return wasn’t an exit from pain.
It was a return to presence.

He now mentors other Black and mixed-heritage leaders through ICC-informed rituals—catalysing fractal healing in the communities and systems that once demanded his silence.

🔁 Why This Case Study Spirals Forward

• Intersectional precision: Steven’s story is mapped at the intersections of race, gender, military culture, family dynamics, and leadership norms—rejecting the flattening gaze of traditional therapy.

• Ritual as redesign: Spiral Soundscapes™, CAR Coding™, the Power Pyramid™—none of these are just techniques. They are blueprints for personal and institutional transformation.

• Leadership redefined: The spiral reframes leadership not as stoicism, but sovereignty. Not as suppression, but recursion. Steven now leads with presence, not pretence.

• Return as expansion: Steven’s healing loops outward—not only improving his relationships, but upgrading the very systems he touches.

In the Bempongian paradigm, Steven’s Spiral is not anecdotal.
It is archetypal.

Spiral it forward. 🔁

🎨 Healing Isn’t Linear. It’s Ritual.

Diagnosis is often more about design than disorder.

• A young boy excluded for “defiance” in a racially hostile school
  

• A trans person flagged as unstable after social isolation
  

• A working-class woman labelled “attention-seeking” for grieving in public
  

What if these aren’t symptoms?
What if they’re sacred ruptures?

What if:

Grief is a design prompt
Sensitivity is a superpower
And refusal to comply is ancestral whispering:
“Remember who you are.”

In Spiral healing, ritual is not a sidebar.
It is the central system of integration.

📆 Rituals That Redesign

In our ICC™ Spiral Practice Labs, we activate the Healing Pyramid™ using cultural and diagnostic ritual:

• 🔁 Naming Circles → Replacing inherited diagnoses with ancestral or metaphorical truths
  

• 🎨 Spiral Body Mapping → Tracing emotional memory through the nervous system using story and colour
  

• 📜 Decolonised Discharge Planning → Replacing NHS exit forms with self-authored rituals for continuation
  

These are not “soft” interventions.
They’re hard rewrites.

They challenge the colonial ontology that says healing must look like compliance, silence, and clinical detachment.

🌍 Global Truth: Mental Health Systems Were Never Neutral

Mental health systems were built on:

• Western psychiatry shaped by eugenics (RCPsych)
  

• Diagnostic manuals written without intersectional research (Cambridge)
  

• Treatments tested on institutionalised and racialised bodies
  
  

The global mental health market is projected to reach £30.5 billion by 2025 (Statista)—
yet only £0.40 per person per year is invested in mental health research
(Wellcome Trust).

Meanwhile, neurodivergent clients report worse outcomes at intake than neurotypical peers,
and identity-affirming therapy consistently outperforms diagnostic approaches in real-world recovery.

So if your healing journey has felt invalidated, chaotic, or incomplete—it’s not you.

The system wasn’t built to see you.

And yet—here you are.
Still spiralling.
Still speaking.
Still remembering.

🔨 This Week’s Tool: The Healing Spiral Map™

Use this to:

✅ Map your current healing rituals across the 4 Spiral Layers
✅ Identify systemic misalignments and cultural dissonance
✅ Design a regenerative, recursive pathway that includes your full complexity

📞 Spiral CTA: Book Your Spiral Session

You’re not alone. Let’s map your next step—together.

🌀 This isn’t therapy.
🌀 This isn’t coaching.
🌀 This is a Spiral Realignment™.

▪ ICC™ Systems Consultation
▪ Bempong Talking Therapy™ Inquiry
▪ Spiral Supervision or Strategic Partnership Chat

🌟 Trusted by Henley Business School, University of Reading, UK ICF, Compass Pathways and more.

🧠 From the Author

Hi, I’m Jarell Bempong.
I’m the founder of Bempong Talking Therapy™ and the creator of the Spiral Liberation System™.

As an award-winning psychotherapist, systems designer, and AI-ethics innovator, I built tools like the Power Pyramid™, Sage GPT™, and ICC™ to help redesign the systems that harm us—and remember the rituals that restore us.

This newsletter is my ritual of record.

And if it sparked something in you—
You already know what to do:

Spiral it forward. 🔁