The healer and the shrink

Newsroom

17-06-2025

Grace was 11 when she started hearing voices and seeing visions. She heard a man's voice telling her to harm herself and had repeated visions of a man watching her. She'd begun suffering flashbacks, nightmares and disturbed sleep after watching her father assault her mother nine months early.
A chapter from the recently published book Ngā Kūaha: Voices and Visions in Māori Healing and Psychiatry tells the story of Grace's healing session at Health Pasifika, a community mental health service in Porirua. The session was attended by Grace, her mother Hazel, her two siblings, her grandmother Mele and her family pastor Paula, as well as Māori healer, Wiremu NiaNia, and a Western-trained psychiatrist, Allister Bush.
Each part of the chapter is told from a different person's point of view.
Allister Bush: Our session began when Grace's mother Hazel said, 'When Grace made her way back to bed, past my room, I could see that she had been crying. I called out to her, 'What's up, love?' She wouldn't look at me. Finally she burst out, 'I can hear this voice. It's a man's voice. It won't leave me alone. It told me when I die it has the funeral planned for me. It has the casket and pillow all ready. It said that I'm not allowed to tell you because you won't believe me.'
'The next night it happened again. This time, Grace was in the shower. She came sprinting out of the bathroom wrapped in her towel and said, 'I heard that voice again. It told me to use the shower hose to hang myself.''
Even though I'd heard Hazel's story when we had our first assessment meeting eight weeks earlier, I still felt moved by it. We'd invited Grace to tell some of the story, but she'd said she preferred her mother to speak about it. Wiremu, who was meeting the family for the first time, urged Hazel to continue.
'After that, Grace stayed in my room for a few nights. That weekend she attended a church camp. Two nights after her return she was in her room and heard the voice once more. This time all it said was, 'Hi Grace'.
'We were all praying for her. Grace wasn't herself. She would go into little trances. Every night I always see my kids to bed and kiss them goodnight. Then I clean the house up, shower, and go back and kiss them again once they are asleep. During that time, whenever I would return to Grace's room I felt like something was there. Something was in her room, looking at me, not wanting me to go in there by her. It didn't feel good. I would just walk into her room like, 'Hell no, this is my house, that is my baby!' I would go in there and I would pray for her.
'During this time, I spoke a lot with our pastor, Paula. One weekend she arranged for some elders from our church to come round to our house. We had a prayer meeting that lasted a couple of hours. After that the voice didn't come back for a while. Grace seemed a bit better in herself. I thought, 'Okay, we are slowly getting our girl back.'
'A week or two later, her teacher phoned me and said, 'Grace had a bit of an incident today. After lunch she had been to the toilet and on her return I could see that she was visibly shaken so I had taken her to one side and asked her what was wrong. She said that while she was in the toilet she heard the voice again.''
Wiremu interrupted to ask if the voice was male or female, and Hazel clarified that it was male. 'Within a few nights, something changed. I was doing some baking in the kitchen. Grace got up out of bed to go to the toilet and shortly after she rushed out and came running to me in tears and exclaimed, 'Mum, it's a man! He's standing there in the bathroom.' I went to have a look. There was nothing I could see but now I was thinking, okay, I think I know what this is. It was looking more and more like a spiritual problem. I was feeling increasingly angry about this intrusive stubborn thing harassing my daughter. Several moments later she screamed again, 'Mum, he's standing there by the Christmas tree!' Again I was holding her and praying for her.
'During this time, I was thinking a lot about what Grace told me about her experience,' continued Hazel. 'She said the voice sounded husky, like a smoker's voice. But she wasn't sure if the voice was connected to the man she saw because his face didn't look like he was speaking. She told me the man she saw had a dark complexion, spiky black hair and was wearing a black mask. His eyes and mouth looked red.
'The following night Grace was off to have a shower and screamed: 'Aaagh! He's here again!' When I got back in there she was trying to cover herself up with the shower curtain. 'Honest to God, Mum, he's standing there staring at me! Shall I talk to him? Shall I ask him what he wants?' My response was, 'No, no you don't need to talk to it.' I turned the shower off, wrapped Grace in a towel and we went out to the living room.'
Hazel phoned her landlord to tell him what had happened, and he offered to come round that evening to pray for them. Hazel felt uncomfortable as her landlord walked through the house, but when he reached the bathroom he asked Grace if she'd like to say anything. To Hazel's surprise, she said she would.
Hazel says, 'Stepping into the bathroom, she closed her eyes and spoke in the most courageous, powerful voice I have ever heard from her. 'In the name of Jesus, get out! With all my heart, in Jesus's name, I demand that you leave!' What she said snapped me out of whatever I was feeling. Suddenly I could speak again. I sat there and agreed with her. 'Yes Lord, you have authority over my house; you are the centre of my house.'
'As soon as he had finished praying, I ushered him out of the house immediately. I locked the door and straight away I burst out crying. I didn't trust what he had done in our house. Once I had some time to calm myself, I led the girls around the house and we prayed for each room; we asked for Jesus's protection over every wall he had touched.
'Since that night, Grace has not seen or heard anything untoward. She still asks me to come and sit in the bathroom while she has a shower, but she is starting to get more confident with that.'
Wiremu spoke up. 'In order for us to make sense of what is happening for Grace, I often talk about a process of elimination to help determine what is going on,' he explained.
'As Christians, we have a tendency to assume that everything that we don't understand is demonic. And sometimes our world views as Indigenous people, for me as Māori, and for you as Samoan, Tokelau and Cook Island, have been stigmatised as part of that. In my work I deal with the spirit.
'There is a saying in Māori, 'I hangaia tātou ki te Atua, te hīkoi tātou, te hīkoi tāngata,' which means that first and foremost we are spiritual beings experiencing a human existence. I look to the spiritual side first. And you have all looked after that side. There is enough faith here to move a maunga (mountain) to the other side of town. With all the prayers at your home, with your pastor and in your church, you have taken care of that. So I am thinking, what's going on that helps this thing, this gremlin, to keep coming back?'
Wiremu said it was important to consider family relationships as well as the spiritual side. 'I hear what you are saying,' said Grace's grandmother Mele. She looked at Hazel. 'There is another thing. Are you okay if I talk about that?' Hazel met her gaze and nodded. Mele took a slow breath and continued. 'Grace's parents had a pretty bad break-up. Just before they broke up, one night the girls witnessed their Dad beating up their mother very badly. There had been heated arguments before, but that was the first time they had seen anything like that. I know Grace was deeply affected by this. They all were.'
I hadn't briefed Wiremu on this assault before the session, but it had been a focus in our initial child psychiatry family assessment meeting. Grace had difficulties sleeping and had nightmares about the assault, which had happened nine months earlier. Anything that reminded her of the assault would trigger vivid and frightening memories, which would leave her feeling very shaken up. She had refused to see her father since and had been struggling to focus at school; everyone agreed she wasn't herself. In our initial meeting, I'd concluded Grace had enough symptoms to justify a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder and had explained some possible approaches. I decided to raise these approaches again with Grace.
'When we last met, Grace, you were having flashbacks, as you called them, relating to that day when your Dad hurt your Mum,' I said. 'One approach I talked about that could help resolve that traumatic experience was the eye movement therapy called EMDR [Eye Movement Desensitisation Reprocessing]. That would be addressing the trauma from the psychological side. However, Wiremu, I think you are suggesting some kind of spiritual way of addressing the impact of this trauma on the family. Am I right?'
'Yes,' replied Wiremu. 'Another part of my mahi (work) involves working with Māori whānau when there has been family violence. I always ensure that men I'm working with understand that from a Māori point of view, women are a most precious taonga (something treasured) for our whānau, and need to be treated with utmost respect. I can't speak for Samoan, Tokelau or Cook Island cultures, but in te ao Māori (the Māori world), women are sometimes referred to as the whare tangata. Whare tangata literally means the house of people. It is out of women that our offspring grow.
'Alongside this, it follows that if we give respect to each other, then each person's space is sacred. So I have to respect that space. Where there has been violence, then that constitutes a breach of that relationship. Such a violation could render someone in the whānau vulnerable to a negative spiritual thing like this. When that happens, it can be helpful to address this relational breach spiritually.
'There are a number of ways we can do that. Sometimes it is appropriate to bring everyone into the room together to address what happened. But maybe it's not safe to do that straight away. When the tāne (man) isn't ready to take responsibility for that violence, that relational breach, then we often need to find other means to seek resolution in the wairua.'
I was still pondering the significance of the moment in the bathroom when Grace had commanded the thing she saw to leave. When I raised this, Hazel spoke up. 'It's interesting that it hasn't come back since then, has it? You stamped your mark and said, 'Get out of here! This is our home; me, my Mum and my sister's home.''
Wiremu responded, 'I'm not surprised it hasn't shown its face. When you did that, you took your authority back. You took charge. And there was something else you did when you told that thing to get lost. You said, 'In the name of Jesus.' Through our relationship with God we are given this ability to have authority over anything that is impinging on our space. That includes anything that might be harassing you in a spiritual way.'
Wiremu then explained how Grace seeing her Dad hurting her Mum was important. 'When something like that happens, it's like a gap in the spiritual protection you get from your family can open up just enough for this thing to try to scare you with that voice and the man you saw. That negative spiritual thing was trying to take advantage. However, you can address this by taking charge of your space, like you did, and for the adults to make sure what happened between your Dad and your Mum gets resolved safely.'
Five Years after the Family Healing Session
Hazel: Grace will be 16 soon. Since that time just before meeting Wiremu, she has never had any more experiences of voices or visions. She works hard at school and enjoys hanging out with her friends. She is keen on her youth group and social media but is also comfortable with her own company. Overall, I would say in the last five years she hasn't looked back.
I told Grace's Dad about the voices. He didn't question any of it. I knew he was blaming himself for what we all went through.
After getting out of jail, he saw several counsellors. At first, he just told them what he thought they wanted to hear. Later, he found a counsellor who didn't pussyfoot around and was very direct with him. With this counsellor, over a long period of time he was able to look at some painful things from his own life. After that he had a stronger foundation for being a Dad with them. He felt more comfortable with himself and as a result his relationships with the girls improved. He gave up drinking a while ago and stopped hanging out with the guys he would socialise with before. He has had a steady job and has been working hard to improve who he is.
Six months ago, we got back together. It took me a very long time to trust him again. Once he took responsibility for what he did, over time I was able to acknowledge my part in what happened between us. When we first got together, I was 15 and he was 18. I was pregnant with Grace when I was very young. We are not teenagers anymore: we're adults. Neither of us are perfect. Every day we are working on our relationship and trying to be better than yesterday.
Wiremu NiaNia: We have looked at Grace's problem of the voice and visions she experienced from multiple people's viewpoints. Her family tackled this problem from their Christian point of view, but they also asked for medical advice. Allister examined it from his child psychiatrist viewpoint and considered if it could be psychosis, trauma or another physical health cause. For me, I always look to wairua first. As well as the information I picked up from wairua, I was able to share concepts from te ao Māori to which the whānau responded with their own kōrero.
These diverse perspectives are not separate. It is harmful to say it's just one or the other. I am one person with all of these parts. The psychological hurt Grace experienced after witnessing her Dad assault her Mum could be considered a hinengaro (psychological) problem from one viewpoint, but it is intimately linked to her whānau and her tinana (body) and has profound negative effects on her wairua, as we have seen.
If we as clinicians and wairua practitioners work together, we can offer a response that creates space for each of these. There is a saying, 'E hia kē ngā tāera waru kūmara.' There are many ways to peel a kūmara.
An abbreviated chapter taken with kind permission from Ngā Kūaha: Voices and Visions in Māori Healing and Psychiatry by Wiremu NiaNia and Allister Bush with David Epston (Routledge, $34).
Wiremu and Allister met at Te Whare Mārie, a Māori mental health service in Porirua. Allister became curious about Wiremu's work with a 17-year-old who had a terrifying vision of a Māori warrior threatening him with a taiaha. Wiremu discovered the teenager had picked up a pounamu pendant he found on the side of the road, inadvertently breaching a tapu. When he was blessed by a tohunga, his disturbing experiences ended.
Allister realised the young man's experiences didn't fit into traditional psychiatric ideas about mental illness. From that point on, the two men began working together to help young people who heard voices and saw visions – Wiremu from a Māori spiritual perspective, and Allister from a psychiatric perspective.
Their book Ngā Kūaha includes accounts of their healing sessions and interviews with young people they worked with many years ago to see how their lives have been affected by these sessions. Wiremu and Allister's work challenges psychiatrists and psychologists to consider mental health from a Maōri perspective.
They held a series of events around the country to launch Ngā Kūaha late last year. In the month it was launched, it was Routledge's largest seller worldwide.