Mental Illness Isn’t What You Think: Introducing the 3D Healing™ Model of Multidimensional Trauma Healing

By Steve Elfrink

We’re living in a time of great unraveling.

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People across the spectrum—from executives to artists to young adults—are feeling it: a loss of self, a surge of anxiety, a quiet, persistent sense that something is missing.

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And the answers we’ve been given—diagnoses, medications, surface-level self-care—feel increasingly thin.

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Through decades of trauma work and thousands of hours guiding somatic and psychedelic healing journeys, I’ve come to believe that what we call “mental illness” is often not illness at all.

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It is the body and psyche’s intelligent response to experiences that were too overwhelming to feel at the time.

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And to truly heal, we need a new map.

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That map is the 3D Healing™ model—a multidimensional framework for understanding trauma and recovery across both the horizontal and vertical axes of human experience.

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The Horizontal Axis: The Three D’s of Trauma

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Most psychological suffering can be traced to three adaptive strategies the nervous system employs in response to threat:

1. Dissociation

The mind splits from the body. Memory, sensation, and emotion become compartmentalized. We feel detached, numb, or unreal. This is not a malfunction—it’s the psyche protecting itself from overwhelm.

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2. Dysregulation

The nervous system becomes unstable. We oscillate between hyperactivation (panic, rage, anxiety) and hypoactivation (fatigue, collapse, shutdown). These aren’t personality flaws—they are autonomic defenses locked in a loop.

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3. Disconnection

We lose connection to others, to meaning, and to the deeper Self. Disconnection is the spiritual wound of trauma—it leaves us exiled from belonging, love, and the felt sense of being part of something larger.

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These three states—Dissociation, Dysregulation, Disconnection—form the horizontal axis of the 3D Healing model. They are the ways we survive when our systems can't safely feel or integrate our experiences.

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But survival is not the same as wholeness. To heal, we must move vertically.

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The Vertical Axis: The Pathway of Reconnection

If the horizontal axis reveals how trauma fragments us, the vertical axis shows us how to come home.

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This vertical movement is the reunion of body, mind, and spirit—the ascending layers of healing.

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Body

The base of the pyramid. Healing begins here—at the level of sensation, movement, and nervous system regulation. Without body awareness and somatic processing, no insight can land, and no psychedelic journey can be integrated.

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Mind

The middle layer. Once the body begins to settle, the cognitive mind can re-engage in new ways. We can make meaning, reshape beliefs, and integrate memories without reactivating old trauma loops.

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Spirit

The top of the pyramid. As body and mind reconnect, the vertical opens into spirit—our innate sense of aliveness, purpose, interconnection, and soul. This is not about religion—it’s about restoration of meaning and belonging at the deepest level.

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The vertical axis honors the fact that healing is not just clinical—it’s existential. It’s about coming back into coherence with who and what we truly are.

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Why Psychedelic and Psycholytic Medicines Matter

Psychedelics can catalyze vertical experiences—moments of ego dissolution, spiritual revelation, or profound inner clarity. But when used without grounding in the body, these experiences may destabilize more than they heal.

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That’s why the psycholytic approach—working with low to moderate doses of ketamine, psilocybin, MDMA, or cannabis—can be so powerful. In the right setting, these medicines allow us to soften our defenses, stay present, and access emotional material that was once too overwhelming.

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When paired with somatic tracking and safe relational presence, psycholytic medicine becomes a portal into the 3D field: dissociated parts return, dysregulated energy releases, and disconnection gives way to reconnection.

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The vertical and horizontal integrate.

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And what once seemed like pathology becomes pathway.

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You Are Not Broken. You Are Healing.

The 3D Healing™ model doesn’t pathologize—it reframes. It doesn’t reduce you to a diagnosis—it recognizes you as a multidimensional being adapting to unbearable experience in the only ways you could.

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This model meets you where you are—frozen, chaotic, alone—and walks with you toward embodiment, insight, and meaning.

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Not from the top down. Not from the mind alone.

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But from the ground up.
From body, to mind, to spirit.
From dissociation, to regulation, to reconnection.
From fragmentation… to wholeness.

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This is not a fix.
It is a return.

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