There are several factors believed to impact one’s self-healing power; one of these is conception. Fu-Kiau explains that parents are the first and most im- portant variable involving the functioning capacity of an individual’s self-healing power. Collectively, they are believed to be responsible for children who are weak or strong or healthy or not. The Bantu-Congo believe that parents can be deliberate or unwitting players in the development of their children by what they do when selecting each other as mates and how they come to engage in the act of procreation. By selecting each other as partners, they seal the bio- genetic rope that determines the composition of that seed of possibility that will become their children. The circumstances surrounding the act of lovemaking (both the mental state of mind and the physical state of being) then contribute to that energy that bonds the two parents together, influencing the character and overall mental and physical health of that child whose being is a result of that act between the mother and the father. Because both biogenetic and situa- tional factors influence outcome in this case, adults attempt to avoid any circumstance during the act of love making or procreation that potentially depletes or contaminates the energy flow between those individuals, including angry or hostile spirits, alcohol or drug use, etc.
Another factor is gestation, or the physical environment in which the fetal child is carried and nurtured in the womb. The womb becomes the first phys- ical environment that the child grows up in, and this environment influences both their eventual physical health and their self-healing power. Thus, nutri- ents or contaminants/toxins that a mother takes into her body can have the effect of either reinforcing a healthy first environment or contributing to the deterioration of one, making a child more vulnerable to illness once he or she is born. This latter circumstance is what is believed to contribute to health chal- lenges a person experiences later in life, and a depletion of their self-healing power’s potential.
That self-healing power and potential is central to an individual’s well- being, according to the Bantu-Congo philosophy. Illness, both physical and mental, is believed to be related to a state of “body electron regression.” In this regard, the body’s and mind’s loss of functioning efficiency and power is be- lieved to be caused by a loss of the body’s balance of energy, rather than by bacteria or virus. Thus, mental disorder and life dissatisfaction are related to a person’s self-healing power being able to produce and regulate sufficient spiri- tual energy to manage daily stresses, life adversities, occasional depression, and situational anxiety. Thus, with this system of beliefs, much like that of the Ancient Kemetic, Akan, or others, one questions how any intervention by a mental health professional who does not address the fundamental nature of spirit, energy, and life force in a person could be effective.