Tag Archives: Psychology

Rethinking Depression: A Descent Forward

“We do not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
— Carl G. Jung (Alchemical Studies (Collected Works Vol. 13, para. 335))

The Nigredo: Depression as a Sacred Descent

What if depression is not a malfunction of the mind, but a message from the soul – a summons to a life not yet lived? This is not a clinical breakdown, but a rethinking of depression. One that sees it not as a failure, but as a descent forward and an initiation into deeper wholeness.

Life moves in an endless cycle of death and rebirth. While many cultures and spiritual systems speak of this in terms of reincarnation, we can also observe the same process unfolding within a single lifetime. These inner cycles of loss and renewal (especially those marked by depression) can be seen as a symbolic initiation. In Jungian psychology, this experience is mirrored in the concept of the Nigredo, a term borrowed from medieval alchemy meaning “blackening.” It marks the initial stage of psychological transmutation: the symbolic death of the ego, the decomposition of outdated identities, and the necessary descent into darkness before something new can be born. Though bleak in tone, the Nigredo is not pathological – it is mythic. And it is through this inner decay that rebirth becomes possible.

The Myth of Constant Happiness

Many people describe the feeling of “having the rug pulled out from under them,” just when life appeared to be going well. This sensation is not uncommon, and it tends to arise from an unspoken belief that life should move in a linear, upward arc toward perpetual happiness. However, that myth is precisely the problem. When we expect stability and comfort to be the norm, we perceive disruption as betrayal.

Life is a chaotic wave we are meant to ride, not resist. Cycles of darkness and light are not only inevitable, they are also essential. In Western culture, we often see depression as a deviation from the norm, a detour from what life is “supposed” to be; this narrative framing is precisely what keeps us tether to our suffering and unable to transform it. We keep reaching back toward a past self, a familiar story, rather than surrendering to the transformation that depression is trying to initiate.

“In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.”
— Carl G. Jung (Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works Vol. 9, Part 1))

The Tao of Descent

In Taoist philosophy, humanity is meant to align with the natural rhythms of nature and life rather than exert dominion over them. There is a profound wisdom in the concept of flowing with nature rather than pushing against it. When we combine this with Jungian psychology, we come to understand that surrendering to the flow of emotional cycles (especially the painful ones) is where we find synchronicity. But again, this flow is not always joyful…and in many cases, the farthest from it.

The path of individuation is deeply personal and often wrenchingly difficult. It requires not only that we allow all emotions into awareness, but that we consciously descend into them. Particularly in the case of depression, this descent becomes a portal: a journey into the underworld of the psyche. Here, the past self that no longer serves us can decompose, so that something more authentic may emerge.

And yet, we resist this descent. Not because we are weak, but because rebirth is unknowable…and the unknown perpetuates humans living in a fear-based mindset. The past is easier to cling to because it is tangible, already lived, already understood. The future, by contrast, is shadowed and unfamiliar. We convince ourselves that because we have suffered, we are destined to continue suffering. This is the trap. But the stage of Nigredo is not a prison, it is a crucible.

“There is no coming to consciousness without pain.”
— Carl Jung

Alchemy of the Self

We are in a constant state of ebb and flow…finding and creating ourselves. Depression is not a static condition to be pathologized. When we define it solely as a chemical imbalance or a DSM diagnosis, all nuance is lost. Reality is flattened. We miss the alchemical truth: that this darkness is part of a deeper initiation into being. When met with introspection and care, the Nigredo stage can transmute into a radiant rebirth, a more integrated and resilient Self.

In this light, depression is not a flaw or failure. It is the call to transformation. It is the soul whispering that something must die – not our lives, but our illusions, our attachments, and our false selves. When we honor this experience as something deeply meaningful rather than defective, we allow it to do what it came to do: burn away the hollow performances and reveal what is real beneath. This does not mean the pain will vanish. It means the pain will become purposeful.

Now I shall leave you with this final thought: perhaps it is not the past that haunts you while in the depths of depression, but rather the future calling you to become someone you are still afraid to meet.

“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.”
— Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching)

The Illusion of Self-Invention in Modern Society

“The self is not only the center but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the center of this totality, just as the ego is the center of consciousness.”
— C.G. Jung (Memories, Dreams, Reflections)

We are living in an age of self-invention, aesthetic personas, and curated digital selves. However, beneath the surface of this seemingly radical freedom lies an epidemic of confusion, anxiety, and soul starvation. What if our obsession with identity is not freedom at all, but perhaps a symptom of disconnection from the very thing we claim to seek?

The Psychological Crisis of Modern Identity

The modern world is in the throes of an identity crisis. While it is partially due to a lack of sincere self-expression, it is most notably due to a profound disconnection from the true, inner Self. Society’s emphasis on external validation over internal integration, radical individualism without introspection, and performative identity rather than authentic selfhood has left individuals fragmented, directionless, and spiritually unmoored. At the crux of this crisis is our overidentification with personas: masks we have unconsciously constructed for survival, social belonging, and self-preservation. These masks, reinforced by societal narratives, have become indistinguishable from the Self, trapping individuals in pre-scripted roles rather than guiding them toward true individuation.

The fear of self-knowledge stems from the existential risk it poses: if we question the identity we have built, we also risk losing the belonging we have centered our lives around. The root of this crisis is a misunderstanding of freedom and individuality and further mistaking boundless self-reinvention for self-knowledge and equating superficial labels with personal depth. Until individuals engage in the inner work of confronting their unconscious, the modern identity will remain a mere illusion – an act of self-preservation rather than self-realization.

A World Unmoored

The modern identity crisis is a reflection of inner worlds in immense disarray. People search endlessly for a sense of self, but their efforts remain fixated on external validation rather than internal discovery. What we see in the world today is not just a breakdown of individuality, it is the external manifestation of inner dis-ease. Our unconscious fears, unresolved insecurities, and desperate longing for meaning shape the societal structures we participate in. The barriers we encounter in defining ourselves are not simply imposed by external forces but are perpetuated from within, arising from an inability to face the discomfort of self-exploration.

This crisis stems from a fundamental misunderstanding: identity is not something found, nor is it something entirely created. It is both. To believe one can “discover” themselves without active participation in their own growth is naive; yet, to believe one can “construct” an identity from nothing is equally misguided. True identity emerges from the reciprocal process of self-discovery and self-creation, requiring deep engagement with one’s unconscious, one’s history, and one’s values. However, modern society does not encourage this kind of introspection…instead, it offers external solutions (i.e., labels, movements, political identities, aesthetic subcultures) that masquerade as authentic selfhood while keeping the true self buried beneath copious layers of artificial constructions.

From childhood, individuals are conditioned to prioritize external frameworks over internal understanding. Sir Ken Robinson’s critique of modern education as a factory-like system illustrates how institutions suppress individuality in favor of obedience and standardization. Schools do not encourage students to explore their inner world; they train the most vulnerable of learners to meet external expectations, reducing identity to performance rather than authenticity…and as a result, individuals emerge from these systems ill-equipped to navigate the complexities of selfhood, forced instead to assemble identities from whatever societal structures are available.

This has led to an age of personas. Carl Jung illustrated to us in his theories that personas serve as an essential function in adapting to social environments, but when they become overidentified with, they become quite the barrier between the Self and the unconscious. Thus, over time, the authentic Self is buried beneath layers of adaptations, performances, and unconscious defenses. The more one seeks to “find” themselves through social belonging, political allegiance, or external validation, the further they drift from their authentic being. Their Self remaining trapped beneath the rubble of misguided attempts at self-definition.

The Mirage of Radical Individualism

This phenomenon is particularly evident in radical individualism, which falsely promises self-empowerment while leading to greater disconnection and inner fragmentation. The modern world tells people that they can be whoever they want to be – that their identity is fluid, self-determined, and unconstrained by anything but personal will. But without internal coherence, this freedom becomes an abyss rather than a path forward. People harness this freedom and yet remain unfulfilled, anxious, and detached from any deeper sense of meaning. The paradox here is clear: the more one pursues self-definition through external means, the more fragmented and lost they become.

This crisis is not just psychological, it is spiritual. The old principle “as within, so without; as above, so below” reveals that social disarray is a direct reflection of internal chaos. The widespread confusion surrounding identity is a mirror of the unconscious turmoil within individuals. Without a grounded inner world, people turn outward, seeking answers in ideological movements, social tribes, and political identities, not realizing that these external constructions only serve as temporary relief from the depths of a deeper existential void.

The Way Back to Self

True identity is forged through the confrontation with the unconscious. It requires integration, not escape and demands that one look inward, acknowledge the fragmented aspects of the true Self, and rebuilds from within. Until individuals reclaim their inner world and recognize that identity is not something that can be passively received, but actively cultivated, the crisis of modern identity will persist.

The Self cannot be found in labels, nor can it be fabricated through social affirmation. It is only in the depths of introspection and in the reconciliation of the inner and outer worlds, that true individuality may emerge.

“Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakens.”
— C.G. Jung (Psychology and Religion (Collected Works, Vol. 11))

Unlocking the Power of Dreams in Therapy

“This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once: scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.”
— Carl Jung (General Aspects of Dream Psychology (Collected Works, Vol. 8, para. 505))

Beyond Behavior: Why Dreams Matter More Than Compliance

The field of clinical mental health counseling overly privileges observable behavior as the golden standard, largely because it can be assessed through our five senses. Yet we ignore how subjective even behavior is: What I view as “appropriate,” another may find unacceptable. We can offer a general spectrum for functional behavior, but at the end of the day, behavioral analysis often turns into something few are brave enough to call by its real name: manipulation.

We manipulate children, adolescents, and adults to adhere to behaviors that we deem acceptable. By “we,” I mean clinicians en masse, armed with interventions that make people more palatable to the world, but not nearly more whole. This is especially visible in the rise of ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) services for individuals with autism. ABA does not aim to deeply understand; it chisels away at the individual’s uniqueness so they might fit into a narrow mold crafted by society. It may help some who are overwhelmed by severe symptoms, but for many others on the spectrum, we could and should be asking better questions.

Now, what gets missed when we only look at the surface? Well, everything. A person’s dreams, defenses, distortions, complexes, archetypes…none of it is visible in behavioral checklists. And yet, those are the things that contain the essence of who we are. Dream analysis is one such approach that actually honors this depth, and it is the primary focus of this essay.

The Symbolic Language of the Soul

What are dreams? This question echoes endlessly through the halls of academia. Some settle on the view that dreams are meaningless…mere flickers of random neurons. But others, including myself, argue that dreams are not only meaningful, they are essential.

Dreams are the language of the unconscious soul. They do not speak in bullet points or diagnoses. They speak in images, metaphors, distortions, and riddles; they speak in symbols: a language that most modern clinicians have tragically, long forgotten (and have little interest in learning) how to read.

Contrary to common belief, dreams do not simply reflect external events. The psyche is far more clever and complex for that kind of spoon-fed narrative. It weaves what we have witnessed into tapestries of meaning that reveal the truth of our inner lives. A monster in a dream is not just a scary image, it may just be the shadow self: the rejected and disowned part of our psyche we’ve exiled to protect our conscious ego. Dreams force us to confront what we have avoided. They demand our attention….or else, we forget under the guise of “I don’t dream.” Unless we heed to the call, the call becomes muted.

To reclaim symbol interpretation (as a clinician, and as a human) requires that we first do the work ourselves. If we dare claim to help others, we must help ourselves first. Dream journaling and analysis are perhaps the most powerful tools we have for integration. It is how we make the unconscious conscious. It is how we reclaim what we have buried. Moreover, it acts as a fundamental benchmark in examining our own and our clients’ progress along their path to individuation.

Personal Dream Example: The Devil Behind the Clock

Here is a personal anecdote to my time utilizing dream analysis: When I was four years old, I had a recurring dream.

I was at my aunt’s house: a place that, in waking life, felt safe and loving. In the dream, however, something was wrong. I was sitting on the couch in the living room while my mom and aunt talked in the dining room. A large grandfather clock stood nearby. And behind it… was the Devil.

The depiction was exactly as I had seen him in a Christian movie growing up: red skin, horns, sinister. I cried, pointed, and ran to my mother. She didn’t even turn around. She waved me off with intense irritation. My aunt barely looked up. I was desperate, in agony, as this evil figure crept toward me. But I was dismissed and being overtaken.

Jungian Interpretation:

This dream, like many from early life, was not random. The devil behind the clock was not simply “evil” in the religious sense, it symbolized the forbidden, the repressed, and the terrifying unknown. In the context of a rigid, hyper-religious upbringing, he embodied not only projected fears around the body and sexuality, but also the unspeakable trauma that was taking root in my psyche.

The two women – figures who were sources of comfort and safety in waking life – were not villains in the dream. Rather, they represented a feminine energy that was emotionally unavailable, disconnected, and fragmented. Their dismissal in the dream was symbolic of a larger absence: the absence of grounded, attuned feminine containment. They did not betray me in waking life, but their dream counterparts portrayed what my psyche felt in that moment of crisis: alone, unseen, and forced to face the shadow without an emotional mirror.

This was the beginning of my inner rejection of the feminine. Not out of hatred, but as a survival mechanism. My mother (herself animus-possessed) modeled a way of being where logic, control, and emotional suppression were used to navigate life. Her feelings were powerful but unspoken, guiding her from beneath the surface. And so, I followed suit.

The dream encoded the psychic conditions that formed the early architecture of my inner world:

  • The growing dominance of my internal masculine (animus) as a protector and suppressor
  • The repression of my intuitive, feeling-based feminine qualities
  • The emergence of a mother complex shaped not just by relational dynamics, but by the archetypal distortion of what the feminine had come to represent for me: danger, denial, disconnection

This dream revealed the symbolic moment when the feminine was unconsciously exiled within me, and not out of blame, but out of necessity. It marked the beginning of fragmentation… and, much later in life, the very clue that would lead me back toward integration.

Reality Is Subjective: The Limits of Perception

There is such a thing as objective reality, however, no human can experience it. Everything we perceive is filtered through layers of lived experience, cultural imprinting, trauma, emotional valence, ego defenses, and complex structures buried deep within our unconscious. This is why even people raised in the same household often have drastically different interpretations of their past. We each wear unique perceptual lenses and no two alike. What we call “normal” or “abnormal” becomes a judgment passed through a very narrow filter. And so, if we hope to help others, we must first admit that we cannot see clearly. We must own our subjectivity. Only then can we begin to understand the symbolic logic of another’s psyche.

Dreams as the Roadmap to the Client’s Inner Cosmos

If each person carries a private myth; in other words, one’s unconscious is a rich, symbolic architecture and it is no longer helpful to impose a generic model of healing upon the individuals we work with. Instead, we must become curious. We must become guides of dreams. As a clinician, I do not “decode” a client’s psyche like a puzzle. I ask questions. I help hold the lantern while they descend into their inner world. The dream leads the way.

Clinical Dream Example: The Assault Nightmare

A male client once came to me terrified of his dreams. Night after night, he relived scenes of sexual assault, but in these dreams, he was not the victim. He was the perpetrator.

This detail tormented him. In waking life, he had been assaulted as an adolescent. The trauma left him paralyzed with shame, plagued by a profound inferiority complex and a deeply wounded mother complex. Sleep offered no refuge. Instead, it cast him in the role of the very force that had once violated him.

Understandably, he feared what these dreams said about him. But as our work deepened, and we dared to interpret the dream symbolically rather than literally, something far more human, and far more tragic, emerged.

Jungian Interpretation (Male Psyche, Symbolic Violence, and Trauma Integration):

The dreams were not about desire or cruelty. They were a dramatization of an internal psychic war. His unconscious had cast him in the role of the perpetrator; not to shame him, but to illuminate the depth of his fragmentation. What had been done to him was so shattering, so annihilating, that the only way his psyche could begin to metabolize it was to invert the trauma: putting him in imagined control of the very violence that once rendered him powerless.

In Jungian terms, these dreams symbolized the domination of this client’s psyche’s internal masculine function (rigid, disconnected, and tryrannical) over the anima, the inner feminine principle that governs intuition, emotion, and relational depth, because there was an incongruence between the dualities within him. After his assault, his psyche could not afford softness, so, it adapted. The anima was not safe to express, so she was buried. And in his dreams, she reemerged not as a figure of beauty or connection, but as the one being symbolically violated. This was not a literal drama. It was a psychic mirror reflecting how thoroughly his own inner feminine had been suppressed in order to survive.

These dreams were not signs of pathology. They were signs of readiness. The unconscious had begun to reveal, through dark imagery, the deeper truth: that what had been lost could now be reclaimed. The symbolic violence pointed not to moral failing, but to the soul’s attempt at re-integration.

What appears as horror in the dream world is often, in truth, the first flicker of psychic rebirth.

A Reaffirmed Commitment to the Depths

I have been working with dreams for many years through a Jungian lens, and over time, my appreciation for their psychological necessity has only deepened. Dreams are not just curiosities or byproducts of sleep. Over the decades, I have come to learn that they are essential dispatches from the unconscious. And interpreting them is not a technique to be memorized, but a far more sacred practice, one that requires presence, humility, and depth.

Dream analysis, especially when working with another person’s dream, demands a level of emotional insight and attunement that many clinicians are simply not trained to wield. One must not only understand symbols intellectually but feel into them empathically and tune into the psyche of another without overlaying it with one’s own projections. There is a great deal of intuition involved, as well as a kind of inner spaciousness: a willingness to listen to what is unsaid, to notice what appears behind the veil of the image…to look far beyond the mere surface.

This is not easy for everyone…far from it in fact. Those with a Sensing-dominant personality type, for example, are often more attuned to what can be observed through the five senses. Their cognition is rooted in concrete reality. And while this has tremendous value, it can make dreamwork more difficult because the dream speaks from beyond the veil. It emerges from the invisible layers of the unconscious and from the mythic architecture we carry within. It requires us to see in the dark, and to trust that what we cannot touch may still be real.

Closing Thoughts: Why Dream Analysis Should Not Be Optional

We are not blank slates. We are stories: myths, images, and memories tangled in archetypes that stretch back to the beginning of time. To understand someone (and I mean truly understand them) we must move beyond behavior, beyond diagnoses, and beyond surface language. We must comprehend the narrative folding that resides within. Thus, we must go inward.

In closing, dreams are not an accessory to therapy. They are the deepest expression of the Self calling out to be known. They are how the unconscious speaks when the ego is silent. And they offer what behavior never can: truth – truth that is symbolic, personal, and transformative.

What are your dreams asking you to witness?

“Every symbol in your dream has a special, individual connotation that belongs to you alone, just as the dream is ultimately yours alone. Even when a symbol has a collective or universal meaning, it still has a personal coloration for you and can be fully explained only from within you.”
― Robert A. Johnson (Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth)

The Alchemy of Love: Transformation Through Connection

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
— Carl G. Jung (Modern Man in Search of a Soul)

The Mirror of Love

Love has undone me more than anything else in life. And I say that not with bitterness, but with reverence, for it has also revealed truths I could never have touched otherwise. Truths about who I am, who I imagined I was, and who I pretended others could be.

This piece is a kind of self-study. Not a memoir, not a clinical breakdown, but rather, a weaving of both. I want to speak to those who have felt love as something mythic, disorienting, impossible to replicate. Those who have touched the sublime and then have been left holding only the echo thereof. Because I too have known that kind of love: the kind that alters your chemistry and warps your sense of time. The kind that feels like a meeting not of people, but of archetypes.

The kind of love that this essay will address is not the kind based merely off lust, but rather, of the soul meeting itself through another.

Love as the Search for Wholeness

In the remarkable work of The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other, James Hollis writes that “…we are not loved; we are only loved as the other perceives us to be.” He argues that most romantic connections begin not with true seeing, but with projection: the unconscious casting of our inner yearnings and unmet needs onto another… who is often doing the same in return.

When I first read Hollis, I was reeling from a relationship that defied explanation. I had found my match. Not only in compatibility (which was strikingly real), but also in psychic intensity. What undid us was not necessarily a lack of alignment in the external world, but the gravitational pull of our inner worlds colliding. The very parts of us that recognized each other most deeply were also the parts most shaped by fear, longing, and unfinished psychological business: a puer aeternus to my puella aeterna. Two archetypal children trapped in adult bodies, trying to love each other while still longing for escape; terrified by the paradox that enwrapped us from within.

He was Sir James Matthew Barrie’s Peter Pan: elusive, enchanting, untouchable. I was the Grimm Brother’s Raven: circling, waiting, aching to be seen and caught — but only by someone who could still let me fly.

The Myth We Lived: A Love Too Archetypal to Hold

We had what movies attempt to demonstrate: an unspoken, psychic link that needs no explanation. Could feel each other across distance. Knew when the other was hurting. We dreamt of each other and collapsed into each other’s arms as if we had known one another long before we met. Yet… we ran. Detachment and anxiousness enveloped our existences when together.

We were not two fully individuated people choosing one another, we were, instead, two complex systems colliding. Our wounds fell in love. Our shadows dated. And our childhood fears ran the show. While the love was all too real, it was also deeply unlivable.

“We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.”
— Sam Keen (To Love and Be Loved)

The Aftermath: The Art of Longing

I am still living in the aftermath of this time that happened years ago. Not because I have not moved forward in life, for I have: I am married. I am a mother. I am completing graduate school, training to help others navigate their inner worlds. But a part of me… is still there. In that suspended space where something wild and beautiful was once almost real.

This is where I believe art begins. In the sacred wound. In the longing that cannot be resolved but must be transformed. Hollis further wrote that most people never truly grieve their projections. They simply suppress them, numbing out the loss of a love that was never sustainable, but was still real in what it revealed. While I have tried my damnedest to suppress, I find the shadow merely grows, overtaking me in the most inopportune times. Thus, I am here, bearing my soul as a means to feel… because the only way out is through and my art lives in my writing.

There is a song entitled Embrace by ALIGN, every time I hear it, it stirs something inside of me. In it, there is a voice clip layered beneath the ambient textures, a quiet, intimate conversation between two people. While I have never been able to track down its origin, I have listened to it so many times now that I hear it through my own internal translation. Whatever the original words were, they’ve become something else for me, something deeply personal that rattles me to my core.

The emotion in that brief, unplaceable exchange evokes exactly where I find myself: suspended between the call to evolve and the ache to return. It captures the struggle of letting go of something that felt so ecstatic, so perfect, that part of me still clings to the illusion that it might return. That reflection I once saw in the eyes of another still lives inside me. Not just as memory, but as longing. And perhaps, part of me doesn’t want to let go, because to do so would be to release not just him, but the version of me that felt most known.

In classical mythology, the muse was the feminine spirit who inspired men to create, to speak beauty into form. But my muse was not a woman, it was a masculine soul who ignited the same trembling force within me. A fire that demanded I transcribe it. And like many artists before me, I find myself haunted by the figure who awakened my art: Dante’s Beatrice Portinari, Rilke’s Lou Andreas-Salomé, Picasso’s Dora Maar, Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne Verdal. Throughout time, muses have embodied longing; not just for the person themselves, but for the part of the self the “other” awoke.

Thus, I feel both summoned toward evolution and trapped in nostalgia. Longing for the psychic recognition of myself through another. That is the root of it. Not just love lost — but of reflection interrupted.

Clinical Reflections: Projection, Alchemy, and the Psyche

Clinically, what I experienced fits the very pattern Hollis describes: two individuals encounter one another not just as people, but as symbols. Representations of inner psychic ideals. In us, the projections matched:

  • I saw in him the freedom, intensity, fearlessness, and sacred detachment I longed to embody, but also deeply feared.
  • He saw in me grounding, mystery, and devotion…but also the threat of entrapment.

In Jungian terms, we were animus and anima (personifications of the unconscious masculine and feminine), acting out a drama far older than either of us. The tragedy was not that we failed to love each other, but that we did not yet know how to hold the tension between what we represented: autonomy and intimacy, flight and commitment, spirit and form.

Carl Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis explores this very phenomenon: the alchemical union of opposites within the psyche. Until that sacred inner union takes place, we often chase its reflection in another, believing we have found our missing half. But what has really been found — often to our detriment — is not a wholly perfect person that will complete us, but instead a mirror of our own unfinished work.

In this way, what we shared was not fate in a romantic sense, but in a psychological one. My unconscious sought integration through him. And while this relationship did not last, it was not a failure. It was an alchemical fire. It illuminated the parts of myself (and even himself) that were (and are) still unformed, still unclaimed. While it burned too hot to last, it revealed something eternal.

For Those of Us Still Yearning

If you are reading this in the ache of aftermath, or in the quiet ache for a love that does not quite belong to this world — or perhaps both — I see you. And I am speaking to myself just as much as I am speaking to you.

I will not offer false hope or cheap advice…for this kind of liminal space is deeply complex and nuanced. Speaking about this subject at a surface level would go against everything I hold sacred in my work, both as a clinician and as a soul in process. However, I will offer this: The kind of love this essay has tried to give shape to (the archetypal, soul-altering, life-breaking kind) is not a mistake. It is a kind of initiatory wound. It splits the skin of your ego so that something more honest, more whole, might be born. You may never “get over it.” But you can alchemize it…into vision, into art, and into soul.

From Longing to Meaning

Love, when stripped of illusion, does not promise Eden. As Hollis reminds us, relationships are not designed to make us happy, they are meant to challenge us, to confront us with our unconscious through the sharp edges of trigger points and projections, both positive and negative. Love, then, offers something far more dangerous, and more sacred: a confrontation with the self. Not the self you think you are, but the self you become when you dare to love with your whole being and turn the magnifying glass inward.

As for me, I am still becoming her… whoever that may be. I still find myself caught in the projection — longing, missing, hurting. But I lean in rather than turn away. I let myself feel it all fully (sometimes unbearably), in hopes that by doing so, I may become the conscious embodiment of what I once cast outward.

In Ginette Paris’s Heartbreak, Mourning, Loss, Volume 1: Detach or Die (a depth psychological exploration of grief and identity), she argues that we must choose between psychic decay and conscious separation. Now, please let us not mistake the term “detach” as emotional numbing, suppression, or erasure, but rather as a reclamation of life from illusion.

After much thought, and after pouring myself through the ache, depth, and sheer emotional weight of reflecting on a love that once was, I have arrived at this: I believe I will always miss him. And I will always love him… my brutally honest reflection, the one who both challenged and saw me. But, c’est la vie. This is where I find myself, for now. Not over it, nor wholly through it, but more honest for having ever walked through it.

Some reflections do not fade. They simply shift form and lead you inward…if you let them.

“We are not loved because we are understood. We are loved because someone has risked being changed by what they have seen in us.”
— James Hollis (The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other)

Breaking the Mask: Embracing Authenticity in Therapy

“The persona is a mask which makes people believe one is somebody. It is a compromise between the individual and society as to what a man should appear to be.”
— Carl Jung (Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (Collected Works, Vol. 7))

The Death of Goodness: Why I am writing this at all…

I have stayed quiet for a long time. Not because I had nothing to say, but because I became accustomed to staying in the shadows. Observing. Analyzing. Simply being a wallflower. There was comfort within the discomfort of it all.

I am a therapist-in-training, a mother, and a woman shaped by both compliance and rebellion. For years, I have carried a growing dissonance between what I know in my body and what I see in the world around me and especially within the clinical realm.

We say we care about healing. We say we care about wholeness. However, what we reward is fakeness. Blind obedience. Faux goodness. Polished language. Correct affiliations. Emotional tone regulation. Smiles.

We have, moreover, been told to be safe. Kind. Neutral. Do not say too much. Do not feel too much. Oh, but don’t forget to empathize. And one of the single most important pieces: Do not think too much…best yet, not at all. We are to make sure everyone is comfortable, even if we and our clients are disintegrating inside. Internally ripping our faces off, screaming into the abyss of our minds that fails to pierce through the veil of our lips.

And I have become tired of it all.

Exhausted by the pretense that goodness equals wholeness. That if clients are able to be “socially acceptable” and “independent,” they are healed. But they aren’t. Not truly. It is rather, the opposite, and that is now why this website exists.

This space is not for performance nor to reinforce the shiny persona of the perfect clinician or the healed mother or the spiritually poised woman. I am not writing for applause or even in the hopes that the world will even wake up; I am writing because if I don’t, I will suffocate under the weight of what has been left unspoken — not just within me, but that resides under the overbearing weight of the performance we have all abided by for much too long.

I have seen too many people break under the lie that goodness will save them. For it won’t. It always has been and always will be a mere mask. And masks are useful…until they begin to rot from the inside because it was mistaken for an authentic sense of self.

Goodness Over Wholeness: A Cultural Delusion

The clinical world, for all its talk of self-awareness and integration, often operates on a fundamentally disintegrated model. We are taught to repress the parts of ourselves that might make others uncomfortable: rage, shame, complexity, ambiguity, and paradox. We call that “professionalism.” Some even call it “trauma-informed.” We say it’s for safety. No, it is to merely maintain an illusion. Clinicians are some of the most messed up souls around, yet we act as though we have all of the answers (now whether we consciously admit to this or not is a whole other story).

What it really is that we as clinicians and clinicians-in-training have mastered is avoidance. And in that avoidance, we do the very thing we claim to treat by dissociating. We become “well-behaved” monsters: smiling, credentialed, abiding by ethical codes. Hollowed out. Half-alive and barely living.

We have traded soul for approval and mistaken emotional compliance for mental health. We call ourselves “helpers” while living inside systems that are terrified of anything raw, messy, or real. And then we have the gall to wonder why the world is collapsing and find some external force to blame all of our problems on…the crux of these problems that really reside within.

The Monsters We’ve Become

We imagine that monsters are violent, loud, and cruel. Grotesque and malicious. Wholly one way without an inkling of goodness within them. However, the true monsters are often those who believe they are good while being completely unconscious of the damage they do; the nuance of this complexity lacks any acknowledgment, whether in training programs, intellectual circles, or mainstream pop culture.

Monsters include the therapists who smile while pathologizing difference and judging each client by the diagnosis they were labeled by. The educators who punish emotion under the guise of order. The activists who rage for justice while secretly feeding on ideological purity and power. And yes — they are all of us. Me, you, and your friend’s sister’s cousin twice removed.

We are all susceptible to the spell of goodness. But why? Because goodness feels safe. I mean, it has gotten us this far, hasn’t it? We are no longer worried about outsiders raping and pillaging. Nor about having our neighbor turn on us simply because we are in some way different from them…or are we?

Now, what about this wholeness I spoke of? Wholeness asks us to face the parts of ourselves we have exiled: the shadow, the shame. The parts of us that wanted to punch the person that nearly crashed into us, scream at the system we feel is suppressing us, or collapse in the grocery store and cry because we are just so tired of pretending to be okay.

This blog marks the end of my performance.

Where We Go from Here

I do not have a formula. I do not have an endpoint. But I do have a voice, and a deep ache for truth. If you too are tired of being “good” and living in a world that tries their damnedest to collapse reality down to a 2D version of itself — black and white, good and evil — but still want to be whole…you are not alone.

If you feel more like a monster than a saint some days…you are also not alone. And if you are willing to question the very ground, we’ve built our “helping professions” on — then welcome!

This is not a safe space. It is a sacred one. One that while perhaps infuriating you, will also make you think. Sacredness begins not with perfection, but with brutal honesty. As the late psychiatrist, Dr. Carl Jung noted, what we do not face, we become. And what we refuse to name, we are destined to act out. Thus, wholeness is born when the mask is torn, and the monster is finally met.

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
— Carl Jung (Alchemical Studies (Collected Works, Vol. 13))