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The Silent Crisis: Men and Mental Health

“The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.”
— Carl Gustav Jung (Modern Man in Search of a Soul)

We are witnessing a quiet crisis in the United States…and not one that comes with all the bells, whistles, or media fanfare. No marches are held for it, no signs drawn up, nor flags waved. It does not necessarily draw headlines, for it is the kind of crisis that festers in boardrooms, in bedrooms, behind the wheel of a car, and beneath the ribcage. It is adult men who are suffering and mostly silently. Mostly alone.

While awareness of mental health has grown, men remain one of the most underserved and misunderstood populations in the field. This is not due to a lack of pain – rather far from it, actually. It is due to a lack of space, and more critically, a lack of nuanced understanding.

A System Not Built for Them

Men die by suicide at disproportionate rates. They are more likely to externalize distress through substance use, violence, or even total emotional withdrawal. Their mind does what it knows best: protect the heart by building a palace of thought. But they remain emotionally silent. Stunted. Of all demographics, men are the least likely to seek help. The reasons of such are complex – cultural, social, psychological – but one thing is all too clear: the mental health field, for all its progress, has done too little to speak to men in a way they can hear and respect.

The prevailing scripts tells men to ‘be vulnerable,’ yet simultaneously pathologizes their silence, aggression, or stoicism, without curiosity to ask what might lie beyond the surface.

Most clinicians are ill-equipped to reach men on a soul level. The problem is not just one of technique, it is an absence of projection withdrawal, and of mythic literacy: the understanding that every man is living a story deeper than he can name. Few men have been initiated by elder men into their psyche, their wounds, or their inner world. They have instead inherited a hollow script: manhood shaped by worry, war, and work, as Jungian psychologist, James Hollis, so poignantly described.

Thus, men are emotionally stunted not by nature, and not entirely by choice, but by inheritance.

“Our society has long treated men as machines, as bodies expendable in the name of progress or profit. Men have overruled their pain and soul’s delight, taught to think of themselves as “mechanisms”.”
—James Hollis (Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men)

The Wound Beneath the Armor

As a clinician specializing in working primarily with male clients, I have sat across from men whose bodies are taut with rage, whose minds race with shame, and whose eyes are starved to be seen. I have witnessed what James Hollis also described so incisively: men dominated by unconscious complexes, ungrieved betrayals, and a loss of inner authority.

Men are not suffering because they are physically weak – quite obviously the opposite in many cases. They are suffering because they were never taught how to be strong in a way that includes the soul. A strength that makes space for vulnerability, for attunement to the inner world, and for the courage it takes to feel.

Instead, men have become possessed by the survival-driven aspects of the masculine psyche: logic, control, pride, and dominance – while the balancing presence of the inner feminine has been severed. Receptivity, emotional attunement, softness, and intuition have been amputated (often in childhood) in an unconscious attempt to survive in a world that shamed their presence.

In the present age, these qualities are still mocked and pathologized. Men are told they embody “toxic masculinity,” a phrase that wholly fails to offer compassion or even a glimmer of curiosity. Masculinity, in any form should not be worded as “toxic”. It should, in many cases, be understood as wounded (often profoundly so) and those wounds are almost always shaped by early experience and the internal narratives those experiences gave rise to.

“Men today cannot claim their identity via culture because they are obliged to find other uninitiated males as their models or succumb to the empty values of a materialistic society.”
—James Hollis (Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men)

The Mythic Terrain of the Male Psyche

The work of Marie-Louise von Franz and James Hillman, moreover, offer rich insight in the realm of the biological male psyche. Hillman, in his work, The Puer Papers, explores the archetype of the puer aeternus: the eternal boy. This pattern reveals itself in men who remain suspended in fantasy, unable or unwilling to root themselves in the demands of responsibility, commitment, and time.

However, what is often missed in comprehending this archetype is thus: the puer is not a problem to be solved, cured, or disciplined. He is rather a psychic figure, a deeply human experience, longing to be witnessed. The puer aeternus is not some immature impulse, he is a mythic call for meaning, imagination, and for divine connection… he is the flame of the soul and the whisper of the Self. When pathologized, he becomes a shame-ridden burden, but when honored, he becomes a masterful guide: fierce, restless, poetic, and raw.

“If the soul is to be healed, the myth must be remembered.”
—James Hillman (The Puer Papers)

Too often in our field, we treat symptoms without touching the myth…the symbolic core from which symptoms arise. We medicate in order to retrain, because physical restraint is now seen as unethical. Attempt to motivate through rehearsed unconditional positive regard, though behind the mask, many clinicians are unconsciously activated, subtly (or perhaps overtly) disdainful, and lost in countertransference. And moreover, mandate behavioral change without ever asking:

  • What story are you living?
  • What inner gods are you serving?
  • What unlived grief is demanding expression through your actions?
  • And, perhaps the most vital of all: Who are you behind your masks of bullshit – who were you conditioned out of being?

The Cost of Emotional Starvation

One recurring theme I have observed in therapy with my male clients is this: a disconnection between the mind and the body. Many cannot name what they feel. Some cannot even admit that they feel anything at all. For some, emotional illiteracy was simply the absence of teaching. For others, it was far more brutal: they were actively shamed out of knowing. Anger, anxiety, guilt, and irritation became the only acceptable expressions. Beneath those, however, lies something far more primal: terror. Grief. And an aching, near-unbearable hunger to be understood.

The absence of comradery. The evaporation of deep male friendships that are not ruled by the unconscious ego. The relentless performance of manhood. All of it contributes to a quiet but excruciating sense of isolation – rarely spoken of, but constantly lived. Competition has replaced brotherhood. Pride has replaced presence. Many are breaking under the weight of it all, and they are doing so in silence.

“Perhaps the greatest tragedy for men is that fear estranges them from their own anima—their source of feeling, connection, and vitality. This inner disconnection obliges an outer one as well: estranged from themselves, they become estranged from other men. What remains is often only surface-level conversation—sports, politics, events—while the deeper current of relatedness goes unspoken, unfelt.”
— James Hollis (Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men)

Not Redefinition – Reclamation

This is not a call to redefine masculinity according to some sanitized script. It is a call to reclaim its fullness, its complexity, its inherent contradiction – and to invite men into deeper contact with the soul of their being. The goal is not to “soften” men or domesticate them into passivity. It is to honor them. To be a witness to them. And through that witnessing, help them encounter the totality of who they are, including the myth, the rage, the erotic, and the divine.

“The opposite of repression is not expression. The opposite of repression is responsibility.”
—James Hollis

True strength is not domination; it is integration. Maturity is not emotional sterility; it is responsibility. And healing does not happen in isolation, but rather in initiation: in fellowship, in the presence of another who sees you not as a pathology to be corrected, but as a human soul navigating a forgotten myth.

Men were given a broken compass for navigating their inner world. That brokenness is not their fault, but it is their inheritance. And healing begins the moment we dare to tell them that.

Final Reflections

This blog post is far from the end of the story, it is the beginning of a re-storying.

We must meet men where they are: not with judgment, but with depth. Not with platitudes, but with presence. Not with quick fixes, but with the long, winding descent into the depths of hell…or in other words, their personal unconscious; that is where the real work happens. It will take time, patience, and perseverance. But, it is the most vital work we can do.

Let us, as clinicians, give men a place to go with their pain. Let us give them stories that honor their longing and their rage, their erotic charge, and their sacred wounds. Give them unpolluted eyes and attuned ears, where their authentic selves and unlived desires may finally come to be seen, heard, and held.

Let us become witnesses and guides, instead of saviors. Moreover, let us not be golems of our education: mechanical, reactive, hollow. I ask that we learn to walk beside men as they step into the wilderness of their own becoming and comprehend that as within, so without.

“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being.”
―Carl Gustav Jung (Memories, Dreams, Reflections)

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)

Exploring the Mythic Dimensions of Sexuality

“Our sexuality is never merely physical—it is mythic. It is the place where our complexes meet our archetypes, where our hunger for transcendence collides with our fear of dissolution.”
— James Hollis (The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other)

A Return to the Soul of Sex

I recently wrote the following reflective paper as part of my graduate training in human sexuality. While it was originally intended as a personal academic submission, I have chosen to share it here because it touches on themes that I believe need to be spoken of more honestly, more symbolically, and more soulfully. The true essence of sex was lost long ago and has been buried beneath the pollutants of inadequate social standards and shallow scripts that we have inherited throughout time. Thus, I encourage its come-back that is no longer dripping in taboo and shameful disgust.

It is a common misconception that sex is simply physical. To the absolute contrary, it is psychic, mythic, and raw. Below is my original piece, unedited in content, written from that liminal space between scholar, seeker, and clinician-in-training.

Journal #1: Understanding Sexual Development

Upon reflecting on my own sexual development and the shaping forces behind my internal “sexual script,” I am struck by how deeply both the elements of evolution and experience have etched themselves into the narrative. Gagnon and Simon’s Sexual Script Theory resonates with me in that it acknowledges sexuality not merely as a private, isolated phenomenon, but as a relational, symbolic, and socioculturally embedded experience (1973). It echoes a notion that I wholly believe that is no human arrives at their sexuality tabula rasa. Rather, we are inscribed with a primal blueprint, one that is then sculpted by our biology and then layered with meaning, shame, fantasy, myth, trauma, and desire through our individual lived experiences and in turn, our inner world.

As someone high in openness and agreeableness, I approach sexuality with a deep sense of curiosity and respect. My views of sex are not through a moralistic or binary lens, but instead through one that honors complexity. I believe that what consenting adults choose to engage in is not only their choice and business but is also, more often than not, an expression of deeper, symbolic truths, whether that be wounds seeking healing, fantasies expressing power dynamics, or mythic archetypes emerging through the body. Even practices like consensual non-consent (CNC) are rich with meaning. Thus, I see sexual kinks and sexuality as a whole, as a reflection of the psyche in motion. I find both (sexuality and the psyche) to be beautiful, endlessly fascinating and worthy of exploring through a symbolic lens.

However, I do hold strong boundaries around harm – a rather commonsensical approach. Pedophilia, for instance, is a domain where my openness narrows. While I acknowledge that urges are not chosen, and while I also believe that behavior is not always fully conscious (often influenced by unresolved trauma, psychological possession, or overwhelming emotional states, or what may also be called the Shadow aspect of the self (Jung, 1959)) it does not negate the reality that children cannot consent. The neurological and emotional development of a child ensures this, and any sexual exploitation of a minor represents a violation of power and innocence that I cannot condone (Seto, 2008). My moral compass is anchored in the principle of harm and the centrality of consent, which remains the non-negotiable line in both clinical work and ethical reasoning. That said, I reject the idea that individuals should be flattened into their worst behavior or vilified without psychological inquiry. I do not believe in ranking sins as if some are redeemable and others are not. Every individual has a story, and sexuality does not arise in isolation and is shaped by biology, psyche, environment, developmental trauma, and cultural imprinting (Buehler, 2021; Levine, 2003). To dehumanize someone is to sever the possibility of healing, and in doing so, we often reinforce the very cycles of shame and unconscious compulsion that fuel these behaviors in the first place. Thus, I believe the ultimate task of the clinician is to hold space for truth, even (and especially) when it is difficult, and to meet individuals at the level of soul; not to excuse harm, but to understand its roots and help prevent its repetition.

Culturally, I come from a long lineage of sexual suppression. I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian household where sex was cloaked in shame, spoken about in hushed tones, and governed by strict rules. It was not presented as something sacred in the empowering or life-affirming sense, but rather as something to be feared, controlled, and weaponized. It was surrounded by anxiety and silence (rarely was it discussed except through judgment or moral warning) and made explicitly clear that it was to only occur between a man and a woman within a heterosexual, physically committed marriage. There was no room for curiosity, nuance, or safety in those conversations. Desire was treated as dangerous; however, while the purity pill was perpetually force-fed, I was at the same time, taught to think critically, even if only within a narrow framework.

That early exposure to disciplined thinking ultimately allowed me to question what I had been taught. As I grew older and approached the realm of sexuality on my own terms, I began to see how disconnected these teachings were from the actual landscape of human experience. I came to reject purity culture and be drawn to the erotic, to the symbolic, and to the mythic dimensions that often emerge in sexual experience. My own experiences of love and sex have been transformative. They have mirrored archetypes such as the forbidden fruit, projections of the anima and animus encountering one another, and the longing for both union and ego dissolution (Jung, 1969). Sexuality is never just about sex, it is a story told through bodies, reactions, and silent scripts, often written in response to the very systems that tried to silence them.

Becoming a therapist who can work with sexuality, especially as a future sex therapist, feels like a calling that merges my personal openness with my professional identity. People have always confided in me about things they have never told anyone: fetishes, affairs, traumas, confusions. In those confessions, I never recoil. I lean in and not because I am titillated, but because I am reverent of how socially taboo and vulnerable that realm is for many. To be able to sit with someone in that space, without judgment, is an honor that I have never and will never take lightly.

Buehler’s (2021) reflective questions led me to notice how even my own comfort edges, albeit, while broad, still exist. I am less reactive to unconventional practices than I am to societal ignorance and hypocrisies surrounding sex. That tells me something: my bias is toward liberation. Through this conscious awareness, I must then be mindful to not impose this bias in sessions, even if it is cloaked in “progress.” Some clients may come from deeply religious frameworks or desire more traditional relational structures. My task is not to lead them toward my values but to help them discover their own authentic alignment.

In Jungian terms, sexuality is the shadow’s playground. It is where the unconscious speaks in moans, rituals, projections, and resistance (Hillman, 1972). If clinicians want to understand one’s inner world, we must listen to how clients speak about sex… or don’t. There, we will find roots to shame, power, longing, and the archetypal struggle between control and surrender.

If I were to illustrate my sexual development as an image, it would be a labyrinth. Not to be confused with a maze where one gets lost, but a sacred path inward: winding and looping through layers of masks, sharp exhales, and meaning. At the center there is not an answer, but rather, a mirror. Much like all sacred mirrors, it asks only one thing: the courage to look.

References

Buehler, S. (2021). What every mental health professional needs to know about sex (3rd ed.). Springer Publishing Company.

Gagnon, J. H., & Simon, W. (1973). Sexual conduct: The social sources of human sexuality. Aldine Publishing.

Hillman, J. (1972). The myth of analysis: Three essays in archetypal psychology. Northwestern University Press.

Jung, C. G. (1959). Aion: Researches into the phenomenology of the self (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press.

Jung, C. G. (1969). Archetypes and the collective unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed.). Princeton University Press.

Levine, P. A. (2003). Waking the tiger: Healing trauma. North Atlantic Books.

Seto, M. C. (2018). Pedophilia and Sexual Offending Against Children: Theory, Assessment, and Intervention (2nd ed.). American Psychological Association.

Closing Reflection

What strikes me now, after rereading this piece (and a few others in academic journals and post-modern feminist magazines, whose pages somehow manage to be both self-righteous and self-referential), is how even the most ‘progressive’ conversations around sexuality remain steeped in judgment, veiled beneath the illusion of liberation. It is no longer a matter of sin, but of social acceptability, dictated by ever-shifting ideological standards. As long as a behavior fits neatly inside a shiny identity label, it is celebrated. But if it challenges our comfort zones, or if it cannot be hashtagged or politicized, it is discarded, condemned, or pathologized.

We have traded purity culture for progressive purity. We still rank sins. Still choose who is worthy of understanding, and who is not. And we still fail to ask the deeper questions and to really think.

Sexuality is not a checklist. It is not a gender, nor is it a slogan. It is soul-stuff: a living current of paradox, shadow, trauma, desire, repression, and longing. Sexuality is not meant to be safe. It is meant to be sacred.

Sex and sexuality is another area in which I am tired of the flatness: of the empty performances of sexual liberation that still revolve around control. Of the cowardice in our discourse, the refusal to sit with what disturbs us, and the rejection of anything that does not come pre-approved by an ideology from either side of the track.

We do not heal by policing people into silence, nor do we grow by judging which wounds deserve compassion. We do not and will continue to not understand sex — truly understand it — until we stop moralizing and start listening.

Life is nuance. Truth is contradiction. And something as sacred, as revealing, and as volatile as sex deserves better than dichotomous thinking. It deserves uncensored honesty.

“Sexuality is the strongest instinctual force that we experience. It carries both the danger of possession and the possibility of transformation. The question is always whether one is possessed by the instinct or is able to relate to it consciously.”
— Marie-Louise von Franz (Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche)