Bring the Soul Back to Therapy

What happens when the field designed to support the human soul slowly begins to reject it?

This question has followed me for years, largely because I live on both sides of it. I am a therapist. I have been deeply helped by therapy—by one therapist in particular who helped stabilize my relationships and gave me a sense of ground beneath my feet. I have also watched therapy help many people in meaningful ways through my own work.

And still, I hold a persistent inner conflict with the mental health model itself.

Both things are true.

That tension is part of what led me away from working exclusively within traditional frameworks and toward writing The Process of Unbecoming and creating Unbecoming You. Not because therapy is inherently harmful or misguided, but because something essential has been stripped away in the effort to professionalize, measure, and standardize human suffering.

Long before therapy became a field, suffering was not understood as an individual malfunction. It was seen as a rupture—between a person and their community, their world, or the deeper sources of meaning that oriented life. Pain was not private or pathological. It was contextual, relational, and often communal. It was brought into story, ritual, initiation, and shared experience. Suffering belonged somewhere.

Early philosophy did not abandon this understanding. Thinkers like Aristotle and the Stoics recognized emotion and distress as part of the human condition. Reason played an important role, but it did not dominate experience. It was used to reflect on how a person might live well within the realities of loss, limitation, and uncertainty. The soul was still part of the conversation.

The decisive shift came with the Enlightenment.

Reason became the primary path to liberation. Knowledge overtook lived experience. The mind was separated from the body, cognition from meaning, and identity was relocated into thought itself. What could not be rationally articulated or empirically measured lost credibility. Subjective experience—grief, longing, despair, reverence—was increasingly viewed with suspicion. Suffering began to be understood less as a feature of being human and more as a problem of perception.

Modern psychology emerged from this soil. As scientific legitimacy became paramount, inner life was narrowed to what could be observed, quantified, and controlled. Early depth psychologists attempted to hold onto symbol, meaning, and the unconscious, but the field ultimately moved away from them. Behaviorism took hold, and with it a profound contraction of what counted as real.

Inner experience was dismissed as irrelevant. Behavior became the focus because it could be measured and modified. Distress was reframed as pathology. Relief was defined by symptom reduction. The consequences of this shift were severe.

Asylums, lobotomies, and early forms of electroconvulsive therapy were often introduced with the belief that they were helping, but they were rooted in the same logic: that inconvenient behavior indicated something fundamentally wrong with a person. Grief that lingered. Nonconformity. Emotional expression that exceeded social tolerance. These were treated as defects to be corrected rather than experiences to be understood.

Modern therapy evolved from this lineage. While practices have become more humane, the underlying assumptions have remained largely intact. Distress is still treated as something to eliminate. Emotional pain is still framed as evidence of disorder.

The DSM reflects this orientation. It offers a system for naming patterns of suffering, and for some people, this naming brings relief. A diagnosis can validate experience, provide language, and offer a sense of coherence. For others, it confirms a more devastating belief: that there is something inherently wrong with them. Both responses make sense.

What is often overlooked is that the relief many people feel does not come from the diagnosis itself, but from recognition. From being seen and taken seriously by another human. That recognition does not require pathology. It requires contact.

The problem is not diagnosis per se. It is the premise beneath it—that distress signifies defect.

Many people arrive in therapy carrying questions that are fundamentally existential, even if they are not articulated that way. Questions about identity, belonging, meaning, loss, and mortality. These are not cognitive errors to be corrected. They are human questions that arise in response to living.

When therapy remains confined to symptom management, something vital is missed. People may gain insight, learn language, and develop strategies, yet still feel unseen. Therapy becomes an exercise in explanation rather than encounter. Understanding increases, but contact does not.

There are other unintended consequences as well. When clinical boundaries are emphasized without relational presence, clients can internalize the sense that their humanity is excessive—even for a therapist. When therapists are trained to suppress their own humanness in the name of neutrality, the therapeutic space becomes thinner, not safer.

Countertransference matters. Projection can be harmful. Therapists need self-awareness and support, but fear of our own humanity has pushed the field toward emotional distance that undermines the very thing that heals.

Human suffering—particularly existential suffering—cannot be met through technique alone. It requires relationship. It requires presence. It requires another person willing to remain in contact without needing to fix, explain, or contain experience too quickly.

This is why I no longer understand what people bring to therapy primarily as mental disorders. I see ruptures in the human experience. A loss of orientation. A sense that something essential has gone missing.

Healing does not occur through intervention alone. It occurs human to human.

Most people do not leave therapy because their therapist lacked skill. They leave because they did not feel met. Because there was no felt sense of connection. No experience of being held in relationship. Connection is not ancillary to the work. It is the work.

We do not need more mental health in the narrow sense of the term. We need a return to something older and deeper—an understanding of suffering that includes meaning, relationship, and the full range of human experience.

We need to bring the soul back.

Whatever we ultimately call this work, it must begin there.