When Therapy Loses the Soul

In this episode, Lacey reflects on the modern mental health model — where it helps, where it falls short, and why many people are bringing deeply human struggles into therapeutic spaces that were never designed to hold them.

This is not a critique of therapy itself. Therapy can be life-changing, stabilizing, and necessary. But the dominant framework we use to understand suffering often assumes that distress means something is wrong with the individual, rather than recognizing how much of what people experience is inherent to being human.

The conversation explores how historical shifts — from soul-based understandings of suffering to mind-based and behavior-based models — have shaped modern therapy, and how that shift can unintentionally turn the self into a project to fix.

Lacey shares why she created The Process of Unbecoming and The Unbecoming Hub as an alternative orientation — one that honors wholeness, contradiction, and the human condition without pathologizing it.

If you’ve ever wondered why insight and self-work don’t always resolve the deeper ache, this episode offers a different way to understand what you’re experiencing.

In this episode:

• The history of how humans have understood suffering across time

• The shift from soul-centered to mind-centered models of the person

• Where the modern mental health model works — and where it doesn’t

• How therapy can unintentionally turn the self into a lifelong project

• The difference between pathology and the human condition

• Why existential pain often doesn’t resolve through behavioral change

• The relational and meaning-based roots of many struggles

• Why a different orientation to being human may be needed

Mentioned:

• The Process of Unbecoming

• The Unbecoming Hub

Learn more:
www.theunbecominghub.com