14/06/2025
As a family therapist, I often sit with families in pain, couples in conflict, and individuals seeking change. Early in therapy, the questions are usually practical: How can I communicate better? How can I change my partner? How can I stop being this way? These are honest and useful questions. Communication tools and conscious strategies have their place. But for me, they are only surface ripples of a deeper current.
Something more profound calls beneath the words—something that longs not just for solutions but for understanding. I often guide people beneath the surface, into the unconscious. Here, we leave behind logic and enter what Carl Jung called the Collective Unconscious.
Jung likened the unconscious to water—limitless, fluid, and reflective. Water doesn’t offer direct answers. It mirrors. It reveals.
This is where the real journey begins. Because the deeper we go—past blame, past the hope of changing others—something shifts. Slowly, clients begin to see not the person they hoped to change but the person they truly need to confront: themselves.
Not with blame, but with awakening. They see the child within longing to be heard, the protector who learned survival through silence or control, the lover afraid of vulnerability. In the mirrored depths, they encounter not solutions but insight.
Therapy becomes less about fixing others and more about unfolding the self. Not a toolkit, but a pilgrimage inward. In the water, they see both pain and potential—intertwined.
And in those quiet moments of recognition, something profound happens. They stop asking how can I change someone else? and begin asking how can I understand myself more deeply? That shift—subtle and sacred—is where healing begins.
