Welcome to the Blog: On Healing, Therapy, and the Soul

Hello, and welcome to my blog!

In this space, I hope to be able to provide some support to those of you in therapy, seeking therapy, or just curious about therapy, whether you are an individual seeking to overcome obstacles, are struggling with anxiety or depression, or seeking ways to contextualize and integrate some of your “troubles” into the story and meaning of your life.

I also will be including material for those of you struggling in your relationship, incorporating some of what I have learned through my years as a couples’ counselor, through my own navigation of marriage and parenthood, and through my ongoing studies. I intend to provide insights from my life, my work, my training, and my influences. I want to include poetry, writings, art, and stories, as I understand many people do not respond to the same things.

For now, I will offer up two passages that speak a bit to the complicated nature of what is involved in this engagement often referred to as a healing process, the less than self-evident path that therapy can take. Where is the line drawn between mental health and a sick society? Is every symptom to simply be eradicated, or can it be followed to its source, investigated, leaned into?

First, a quote from one of my “north stars,” the brilliant Jungian Psychologist, James Hillman:

“Depression is essential to the tragic sense of life. It moistens the dry soul, and dries the wet. It brings refuge, limitation, focus, gravity, weight, and humble powerlessness. It reminds of death. The true revolution begins in the individual who can be true to his or her depression. Neither jerking oneself out of it, caught in cycles of hope and despair, nor suffering through it till it turns, nor theologizing it — but discovering the consciousness and depths it wants. So begins the revolution on behalf of soul.”
– James Hillman, A Blue Fire

And I will leave you with a complimentary and equally controversial poem by the great D.H. Lawrence:

Healing
by D.H. Lawrence
I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self
and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance
long, difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.

Please come back to this space for more, and share with anyone you think might benefit.

– Avi