Many people who find their way to me are not, on the surface, in crisis. If anything, they have held themselves together with considerable skill, sometimes for decades. From the outside, they appear to have it all: a career that offers status and advancement, a relationship that functions more or less, a self that has learned, through practice, to meet the world's expectations without too much visible strain.
What brings them in is rarely what's actually wrong. They share a presenting problem: a relationship fraying at the edges, anxiety that won't quieten, a role or expectation that no longer fits. But underneath this lies another question. One they may not have said aloud, even to themselves:
Is this it? Is this the life I'm living, this particular fraction of what I thought it might be?
Underneath that question, quieter still, is often a longing without a name. A desire for more depth, connection, aliveness, more of whatever it is that makes a human life feel fully inhabited.
I remember the first time I heard this voice. I was 21. My first relationship had just ended, I was depressed, lost and in between jobs, and weighed about 50 kilos. Sitting on the bottom of the staircase, unable to move, think, or even feel a thing. And then, in the middle of that, a voice emerged from within, assuring me I'd be okay and asking me to follow her. She was soft and faint, easy to ignore. I don't know what it was, but I trusted her enough to heed the call.
How many of us truly follow that longing, in a world where there is always something more urgent demanding our attention? Often, the voice grows quiet. In the body that grows tired in ways sleep doesn't fix. In the creativity that dried up gradually. In the vague sense of fraudulence that follows even genuine achievement.
Until life knocks on the door.
It always does, though not always gently. Life is not cruel, but it is insistent: it knocks because something in you called for it.
It always does, though not always gently. Life is not cruel, but it is insistent: it knocks because something in you called for it. Because something longs to come alive in you.
This longing is, I think, among the deepest currents of the human heart. The Germans call it Sehnsucht—an ache toward something no material thing can fully satisfy. The mystics called it the soul seeking God. Jung understood it as the call of the Self, the deeper centre of a person pressing toward expression. Whatever name you give it, it is the thing that has not yet been lived, and that does not go away simply because life gets busy, or because the conditions for living it have not yet been created.
Healing or therapy, in our hasty, modern times, commonly implies restoration rather than renewal: a going back to before. But for many of the people I work with, the version they'd be returning to was already a self shaped more by survival than by choice, more by what was required of them than by what they actually were. I aspire to something more demanding — and invigorating.
The Sumerians called it katabasis, the necessary descent. In their oldest surviving myth, the goddess Inanna chooses to enter the underworld. Not because she is forced to, but because something in her knows she must. At each of the seven gates she passes through, she must surrender something: her crown, her robes, her dignity, all the markers of who she has been, until she arrives stripped of everything. Hung on a hook.
And then she returns. Not as she was, but as someone more fully herself: someone who met her own darkness and is no longer governed by the fear of it. Renewal is not erasure. Inanna does not return from the underworld having shed her history, she returns having metabolised it. What was once wound becomes wisdom. What was once survival becomes, eventually, a new kind of freedom.
The past is not left behind; it is carried differently.
Much of what passes for healing is really a form of forgetting. Or worse: dissociation dressed up as growth. The goal is not to become someone who was never hurt, never formed by difficult things, never shaped by a family or a culture that asked too much or gave too little. The goal is to become someone for whom all of that is finally, fully, part of the story. Not the whole story. Not the ending, but part of it: held, embraced, integrated, no longer running the show from the shadows.
Janus, the Roman god of thresholds, has two faces for a reason. One turned toward the past, the other toward the future. He does not choose between them but holds both, without contradiction. Wound and gift. Past and future. What was and what is still possible. That is what I mean by renewal: not away from what was, but through it and beyond it, with all of it still in you, held in equal balance, carried differently.
I believe that loving and creating are not things we do alongside living. They are what a life, fully lived, actually is. The capacity to love, without the armour that old hurt requires, and the capacity to bring something new into being: a vast appetite for life. Curiosity. A longing so alive it astonishes. The startling discovery that life, your life, has been there, waiting for you to claim her, all along.
Renewal, then, is not the end of the story. It is the moment when a person can finally begin to write it: not from survival, not from the expectations of others, not from the diminished self that formed under difficult conditions, but from something closer to the centre. From what was always there, waiting.
What is longing to come alive in you?