Is Something Missing in Your Therapy?

""The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao," wrote Lao Tzu in Tao Te Ching more than 2,500 years ago, capturing a paradox that still resonates today. Our deepest experiences of meaning, awe, and transcendence often resist language. Yet the fact that spiritual and existential concerns are difficult to articulate does not make them any less psychologically real and important. Questions of purpose, belief, connection, and mystery quietly shape many people's emotional lives-even when they are not spoken aloud."

"It is ironic that psychotherapy, a field devoted to exploring what is hidden or unconscious, has often been wary of engaging directly with spirituality. Sigmund Freud's influential view of religion as an illusion rooted in dependency and neurosis cast a long shadow over psychoanalysis. Although Freud wrote extensively about religion and religious identity, his skepticism led generations of clinicians to treat spiritual material with caution-or to avoid it altogether."

A paradox about language and the ineffable captures how deepest experiences of meaning, awe, and transcendence resist description. Spiritual and existential concerns can be difficult to articulate yet remain psychologically real and influential. Historical psychoanalytic skepticism framed religion as illusion and dependency, which led many clinicians to treat spiritual material with caution or avoid it. Spirituality now extends beyond organized religion, with people finding meaning in nature, meditation, music, social justice, and personal beliefs. Patients can feel an essential, hard-to-describe absence when therapy focuses on jobs and relationships but neglects purpose, values, belief, and coherence. Therapists often address thoughts and behaviors yet sidestep spiritual concerns that shape healing, loss, meaning, and connection.

Read at Psychology Today