What Is Depth Psychotherapy? A Pilgrimage Along the Path of Soul
“Call the world, if you please, ‘The vale of soul-making.’ Then you will find out the use of the world.”
What does it mean to heal? What shape does wholeness take within our lives, our worlds?
Depth psychotherapy offers a space for exploring life’s deepest questions—not just with the mind, but with the heart, body, and soul. It is more than simply "talk therapy." It’s an art form, a prayer, deeply rooted in the belief that healing is a creative, collaborative, and soul-enriching process.
In this essay, I hope to speak to the intricacies of depth-psychotherapy, weaving together an explanation of the guiding principles of my work and the holistic integration of methods informing my psychotherapy practice.
Psychotherapy as the Artistry of Soul
Depth psychotherapy invites us to come to know the inner world. It’s a process that asks us to descend to the depths within our psyche that we may come to know and embrace our inner pain, darkness, and suffering. In doing so, we embark on a journey to not only come to understand our symptoms, but to experience the unconscious patterns, thought forms, stories, and belief systems structuring our psyches and informing our present lived experience.
The poet John Keats wrote of the act of “soul-making,” an idea later amplified by psychotherapist James Hillman in his theory of Archetypal Psychology. It is through this process of soul-making, an artistic endeavor in itself, that we come to work through suffering, finding meaning, wholeness, and enrichment within our lives. By engaging with repressed unconscious material within, we come to integrate our shadow elements and create coherence between mind, body, heart, and soul.
While many contemporary psychotherapeutic approaches are aimed at reducing suffering as quickly and easily as possible, depth-psychotherapy exists as an approach for those who are interested in doing the slow and holistic work of remembering the wholeness that exists within. The artistry of Soul requires patience, trust, and curiosity about one’s truest Self. In reverence, we tend to the inner world and honor the complexity of being human. It is my hope as a depth psychotherapist that my sessions feel spacious, gentle, and deeply transformative.
The Healing Journey
Depth psychotherapy weaves together teachings from the fields of literature, philosophy, and mythology, as well as the foundational psychoanalytic and analytical schools of thought. Contemporary depth-psychotherapy as I practice involves the trauma-informed exploration of mind, body, and soul to promote healing and support emotional, relational, ecological, and spiritual wellbeing.
Trauma Informed Therapy
While trauma takes many forms, its basic imprint on the body and nervous system is one of chronic dysregulation and lack of felt-sense safety. In my practice, I approach psychotherapy in a trauma-informed way, inviting your collaboration to co-create a space of safety where your nervous system can feel safe to be held.
Throughout sessions, I will invite you to answer questions or speak to topics in a way that feels comfortable to you. This means that you are never required to move at a pace that feels too quick, or over-share in a way that leaves you feeling dysregulated. My hope is that we can build trust slowly and organically, with enough space in sessions to support your bodily and emotional autonomy.
Psychoanalytic and Relational Perspectives
Contemporary psychoanalytic and relational theories recognize the inherent value of the psychotherapeutic relationship on healing. A psychoanalytic and intersubjective perspective helps us understand our interactions with others, especially the projections and deeply rooted beliefs about the world that shape the dynamics we create in our daily lives.
Through a co-created therapeutic space, we explore feelings such as anger, love, hate, shame, and fear that may emerge in your relationships, as well as within the therapeutic relationship. Through this process, we begin to recognize your relational patterns, deconstruct projections, and cultivate greater closeness and intimacy within your connection to others and to yourself.
Jungian Psychology and the Archetypal World
Drawing on the works of Carl Jung, Marion Woodman, James Hillman, and other contemporary post-Jungian scholars and practitioners, I view the archetypal world as having the potential to effect profound changes and lasting healing within the psyche.
Carl Jung believed our psyches are interwoven with individual and collective archetypes— universal energies expressed through symbols and themes that exist across cultures, literature, and human history. Archetypes like “the hero,” “the mother,” or “the shadow” represent aspects of ourselves that we encounter throughout life. In coming to know these archetypes and the wisdom they carry, we can experience deeper levels of insight, healing, and enrichment in our lives.
Dreamwork is a foundational practice of depth psychotherapy that helps us come into contact with the archetypal world. Often, the psyche speaks through dream images that carry their own inherent guidance and wisdom for our lives if we can create space for these inner figures to emerge.
Somatic and Sensorial Healing
While talking is a vital process of any psychotherapy, I believe that somatic modalities are especially potent forms of healing. The body carries our lived experience of trauma- emotions and memories stored within can also be felt and expressed through physical tension, nervous system dysregulation, and illness.
Embodied depth psychotherapy practices seek to ground safety within the physical form that we may reclaim the wisdom of the body. Somatic practices like breathwork, movement, and gentle self-touch can restore connection to the body and facilitate a deepening of embodied awareness and healing. In the recognition of your interconnectedness with the natural world, you may find yourself once again held by the web of life. Embodied healing is an invitation home to yourself.
Depth Psychotherapy as Pilgrimage
As a pilgrimage of soul-making, depth-psychotherapy has the potential to support bodily health, mental wellbeing, and spiritual flourishing. Depth-psychotherapy is an investment toward your wholeness, and while it does not offer quick fixes, the results my clients experience are deep and long lasting.
Psychotherapy acts as an alchemical container for the journey of self-discovery, weaving together the linguistic brilliance of the spoken word, the symbolism of the soul, the relational safety of human contact, and the deep wisdom of the body. Who are you becoming? What is it that you desire to do or be in this lifetime? Such questions are the foundation of our work together.
If you’re seeking a space to begin to explore your inner world, embarking upon this path of devotion to soul, psychotherapy may be the next step in your healing journey. If you are drawn to the possibility of working together, I invite you to reach out to set up an intake with me. I am here to support your journey, we are not meant to tread the path of soul alone. If you’d like a soulful and supportive therapist during this time, I’d be honored to hear from you. Send me a message today to begin your journey home.
Wishing you well and holding you in the mystery,
Sarah xx
