Depth-Oriented Psychotherapy:
Traversing the Deep Dark of the Psyche

Why– not just what & How

Much of therapy is centred around the question of What? — what are your symptoms, what is happening in your life, what are your relationships like, etcetera. Usually clients seek therapy to bring forth their ‘what’ in hopes of getting support with the How? — How do I deal with these symptoms? How do I make changes? How do I establish boundaries and advocate for my needs? 

Some people find that therapy which addresses the questions of ‘what’ and ‘how’ is satisfactory, but others don’t. It’s not uncommon for clients to seek therapy with me because they have tried cognitive-behavioural approaches to some extent and either didn’t like it or got what they needed at the time, but now they want more or have found the same issue has resurfaced in some way. This experience is typically communicated to me in the form of one of my favourite questions: Why?

Does this question sound familiar to you?: “So this is what I am dealing with, and this is how I’ve learned to manage it, but why is this an issue for me in the first place?” If you’ve asked this question, you’re likely looking for the root of the issue. And the key to this question lies in the metaphor itself: the root. And where do roots grow? Under the surface, in the dark: beyond what we can see.

To be depth-oriented means exploring the edges, and beyond, of what is in your awareness. This can feel daunting because we may come to face parts of ourselves we have tried to avoid seeing, pain we have tried not to feel, or questions we don’t have the answer to. However, I believe that true healing can only emerge from the darkness. Jeanine M. Canty captures this beautifully as she describes how crucial venturing into darkness is for our maturation process:

In order to gain wisdom and align with our truest callings for the world, we must dip into this darkness, facing our fears, allowing a death of our selves. When we encounter the wisdom of darkness, the void, a death, the winter of our soul–we step into our maturity, our adulthood. Our current society’s fixation on lightness, endless summer, and eternal youth bars this descent into darkness, leaving us in perpetual immaturity.

Jeanine M. Canty

Think about the deepest places on earth. How much light penetrates these places? None. Where there is depth, there is darkness. And the places of obsidian depth serve a purpose.

In his book, “Underland: A Deep Time Journey”, Robert Macfarlane describes depth–the underland– as places where we dispose of the waste we can’t or do not want to deal with. He writes,

The same three tasks recur across cultures and epochs: to shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable, and to dispose of what is harmful. 

Shelter (memories, precious matter, messages, fragile lives). 

Yield (information, wealth, metaphors, minerals, visions). 

Dispose (waste, trauma, poison, secrets). 

Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.

Robert Macfarlane

Depth-oriented psychotherapy is the metaphorical equivalent to caving: we are going to descend into the depths of your psyche, explore the emotion your body has held onto, allow space for your dreams to be listened to, and courageously look into the abyss of the unknown within you. And this is not for nothing, but rather to yield that which you need for your healing and growth.

beyond rationalizing and intellectualizing

What does exploring the depths look like in therapy? Much of the therapy we do is talk therapy: we have a back-and-forth dialogue about yourself, your life, your experiences. Sometimes talking can take us to the deep places, but other times not. The way we think, and then express, can be well guarded by our coping mechanisms to keep us on the surface where it is safe and known.

We can consider thinking, intellect, cognition to be in the realm of awareness: we use our logic and reasoning to understand our situation and to arrive at a conscious decision on how to proceed. This is wonderfully effective much of the time … until it isn’t. Many of us intellectualize the decisions we make and come to a rationale that we think we can stand behind. And we do this quite often in the face of cognitive dissonance. Rationalizing and intellectualizing are adaptive coping mechanisms, but they can also be self-deceptive.

We are motivated to believe certain things to be true about ourselves and the world and want to discount/avoid/ignore/suppress information and experiences that counter these beliefs. So in rides that chivalrous knight of rationalizing and intellectualizing to rescue us from feeling things like guilt, shame, uncertainty, grief, fear which may arise should we look at the dissonances head on.

Being rescued by cognitive coping mechanisms results in dealing with what we can see on the surface: anxiety, depression, interpersonal conflict. We go to therapy to manage the symptoms. We do the worksheets, start exercising, try medication, establish boundaries with others. And it’s all going pretty great, until that anxiety comes back around again. And again. And again. 

That is, until we ask why—Why do I have anxiety? Why am I depressed? Why do I continue to face the same issue in every relationship? Where is this all coming from? 

Here is the kicker: rationalizing and intellectualizing only gets us so far because many of us are only somewhat aware of what we believe and value and how these beliefs and values impact our way of being in the world. We are only somewhat aware of the way our past experiences and wounding have shaped our way of relating to others and ourselves.

You carry an entire world within you. You see a lot of yourself– metaphorically captured in that classic Lion King Mufasa’s “everything the light touches is our kingdom” sentiment. But to carry a world within you doesn’t mean you are only consciousness (the sun and what the sun illuminates), but also all the places of the earth that the sun doesn’t touch. You carry within you mountainous caverns, the bottom of the ocean, and the earth’s core. And these places within you don’t often show up in the form of thoughts, but rather they are held in your body: your throat, your chest, your gut, your musculature.

dramatic, or deep?

If you’ve ever had a physical or emotional reaction to something but you didn’t know why, then you’ve just experienced a place of depth within yourself. So many of us have been conditioned to shrug those experiences off as us being “over-sensitive”, “dramatic”, “crazy”, “not ourselves”. We learn to quickly move past it, dismiss it, ignore it. Rarely do we learn how to lean into it and decipher the message our bodies are trying to convey through sensation and emotion. 

I write more about this under the guiding principle of body-focused, but essentially, I hold firmly that our bodies are wise and truthful. When we bring your attention in session (and outside of session) to what you are feeling in your body, we often discover rich information that may not have arisen as a conscious thought. We can tell ourselves that we are fine, that the experiences we had as children weren’t so bad. We can think it, we can convince ourselves of its truth, until the body starts quivering, the nausea rises, the tears well up in the eyes.

When the body speaks, we can no longer deny the pain that has been locked away in the dark all these years. The hopeful piece of it all is that the messages from our body are like diamonds or pearls. You have to go into the dark to find them, but once you do, you immediately recognize them as precious.

fear of the abyss

Some clients are at the very end of themselves so much so there is a fervent desire to unearth everything they’ve been carrying. Others have an intuitive sense that they need to do the depth-oriented work but are terrified of what they may discover, whether that be painful emotions or a profound inner emptiness. Emerging from voices laced with terror and dread, I often hear the question, “What if I go into that deep dark of myself and nothing is there?”  What an honest question. What a valid, understandable fear. 

Darkness is a primordial fear in human beings, and that isn’t any different for psychological darkness. This is captured in the hermetic teaching, “As above, so below. As within, so without”: In therapy, we aren’t literally walking in a dark wood at night or going spelunking, but we are doing the psychological equivalent when we explore the edges of your consciousness and venture into the territory of the unconscious. And it is scary.

Many of us are familiar with Nietzsche’s famous quote about staring into the abyss:

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Although this quote is often taken out of its original context, I think it is valuable to acknowledge what the quote has come to signify. Ultimately, we shudder at the prospect of staring into the abyss of our being, fearful that it will consume us. Fearful that it will pull us into the endless nothingness to live a non-existence. To be hollowed out, as a ghost. The title of Gabor Maté’s book on addiction is so poignant: “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts”.

We avoid, we try to escape the deep places within ourselves and yet we can never really escape that which we embody: the deep places haunt us until we muster the courage–or the desperation–to stare back into that abyss and allow ourselves to be changed.

But do not despair. Though you may experience what feels like a primal fear of doing a deep psychological dive, what I can tell you with confidence is that when you reach the depths of yourself, you will not be afraid. You will be in awe.

As a therapist, I have the privilege of regularly witnessing that the beautiful parts of ourselves, some of the most creative, life-giving parts, have been locked away in the dark and buried under much pain and suffering. Such suffering need not be avoided. The paradoxical nature of therapy is that with every ounce of pain you feel, every tear you shed, you strengthen. And once you’ve started to experience this, you will grow to trust that difficult emotions like grief, shame, and regret pass and you are able to move through them.

To reiterate: you carry a whole world within you. Your body is not afraid of the cavernous places, but equipped to move through them. Your body is able to metabolize difficult emotions. Your nervous system is designed to metabolize fear and stress and sometimes just needs our help in unlocking and remembering that primal knowledge. 

The writings and work of Jungian Analyst, Marion Woodman, were substantially nurturing, providing much holding space for me during my journey through the inner abyss. In her book, “The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation”, she writes,

The emptiness at the center of the psyche that has heretofore been experienced as nothingness–an abyss to be avoided with as much anaesthesia as necessary–can be transformed into Beingness

Marion Woodman

The feelings of emptiness, the pain we have tried to avoid, is transformed into something substantial–Beingness–when we venture into the depths. The fear of “what if I lose myself?” becomes the joy of discovering one’s self: a self that has been all along, but can now be fully embraced and integrated.

The word transformation also carries with it significance, as it is through the depth work that we experience profound, lasting shifts in our self-concept, our ways of relating to others, our beliefs and worldview. We come to see (interpret) our experiences differently, we release emotions that we have long held onto, and we start approaching relationship with ourselves from a place of love and compassion.

transformative change

Clients will voice fears of “what if I go back to how it was?”, but if we have done the depth work, it is truly impossible to return to the same place. Should we face similar themes and occurrences in the future, we will view and approach things differently because we are changed, transformed. The changes are sustained. 

There is a reason that butterflies are symbols of transformation: how funny it would be if a butterfly were to be afraid of being a caterpillar again. It’s not possible. What transformation does require is a process of disintegration–a descent into darkness. The counselling room then serves as a cocoon for this disintegration to occur. We also identify other areas outside the counselling room where such a cocoon can be experienced: physical places of safety and comfort, nurturing relationships.

As such, it is not uncommon for clients to experience a temporary withdrawal from the hustle and bustle of life while they engage in a transformative journey into the deep. This does not mean you stop functioning or engaging in the day-to-day, but rather, you come to adopt rest and retreat as part of your process during this time.

This work also requires a supportive container for it to take place. If we were spelunking, you wouldn’t do so without a rope, a harness, safety gear.  As your therapist, I’m not going to push you off the edge into the abyss and wish you luck. I’m going to descend with you, and we will make sure that the exploration is happening at a pace you can digest, within the supportive context of the therapeutic relationship (and room).  We will expand your capacity to endure experiences of emptiness and nothingness that may arise, help you metabolize emotions like guilt, shame, grief, fear, and help you integrate a new way of being-in-the-world.

In Conclusion

Here are some of the ways being depth-oriented can be felt and experienced in our work together:

• Dialogue: Asking questions that evoke different perspectives and require reflection, challenging established ways of thinking/believing that may be serving as blockages, and sharing my own felt experience of your presence and narrative. 
• Metaphor, myth, symbolism: It hasn’t been possible to describe depth with metaphor. Metaphor allows us to shift our perspective and enter into feeling beyond rationalizing and intellectualizing. 
• Body-focus: Focusing on embodiment by increasing your awareness of and present experience of your body’s sensations and feelings. Helping you learn the language of your physical sensations so you can understand what your body is communicating to you.
• Dream analysis: Exploring and interpreting the images and narratives of your dreams as a way of accessing and listening to your unconscious.
• Active imagination: Using imagination to create situations in which we can express emotion and have the restorative, nurturing experiences that we longed to have.
• Astrological counselling: Exploring your natal birth chart and identifying the archetypal dynamics that are felt and present so you can work with them more consciously.
• Ecotherapy: Exploring and nurturing your relationship with nature. Listening to the ways the non-human world–animals, plants, landscape, weather, seasons–teach and guide you through your psychological journey.

Depth-oriented psychotherapy is a restorative journey where through courage and curiosity, we come into relationship with ourselves in a radically new way. It is through this work that we discover the love for yourself that has lain, waiting for you, in that beautiful darkness:

The universe is primarily comprised of darkness. When we relearn to embrace the dark—tending a beautiful darkness—we restore our most sacred connections.

Jeanine M. Canty

References

• Canty (2016) Beautiful Darkness. In Shadows & Light: Theory, Research, and Practice in Transpersonal Psychology (Volume 2: Talks & Reflections)
• Macfarlane (2019) Underland: A Deep Time Journey
• Maté (2008) In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
• Nietzsche (1997) Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future
• Woodman (1985) The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation