Therapy as a Rite of Passage

And so long as you haven’t experienced this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.

—Goethe

When I took my first shame-filled walk to the campus therapist’s office on a crisp October day in 2010 after a series of traumas shattered my world, I had no idea what I was seeking. Nor what therapy was, for that matter. I just knew that something was wrong and according to my friend Riley who had just begun going himself, therapy was the thing to do about it. So when my efforts at simply hoping life would go back to normal kept failing, I mustered my courage to slink over to the counseling building.

Montana was like that, then. Men, at least in my social circles, didn’t talk about feelings unless heavy substance use was involved. If there was emotional struggle, it was hidden, or else enacted violently. Gossip abounded—I always knew who was “crazy,” who’d had a breakdown at last weekend’s party, who was fighting who, which friend was “whipped” by their girlfriend because of their public emotionality. I didn’t want that to be me, so the nuanced layers of grief, confusion, and doubt building up through the transition from high school to university lived in me as a stifled sense of “something wrong;” the happiness and exuberance that was, just last year, my baseline had been quietly replaced by a flat depression and gnawing anxiety.

Those first sessions were rough—my student intern counselor had her work cut out for her sitting across from my repressed 19-year-old self. I remember a lot of closed questions from her and a lot of short, empty answers from me. After each session ended, my counselor clicking the stop button on the tape recorder, I would get up and shuffle out of the office, sheepish and concerned with not being seen. I didn’t have a sense of anything happening in our sessions—what was the point of telling things I already knew to a stranger every week? Something was wrong, I couldn’t get back to happiness, and as far as I was aware, she was supposed to have answers.

What I didn’t realize then is that I was at my first real threshold. I didn’t yet know that there was no fixing nor going back, and that nothing short of letting go of who I had been would revive the aliveness I was missing. My therapist didn’t know either, because graduate school psychology and the medical model are oriented to fix, to understand, to “treat.” Mainstream models don’t know how to make room for mystery, for the actual rhythms of psyche, nor that real healing comes from surrender.

From those first sessions, I spent the better part of a decade fighting a losing battle against my psychospiritual dying, seeking answers from books, therapists, spiritual teachers, and medications that would help me get back to where I was, to the person I thought I was, with the ease and innocence I once enjoyed. It took that intensity of struggle to finally get me to the threshold of readiness for surrender and to finally feel and release the suffering I was carrying. It is that decade of struggle and everything that has come since, that now defines my life, art, and vocation.

Summer was like your house: you knew
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.

—Rilke

Something not taught in therapy school: How to collude with the death/rebirth processes of our clients. There’s no billable code for “psychological winter,” even though most of what I hear in “the words under the words” of my clients is some version of “can you help me to finally let go?”

Traditionally, these moments of ending, rupture, or stagnation have occasioned “rites of passage.” Taking many forms across cultures and continents, these rites typically include ceremonial actions spanning days, weeks, months or sometimes even years. Usually, the ceremonies are physically intense and spiritually demanding, involving direct confrontations with transpersonal forces, nature spirits, deities, and inner and outer distractions, requiring the participant to dig deep enough into themselves to activate the latent psychological powers of their adult Self. It is this “activation” or lack thereof that determines the success or failure of the ceremony.

This process has been practiced in many ways for thousands of years. In nature-based cultures, initiated adults know how to spot readiness in their youth and support them in ceremonially navigating psychological death and rebirth. As psychologist Bill Plotkin describes in Nature and the Human Soul, just as a caterpillar knows through some inner sense when to spin their cocoon and liquefy their body, when humans undergo enough development, the psyche naturally moves toward its next phase.

Often, this movement feels terrible—it is frequently characterized by the libido withdrawing from the personal narrative—like tree sap retreating into the center of the trunk in Autumn—and disappearing into the unconscious. The tree’s leaves, the adornments of our personality, wither and fall to the ground. Suddenly, our familiar catch phrases and talking points sound jarring and ugly to our ears. Seemingly out of nowhere, our clothes seem obnoxious and incongruent and our former passions and interests now appear infantile, empty, or absurd. Meaning feels far away in these moments, and it’s easy to see why “Major Depressive Disorder” is such a common diagnosis. Of course it is—everyone’s psyche needs to symbolically die repeatedly throughout the course of the lifetime, and as mental health professionals and humans conditioned in capitalism, we are often trained in trying very hard to not let that happen.

Prospective Immigrants Please Note

Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.
If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.
Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.

—Adrienne Rich

As Adrienne Rich says above in the excerpt from her poem “Prospective Immigrants Please Note,” at these pivotal junctures and doorways of human development, “things look at you doubly and you must look back and let them happen.” These “things” are the myths, “parts,” and expressions of the deeper psyche. As depth psychologists have long recognized, the unconscious is intentional, intelligent, and in Carl Jung’s words, “objective.” Like rivers and wind and earthquakes and volcanoes, the psyche moves according to its own laws. It has a unique directionality and timing, leading to what poets and mystics might consider purpose.

Rites of passage serve many functions—from social cohesion and community acknowledgement to deep psychological and cultural transformation. The bottom line of them, however, is really about surrendering from one life to another by opening ourselves to the Whole. At the turning of each developmental phase or major event, we are forced into a confrontation with the stories, beliefs, patterns, and energies carried in our bodies, manifesting as our sense of self. The mirrors of therapist, journal, land, synchronicity, dream, intimate relationship, or spiritual practice reveal the perfection of our predicament in their reflection, connecting us to deeper layers of truth. In the right ritual space, pretense falls away and we are left with contact, an intuitive knowing of where we are and what is being asked to be felt, expressed, and released.

In any given moment, if we turn toward ourselves with enough sincerity and curiosity, we will see that there is always something wanting to happen next. There is always a truth waiting to be spoken, a movement aching to be embodied, a stagnant grief wail seeking release, or a vital confidence finally burning its way through the dross of anxiety. In the wilderness rites of passage work I guide we are continually looking through this lens—where is the energy of this dream scene trying to go? How does the body communicate that? What would you have to feel if you stopped fighting?

These and other questions orient the participant or client to that unspeakable place, the closest word in English being “intuition.” Somehow, through opening to our inherent ways of knowing, we make contact with the still, small voice of truth that is often buried beneath the baggage of culture, trauma, and distraction. It is this voice, this capacity to meet reality, that the psychological death/rebirth process is designed to evoke.

The time will come
when you, too, have to drop
all the ways you’ve made yourself
worth loving,
and finally learn how
to sit quietly
right in the center
of your own small life.

Only there can you cry
the tears your life depends on.

—James Pearson

Like the psyche, rites of passage are not typically linear or predictable. For that reason, they don’t readily lend themselves to the medical model of mental health care. Sometimes they require us to shake and scream long held rage, or weep the uncontrollable tears waiting since childhood. Sometimes they seem to be taking us backward or in unexpected, unthinkable directions. Other times, they flood us with images, feelings, or knowings that we must finally confront. This can be a predicament in single hour long sessions in urban office spaces protected by only a sound machine. We can’t reframe our way to the next authentic iteration of adulthood nor can we treatment plan our way to initiation nor drug ourselves to joy. Even if those interventions are helpful at times, true psychological renewal comes from a deeper place.

This death and rebirth process is what our profession is ultimately built upon, going back to early psychodynamic principles and much further still. Our role as therapists is akin to the role held by the elders and medicine keepers and shamanic healers of earth-based cultures. As James Hillman has pointed out, each weekly session with our clients is its own ceremonial act, complete with severance from the outside world, resistance to the call (of transformation), struggle and surrender, and finally contact with reality in the willingness to see and allow what is true to have its way with us.

As far as I can tell, as practitioners, the key to allowing therapy to meet its highest calling of facilitating authentic transformation and healing is utilizing our own inner cultivation to discern, align with, and support the unfolding seasons of our client’s psyches. Often when people arrive for an intake session, their season is fall or winter. Something isn’t working; a rupture, death, depression, trauma, or revelation have dealt a mortal wound to their former life, plunging them into the renewal process.

We could consider the work of fall to be harvesting lessons from the previous chapter, grieving and expressing while turning toward stillness, and learning to let go. Winter may bring the invitation to meet the necessary intensities of loneliness, despair, emptiness, and hopelessness in the stark, leafless forest beneath cloudy skies. A rites of passage therapy does not pathologize these seasons or try to rush a client toward spring, but rather offers the tools, presence, and faith of staying with them loyally enough for these challenging states and emotions to do their transmutational work. If, together with our clients, we can attend with enough containment and sincerity, tender new growth will eventually begin poking up through the hard crust of the thawing soil.

Earth, isn’t this what you want? To arise in us, invisible?
Is it not your dream, to enter us so wholly
there’s nothing left outside us to see?
What, if not transformation
is your deepest purpose? Earth, my love,
I want it too. Believe me,
no more of your springtimes are needed
to win me over — even one flower is more than enough.
Before I was named
I belonged to you. I see no other law
but yours, and know I can trust
the death you will bring.

—Rilke

As a clinical counselor who initially got into the “healing” field through rites of passage work (first as a participant and eventually as a guide), I can’t avoid seeing my clients through the lens of this process I have come to trust so deeply. Hour by hour, I sit with some version of the same story: “My life is not working and I don’t know how to fix it.” The path to the intake session is radically different, yet the longing under the stories always feels intimately familiar.

These days, there is a collective urgency to the struggles of my clients. No longer does individualistic pathology (if it ever did) provide a satisfactory explanation for the myriad presenting symptoms affecting the people I see in my practice. Many of their complaints point to the failing systems we are inextricably part of—impossible money and basic needs struggles, existential angst at the visceral realities of climate breakdown, PTSD flaring up after decades as the media glorifies proven sex criminals, depression at recognizing the bankruptcy and hypocrisy of the western world’s founding mythos. It breaks my heart watching these good, courageous humans try to make sense of their struggles through the myths we’ve been enculturated into. From my perspective, there is no sensemaking left within those stories, because those stories are dead.

At an ever accelerating pace, our “leaders” are showing us how irrelevant we are to the world they are rushing us toward as they wage wars and construct a global AI surveillance state, controlled from climate-controlled bunkers while the rest of us scrape by, fighting for diminishing resources in the ecological wastelands corporate industry left us to inhabit. If, as practitioners, we try to address these realities through the lens of the individual alone (as we are usually trained to do) we are short circuiting the wisdom of the embodied psyche that knows something is deeply wrong here, and that there is wisdom and meaning in the presenting “pathologies.” A rites of passage therapy recognizes the evolutionary intelligence of the body and trusts the signals it gives, acknowledging that indeed “it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” But to truly hold this knowing for our clients, we must first discover it for ourselves.

I propose that we in our field are now tasked with reclaiming the role of threshold tenders, facing the stark realities of our collective circumstances and ourselves undergoing the rites of passage the circumstances require. We must let ourselves die to the false promises we’ve been sold, disidentifying from the basic premises of unending “progress” and individual achievement, allowing ourselves to remember our birth rite as ecological beings connected to every other life form on earth. We must reclaim for ourselves the mystery at the center of not only healing but life itself, recognizing that on our best days as practitioners, it is only our capacity to get out of the way and let something larger move through us that makes any real difference. Only then can we see our clients and their presenting concerns through the lens of wholeness and only then can we offer them the permission to let go of what can no longer be held, stewarding their discovery of the larger story of which we are all only just a small part.

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

—Wendell Berry