Not Every Experience Needs Resolving
When life throws yet another curveball, our options boil down to this:
What can I influence or shift — and what do I need to face as it is?
Counselling, too. It’s not all insight and action. Sometimes it’s sitting with what won’t change, and learning how to live with it differently.
I didn’t learn that only from books. I learned it by getting my responses wrong, by fighting what couldn’t be moved, or by missing what might’ve actually worked — if I’d paused long enough to see it.
Not every experience needs to be resolved. Some things demand presence, not progress.
My interest in psychology began in 2003, in the quiet wreckage after a relationship ended. I wasn’t looking to study people. I was trying to stay afloat. Grief rearranged my attention. I had lost not just a partner, but a sense of who I was in the world. Somewhere in that unraveling, I came across Care of the Soul by Thomas Moore. One insight landed with force: psycho and therapeia – the ancient Greek roots of our modern word psychotherapy – don’t speak of curing the ego, they move the focus toward care for the soul.
That stuck.
It allowed something to loosen. I stopped trying to fix myself, and started learning how to listen. Not just to others — to my own contradictions, confusions, and quieter longings. That act of listening, as simple as it sounds, became a thread I’ve followed ever since.
It led me into the symbolic terrain of archetypal psychology — where dreams, roles, patterns, and images speak louder than analysis. Later came the existential voices: Irvin Yalom, Rollo May, Viktor Frankl. They didn’t offer solutions. They asked better questions. Questions that made room for paradox, and for pain.
And then came the stories. Not the neat ones. The living ones — full of repetition, rupture, and rawness.
Narrative, Not Diagnosis
People don’t suffer because they’re broken. People suffer because the stories they tell themselves of who they are — most often whispered from outside — no longer fit them. It was never their authentic story to begin with. As we mature in life, we needed those stories to get us going. And there comes a time we have to outgrow them. Find our own story, one that fits better. Not perfect — better.
I, too, have been — and regularly find myself — stuck in stories of my own making that make me trip and tumble.
What helped me wasn’t analysis. It was learning to track the patterns of my own storytelling — especially the ones I didn’t want to admit to. Patterns I’d rationalised, spiritualised, or moralised — when really, I was just repeating an old story.
Archetypes and Patterns We Live By
That’s where archetypes became useful. Not as symbols. As mirrors.
The rebel who needs conflict to feel alive.
The rescuer who feels safest when needed.
The outsider who builds a life out of being uninvited.
The king who offers everything except his real self.
Once I could name them, I had a chance to stop performing them. Not all at once. But enough to get some air.
Experience That Changes You
Alongside all of this, I’ve learned from experience — not just mine, but hundreds of others. I’ve sat in groups of men and women in the forests of South Africa and the mountains of Switzerland. I’ve seen what happens when people tell the truth and stay in the room. Not to fix. Not to perform. Just to be real, and to be witnessed.
Those early experiences taught me that change doesn’t just happen in the mind. It happens in the body. In relationships. In nervous systems that learn to stop bracing for impact. In stories that stop being secrets.
This is where the therapeutic theories meet lived reality:
The moment a man stops pretending and says what’s really going on.
The moment a woman stops apologising for her anger.
The moment a couple finally names the loop they’re stuck in, without blaming each other.
The moment someone speaks grief without being rushed toward hope.
“The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self: the ultimate touchstone is witness — the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another.”
— David Whyte, Consolations
Those are turning points. And they don’t come from cleverness. They come from presence, and from being met where you are.
This Is Story Catching
I call what I do story catching.
We slow down enough to hear what’s actually being said — and what isn’t. We look at the stories that shaped you: the ones that were never questioned, the ones that kept you safe, the ones you might be ready to rewrite.
This isn’t a fix. It’s not about becoming your “best self.”
It’s about being more fully yourself — in a way that feels real, honest, lived, and unforced.
