Bringing the Light to All, Answering Life's Questions

My aim these days is to help people work through the questions life throws at them, and to consult with those going through big changes. I want you here with me for that. But I didn't begin in this place. For a long stretch I was lost, the way plenty of you have been, or maybe still are right now.

You could call what I've picked up wisdom. Some people assume a person only arrives at this kind of knowledge after going through something that cracked them open, usually painful. There may be truth in that. The pain probably did push me toward different kinds of self-help, and eventually toward the spiritual edge of psychology, toward mindfulness, toward Carl Jung, and other paths besides.

The whole thing began with questions I couldn't answer about my purpose, about the universe, about where any of it was heading. What I found along the way is what I'd like to pass along. My hope is that you recognize some of your own questions in mine, and maybe notice that you reached the same conclusions I did. That recognition matters, because it tells you something simple: you are not the only one.

The answers didn't settle easily at first. A few of them unsettled me more than the certainties I'd grown up believing. It was hard to accept, since I kept thinking so many people couldn't possibly have it wrong.

Years later I ran into another problem. Some of the answers that once worked for me stopped working. I used to believe that the major decisions, who you marry, what career you chase, whether you have children, got locked in once you made them. I also assumed only certain answers were allowed, and that the things I actually enjoyed weren't the things I was supposed to do.

Often I chose the easiest route rather than the right one. Take graduate school. I went to a Big Ten program near home because it offered clinical psychology, the field I cared about. What escaped me at the time was that I'd need to find a professor whose research lined up with something I could live with, since a master's thesis and possibly a dissertation would grow out of that work.

The hands-on clinical courses were taught by those same professors, and research, not practice, was where their hearts were. Some of what they studied was even built to tear down the people who actually conducted psychological evaluations and ran psychotherapy.

In the end, the answers weren't scattered out in the world waiting to be collected. They sat inside. And I wasn't walking that road by myself. Plenty of others hungered for the same answers I did. Jung had already made the trip and left markers for the rest of us to follow.

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