Your life isn't a true crime mystery.

You cannot dredge the depths of the soul with the meager light of self-analysis.

The inner world never reveals itself cheaply.

~John O'Donohue

"I've got to get to the bottom of why I hurt so much," she said. She'd started soul care with me because she'd not been able to locate the source of her pain with previous therapists.

"Another therapist told me that it's probably long-forgotten abuse," she continued. And I slowly sank into my chair, wondering to myself is this really what we do in my work?

She'd previously told me about some of her interests, including True Crime podcasts. I said to her:

Your life isn't a true crime mystery. Your story can't be reduced to a whodunit. Your heart is too precious to subject it to the harsh light of interrogation.

The late poet and priest John O'Donohue wrote that we're actually cruel and inhospitable to our tender souls when we put them under the bright, operating room lights of analysis. This he calls a modern "neon consciousness" that dishonors the soul's depths, including the dark crevices we can't always see.

Today, even as we go searching for some clear source of our pain, even someone to blame, as I did in my own therapeutic work for so many years, we're learning that our suffering is far more illusive. Even science is reminding us, as epigenetic studies reveal that the chemical markers of your ancestors pain can arrive at your doorstep years later, transmitted multi-generationally, the waves of their trauma visiting you from a distant shore.

Mary Oliver once wrote:

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness

It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.

It's taken me decades of my own work to recognize that some things will be revealed only when the soul is ready. And, indeed, some things will remain a mystery.

But here, as we relinquish the need to figure it out and fix it, we might just meet the God who knows suffering, who bears real wounds, who meets us not under the bright lights but in the dark places, offering us not the control we want but the connection we long for.