My Story: Traversing the Underworld
In the mid-2010s, I had settled into my home after a significant move from Colorado Springs, where my husband and I had lived for about a decade. Life, on the surface, was moving along smoothly. My daughter was still small, and when I wasn’t working, my days were filled with crafts at the kitchen table, slow walks through nature, and the ongoing effort to coax her into something resembling a consistent sleep rhythm.
Professionally, I had spent years as a therapist supporting clients navigating the aftermath of trauma. I worked with people struggling to rebuild a sense of self, regulate overwhelming emotions, and manage complex interpersonal challenges. Many of my clients were survivors of abuse, neglect, or other deeply destabilizing life experiences. Over time—partly because of who was finding me, and partly because I accepted insurance—my practice began to shift. Increasingly, I worked with men in high-intensity professions: military personnel, firefighters, EMS workers, and police officers. By then, I had over fifteen years of experience as a “trauma-informed” therapist, guiding clients through a wide spectrum of difficult life experiences. I believed myself to be relatively skillful at accompanying people through darkness; able to hold what was hard without losing my footing.
Then, over the course of several years, I allowed someone into my orbit—someone who gradually gained my trust. Beneath what appeared trustworthy, something else was taking shape, something I could not yet see: a desire for control, for domination—nothing short of soul annihilation. When the mask finally slipped, and I became conscious of what was happening, I disentangled as quickly and safely as I could. But by then, the damage had already been done. Something in my psyche had been irrevocably altered. The collapse was not sudden or spectacular, but total. My sense of reality wavered; the trust I had always placed in myself and others shattered in ways I could not easily repair. The part of me that had once moved confidently through darkness with others now found itself lost in a shadow of uncertainty and fear. Everything I had built—my professional identity, my routines, my sense of home—felt like it was slipping away. I was destabilized at my core, confronting the painful truth that even someone trained to navigate trauma could be profoundly undone. For a long time, I did not know how to put the pieces back together.
I instinctively tried to understand my unraveling through the lens I knew best: the medical model of post-traumatic stress disorder. I searched for patterns - but my experience refused to fit neatly into any framework. I tried everything I had been teaching my clients for years: breathing exercises, somatic and emotional regulation, exploring the roots of trauma in my childhood (there was plenty to uncover), trauma reprocessing, medication, mindfulness. I forced myself to stay tethered to the outer world, to prevent everything from collapsing inward as my life fell apart. All of it—these “research-based tools” championed by modern psychology—seemed to work for everyone else, but for me, nothing helped. I couldn’t get over it.
By this point, I had been studying Jungian psychology for several years. I regularly attended a Dream Group and saw a kind, insightful Jungian analyst. Although I still couldn’t find solid ground, it helped me move toward letting myself stop trying to fix it. I began to allow myself to embrace the story, to understand that this was not something I was meant to “solve”—that I began to see shafts of light. Immersing myself in myths, fairy tales, and accounts of initiation and descent into the underworld, I began to sense that the descent into my own underworld was not a failure—it was an initiation. Each moment of disorientation, every pang of grief and fear, became a guidepost rather than a setback. I began to recognize familiar patterns: the heroine who ventures into the dark alone, the trials that break the old self so the new can emerge, the shadow figures that reveal hidden truths. These narratives did not offer solutions; they offered maps. They showed me that suffering could lead to transformation rather than annihilation.
It was through these narratives that I discovered the Mundus Imaginalis—the imaginal realm described by Neoplatonists, a space between the sensory world and the purely intellectual, where images and symbols are alive and operative. In this intermediary world, my grief, fear, and disorientation could take shape and be witnessed without being destroyed. Here, the darkness of my descent was not chaos to be fixed but a living process, a liminal terrain in which my psyche could be transformed. By attending to this imaginal space, I began to perceive my own suffering as part of a larger, ordered cosmos—one in which even the descent into darkness carries meaning and opens the path to emergence.
I started to reclaim myself not by doing more, but by allowing: my own experience, the changes in my psyche, and the slow, almost imperceptible return of trust in my own perceptions. I began to reweave the threads of my life, integrating what I had lost with what I was discovering. Over time, the fear and disorientation softened. My connection to my family, my work, and the natural rhythms of life returned with a new depth and clarity. The underworld had not destroyed me; it had reconfigured me. I emerged with a clearer sense of the limits of control, the necessity of boundaries, and the power of story to illuminate paths when logic and technique fall short.
From that place of integration, my work and life began to expand in unexpected ways. I was no longer just a therapist walking beside others—I had become someone who had truly traversed darkness, who could hold it, witness it, and honor the resilience that rises from it. What once felt like ruin became a crucible for understanding, compassion, and profound transformation. From this place, I made a conscious vow: to bring into my work the practices and perspectives that had genuinely sustained me—the attention to story, the guidance of the imaginal, the courage to meet darkness with curiosity and presence—rather than relying solely on a framework that could not hold the fullness of human suffering. My aim became to help others navigate their own underworlds, not by forcing solutions, but by illuminating the paths that transformation, meaning, and resilience can take. I wanted my work to honor the complexity of life’s trials, to hold the space where suffering is seen and met, and to offer the maps that the medical model alone could not provide.
