Seasons of Not Knowing: How Therapy Helps Us Return To Ourselves

There are seasons in life when the ground beneath you feels uncertain. You wake and realize that the things which once brought joy now feel flat, or you wonder if they ever truly enlivened you. You begin to resent the career you pursued with dedication, or the familiar work begins to feel foreign. In these moments questions rise: What do I actually want? Who am I beyond my roles and routines?

This experience is more common than it seems. Psychologist Erik Erikson described such periods as identity crises. They do not belong only to adolescence. They can return in early adulthood, at midlife, or in later years when circumstances shift. When the internal structures that have carried us no longer fit, the roles, beliefs, and defenses we once relied on begin to feel too small. What once held us steady now invites a deeper search for who we are becoming. Psychologists call this identity diffusion, a state in which we no longer feel anchored to values, goals, or desire.

The Psychological View

In a culture that prizes certainty, feeling lost is often mistaken for failure. Yet loss of direction can be a threshold. Carl Rogers observed, “The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination.” What appears from the outside as collapse may in fact be an opening to growth.

James Hollis, a Jungian analyst, describes midlife as “the summons of the soul.” The strategies and roles that once sustained us cease to be enough. In therapy, this summons is explored through reflection, dialogue, and careful attention to what has long been neglected. It is through the act of dialogue that move toward openness and the willingness to be touched and changed by another. People begin to realize that what feels like failure is rarely an absence of desire. More often, the signal of desire has been muffled by expectation, habit, or fear.

Existential analyst Alfried Längle offers another way of seeing these thresholds. He teaches that human life rests on four fundamental motivations: the right to belong, the capacity to savor life, the right to be oneself, and the call to live for something that matters. When any of these foundations becomes unstable, life feels diminished. Therapy can help us recognize which of these existential grounds is asking for attention.

Philosophers across centuries have insisted that self-discovery is essential to a meaningful life. Aristotle taught, “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” Yet this knowing does not come in a neat package. Self-knowledge rarely arrives with clarity. Looking within carries the risk of discomfort, perhaps even shame, but it also brings us face to face with our hidden reserves of courage and joy.

Beyond the Self

Self-discovery does not belong to the individual alone. Spiritual and transpersonal traditions remind us that the self is both a single drop and inseparable from the ocean.

Carl Jung gave this image psychological grounding with his theory of the collective unconscious, describing it as “a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals.”

These perspectives remind us that even when we feel directionless, we remain connected to something larger. Our search for self is also the cosmos searching through us. This matters because it grounds our uncertainty in a universal human experience. The not-knowing itself becomes part of what we share with one another.

In practice, this often shows up in therapy in small but striking ways:

•           Through nature. A patient sitting in the fog of burnout notices that their emptiness lightens while walking in the woods, a nature bath of sorts. The feeling of being “just one more tree in the forest” softens their fear of being lost, reminding them that they are part of a wider rhythm beyond productivity.
* Connection to nature reminds us we belong even when we feel adrift.

•           Through ancestry. Someone working through grief finds comfort when recalling the food, songs, or rituals their grandmother once passed down. What felt like personal despair begins to feel like part of a longer lineage of endurance.
* Remembering where we come from shows us we are part of a story still unfolding.

•           Through community. A woman feeling lonely in a new city begins attending a local meditation group. At first, there is awkwardness, but the presence of others breathing beside her demonstrates that navigating the unknown does not need to be done alone.
* Community offers belonging when the self feels uncertain.

Dreams, symbols, and archetypes also connect us with a shared language that spans cultures and time. These imaginal doorways carry us into something both deeply personal and widely shared. In such moments, people often sense that their struggle is not only theirs to bear. It is a human story being lived through them.

Remembering and Reconnecting

Self-discovery is not the invention of a new identity. It is an act of remembering. Beneath the noise of roles and defenses, there is a current that has always carried us. Therapy becomes a place where this remembering unfolds, where the unconscious waters carry us to the banks of the self.

A patient might begin by saying, “I do not know what I want anymore.” Over time, fragments surface. One recalls the smell of turpentine from a college studio and realizes she has not painted in decades but there is a longing to do so. Another notices that his chest tightens whenever he speaks about work but softens when he imagines being outdoors. These are not ready-made answers but signals of what has been buried yet not lost.

Sometimes discovery arrives in the form of refusal. A person who has lived by pleasing others recognizes that the job or relationship they inhabit no longer fits. Therapy helps them bear the weight of saying no. In the courage of that refusal, a more authentic self begins to breathe. In Längle’s terms, this is the stirring of the third fundamental motivation. It is the right to be oneself, to live with dignity in one’s own skin rather than through borrowed roles or expectations.

At other times the body itself becomes the guide. Trauma-informed approaches encourage people to notice how the body responds to possibility: constriction, warmth, ease, dread. The body often knows before the mind admits it (van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, 2014). Internal Family Systems adds another dimension, inviting dialogue with the many inner voices. Someone might recognize the anxious protector who tries to control every detail, the exiled part that carries pain, or the performer who seeks endless approval. What emerges is not a polished identity but a compassionate relationship with the whole inner system (Schwartz, Internal Family Systems Therapy, 1995).

The Role of Therapy

What binds all these threads, identity, community, ancestry, embodiment, and belonging, is the therapeutic space itself. Therapy offers more than insight; it offers relationship. In the presence of a trusted other, the shame of feeling lost softens, and the anxiety of not knowing has room to breathe. What once seemed like personal failure is reframed as part of the human journey.

The therapeutic relationship becomes the vessel that can hold both fragments and refusals, hidden desires and unspoken fears. The steady attention of the therapist provides a container where what has long been denied can surface with less fear and more curiosiy. Therapy becomes not only a place of exploration but also of belonging. It is also where the fourth fundamental existential motivation comes into focus, the search for meaning, or the sense that one’s life is oriented toward something that matters beyond the self. When therapy helps someone uncover not only who they are but what they live for, uncertainty is transformed into a path toward purpose.

Guided Meditation: A Somatic Inquiry into Self

Close your eyes or soften your gaze.
Take a slow breath in, and let it out slowly.

Notice your body resting on the ground.
Feel where you are supported.

Ask gently:
What feels tight?
What feels soft?
What wants my attention right now?

Breathe into that place.
Allow it to soften, or simply just notice it.

Sense the current, the vibration beneath it all,
the energy that has always carried you.

Remember you are not only yourself.
You are the breath of nature,
the memory of those who came before,
the presence of others beside you.

You are the drop.
You are the ocean.

When you are ready, open your eyes.
Carry with you the knowing that you are held

In your search for self.