Trusting the Process, Waiting in the Unknown

Caring for the Soul in Counselling:
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​Trusting the Process, Waiting in the Unknown

“Loss of mystery is the greatest poverty of our society.”
​– John O’Donohue

It is our nature, as humans, to make sense of the world around us based on the information and stimuli we receive. From this, we draw conclusions, solidify knowledge, make meaning. The scientific worldview, with which the medical model of psychology aligns is based on this—it is essentially a complex system of discovery and measurement designed to produce evidence, based on our innate desire to know.
 
As individuals, our drive to know is shuttered by our own experience of things—our memories, senses, ideas, thoughts, intellects, traumas, feelings—and we take these things to indicate the true nature of the external world. We are, perhaps, too quick to take this as evidence of the nature of ultimate reality. “It is with an enviable and amazing simplicity she attributes her own sensations to the unknown universe” (Underhill, 1911, p. 6).
 
Because of all of this, sitting and waiting in a place of not knowing can be challenging—excruciating for some. Many of the internal mechanisms we have spent our life developing are in defense of this—the fear of the unknown.

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