If I say that I understand you, know that it is through the lenses of my worldview, experience, and traumas. It’s the same for you. We don’t see things as they are, but as WE are. In time, I came to see that understanding is highly overrated, a sort of false empathy for both therapist and client.
If we could sit across from one another now, you full of heart and hope and the fierce desire to help —I would tell you something I learned the long, hard way:
Understanding is neither a connection nor a cure.
You will spend years believing it is.
You will trace every trauma like a map, illuminating every darkened corridor of the soul, searching for the door marked freedom.
You will think that if you and your clients can just understand enough, the pain will finally loosen its grip.
And yet, you will see it: the ones who know their wounds intimately, who can recite the story in perfect detail—and still ache.
Still grieve.
Still wonder why knowing it all isn’t enough to make it stop hurting.
Because understanding, for all its beauty, has limits.
It is a lantern, not a bridge.
It casts light, but it does not carry us across the vast canyon of human suffering.
And so we must learn a different art:
The art of abiding.
Abiding means staying present with what hurts, even when it cannot be explained away, without judgment. It means breathing with the mystery without demanding answers.
It means allowing sorrow to exist—not because we have solved it, but because we have made a sacred place for it to belong.
Abiding is not passive.
It is the fiercest kind of courage.
It is what creates meaning out of suffering — not by erasing it, not by justifying it —but by witnessing it, honoring it, and weaving it into the fabric of a life still worth living.
This is what you will learn, in time:
That healing is less about understanding what broke us and more about how tenderly we choose to carry and abide with what remains.
That meaning is born not from solving the riddle of pain but from refusing to turn away from it.
We do not have to have all the answers.
We only have to abide.
And that — astonishingly — will be enough.
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