What Your Symptoms Are Trying to Tell You

Symptoms as communication

James Hillman spent his career arguing that the symptom is where the soul expresses what the daylight self has refused to know. This is not a mystical claim. It is a practical one.

The insomnia that begins when you accept a job you know is wrong for you. The back pain that worsens in the months before a relationship ends. The anxiety attacks that arrive at the threshold of a new life rather than in the midst of the old one. The body is commenting on what the mind has decided not to examine.

To ask what the symptom is saying is not to deny its reality. It is to take it seriously enough to treat it as a communication rather than a malfunction.

The difference between management and understanding

Modern psychological treatment is largely organized around symptom reduction. This makes sense as a first response to suffering. But it can become a ceiling.

The person who learns to manage their anxiety through breathing exercises and cognitive reframing has gained something real. What they have not necessarily gained is an understanding of what their anxiety is organized around — what it was trying to protect, what it would mean to no longer need that protection.

Depth-oriented therapy holds both. We work with the symptom directly — we do not ignore the suffering. But we also hold it with curiosity: What does this symptom make possible? What does it prevent? What would need to be true for it no longer to be necessary?

Listening with the body

Much of what symptoms are communicating is held in the body rather than in thought. The tightness in the chest when someone mentions a certain name. The heaviness that descends on Sunday evenings. The catch in the breath that precedes a particular kind of conversation.

Relational Gestalt therapy works directly with these somatic signals — not as metaphors but as present-moment information. What is happening right now, in this body, in this room? The answer to that question often opens something that years of narrative therapy have not been able to reach.

This is not because the body is wiser than the mind. It is because the body has not yet learned to lie.