When the Veil Grows Thin
October has always fascinated me. Not because I particularly enjoy someone in a rubber mask jumping out of the bushes wielding a chainsaw that has, thankfully, been relieved of its chain. There are enough unexpected noises in everyday life without volunteering for additional ones. What draws me to this season is something quieter, older, and perhaps a little more mysterious. Perhaps that is also why October feels like such fertile ground for thinking about therapy and self-discovery, because this is the season when we become a little more willing to look toward what usually remains in the shadows.
Every autumn, we tell ourselves that the veil grows thin. Whether you understand that as folklore, symbolism, spirituality, or simply a beautiful story humans have passed from one generation to the next, something curious seems to happen. We become a little more willing to look toward the things we spend the rest of the year trying not to see. Skeletons appear on front porches beside pots of cheerful chrysanthemums. Witches are welcomed into our homes instead of feared. Ghost stories climb onto our nightstands. Ancient forests, forgotten ruins, haunted houses, wandering spirits, and creatures with glowing eyes suddenly feel less like things to avoid and more like old companions arriving for their annual visit.
For one brief season, we loosen our grip on the idea that life should always be tidy, cheerful, and brightly lit. We make room for mystery, allow uncertainty to linger a little longer, and even welcome the monsters in.
Why We Keep Returning to the Dark
I’ve often wondered if that’s because, somewhere beneath the costumes and carved pumpkins, we recognize something profoundly human. Long before horror films and Halloween decorations, people gathered around fires to tell stories about caves, labyrinths, underworlds, dragons, ghosts, enchanted forests, and creatures that lived just beyond the edge of the light. These stories appeared in cultures separated by oceans and centuries, yet somehow they kept returning to the same questions. What keeps us trapped? Why do we lose ourselves? What must we face before we can find our way home?
Perhaps those stories were never really about monsters at all. Perhaps they were always about us.
What the Monsters Were Trying to Tell Us
After all, most of us have wandered through landscapes that feel haunted. We have all inherited stories about who we should be, what makes us worthy, and how much of ourselves is safe to reveal. Some of those stories become trusted companions. Others become cages so familiar that we stop noticing the bars. We mistake survival for identity, adaptation for personality, and fear for truth. Before long, we are living inside stories we never consciously chose, convinced they are simply the way the world works.
That is one of the reasons I find myself returning to old myths and folklore again and again. They have an uncanny way of holding up a mirror without ever pointing a finger. Instead of telling us what to think, they invite us to recognize ourselves in caves and forests, in heroes and monsters, in lanterns and shadows. Somehow, through stories that seem impossibly distant, they illuminate experiences that feel remarkably close.
Maybe that is why they have survived for thousands of years. Not because they explain the world, but because they help us understand ourselves.
The Stories We Inherit Before We Know They Are Stories
One of my favorite stories begins in a cave. Not the sort of cave where an adventurous archaeologist discovers a forgotten civilization or where someone in a horror film inevitably announces, “Let’s split up,” moments before making the worst decision of their life. Plato imagined something much quieter and, in many ways, much more unsettling. Inside his cave, people had lived their entire lives in chains, facing a stone wall. Behind them burned a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners, others carried objects that cast shadows across the wall before them. Having never seen anything else, the prisoners believed the shadows were reality itself. They gave them names, built certainty around them, argued about them, and organized their understanding of the world around those flickering silhouettes. How could they have done otherwise? The shadows were all they had ever known.
Then one prisoner was set free, and although Hollywood has trained us to expect triumphant music right about now, Plato tells a different story. Freedom wasn’t exhilarating at first. It was disorienting. The light hurt. Everything the prisoner believed to be true suddenly became uncertain. The journey upward required letting go of a reality that had once felt unquestionable. It wasn’t simply a matter of seeing something new. It meant grieving the world he thought he understood. The shadows had not only shaped his beliefs; they had shaped his identity.
When the Shadows Become Identity
I’ve always suspected Plato wasn’t really writing about caves. He was writing about the human experience. None of us arrive in this world as blank slates. Long before we know our favorite color, discover what makes us come alive, or begin asking who we want to become, stories begin collecting around us. Some are spoken aloud. Others arrive through raised eyebrows, exhausted sighs, family traditions, school hallways, workplace expectations, cultural messages, and the subtle rewards that teach us who it is safe to become.
Be helpful. Don’t be too emotional. Stay small. Work harder. Don’t make mistakes. Don’t disappoint people. Be grateful. Be easy to love.
Some of those messages are offered with the very best intentions. Some emerge from generations of people doing the best they could with what they had. Others are born from fear, scarcity, trauma, or systems that quietly benefit when we remain disconnected from ourselves. Whatever their origin, we absorb them long before we develop the ability to ask what may be one of the most important questions of our lives: Who told me this was true?
That question has extraordinary power because it gently separates the story from the storyteller. It doesn’t require us to blame our families, reject our communities, or wage war against the people who came before us. Instead, it invites curiosity. It reminds us that inherited stories are just that: inherited. Some deserve to be treasured. Others deserve to be thanked for carrying us this far before being lovingly set down.
When the Story Starts Sounding Like Truth
This is one of the quiet heartbreaks therapists witness every day. A person sits down and begins describing who they are, while the therapist quietly recognizes that they may actually be describing the shadows on the wall. The stories often sound painfully familiar: “I’m too much.” “Maybe I’m just lazy.” “Something in me is broken.” “I’m impossible to love.” “My value depends on being useful.” They don’t sound like stories because they have been repeated for so many years that they have become almost indistinguishable from truth. The voice has been rehearsed for so long that it no longer feels borrowed. It simply feels like reality.
Therapy rarely begins by handing someone a brand-new story. More often, it begins by wondering together whether the story they’ve been living inside was ever theirs to begin with. That is both the gift and the grief of leaving the cave, because once you catch even the smallest glimpse of sunlight, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep calling the shadows reality.
The Descent Before the Ascent
Leaving the cave sounds like the difficult part until you discover that seeing the truth does not automatically teach you how to live inside it. A person may recognize that the shadows on the wall were never the whole story and still feel their body tighten when they disappoint someone. They may understand that rest is not laziness and continue treating exhaustion as evidence that they have finally earned the right to stop. They may know, intellectually, that they are worthy of love and still find themselves shape-shifting in every relationship, trying to become whatever version of themselves seems least likely to be abandoned. Awareness can open the door, but it does not always carry us through it.
This is where Dante offers a very different map of transformation. While Plato imagines a prisoner turning away from the shadows and climbing toward the light, Dante begins his journey in a dark forest after realizing he has lost his way. He does not find a convenient staircase leading directly to wisdom, wholeness, and an attractively organized life. Instead, he must descend. Before he can reach the stars, he must travel through the underworld and witness what human beings become when fear, appetite, anger, shame, violence, and betrayal begin organizing their lives.
When the Pattern Becomes the Prison
It is tempting to read Dante’s circles of Hell as a catalogue of punishments, especially since medieval literature was not particularly known for its gentle approach to consequences. Yet the circles can also be understood as landscapes of entrapment. Each soul is caught inside a pattern that has consumed their ability to live freely. Desire becomes a storm that never settles. Anger becomes a swamp. Greed becomes an endless burden carried without purpose or arrival. The punishment mirrors the pattern because the pattern has become the prison.
Modern suffering rarely arrives with a ferryman, a flaming tomb, or a conveniently labeled circle announcing exactly what has gone wrong. More often, it looks remarkably ordinary. It appears in the person who cannot stop working because stillness allows grief to catch up, in the relationship where someone keeps abandoning their own needs before anyone else has the opportunity to reject them, and in patterns like perfectionism, control, compulsive productivity, emotional withdrawal, self-criticism, and the quiet belief that safety depends on never becoming inconvenient. Our private underworlds are rarely theatrical. Most of them have excellent lighting, functioning Wi-Fi, and a calendar full of responsibilities.
When Survival Strategies Outlive the Danger
The trouble is that many of these patterns once helped us survive. Perfectionism may have protected us from criticism. People-pleasing may have preserved connection in a home where love felt unpredictable. Hypervigilance may have helped us notice danger before anyone else did. Emotional numbness may have allowed us to keep functioning when feeling everything would have been unbearable. These strategies did not appear because something was fundamentally wrong with us. They developed because some part of us was trying, often brilliantly, to keep us safe with the resources available at the time.
Eventually, however, a protective strategy can become its own kind of circle. The very thing that once carried us through suffering may begin organizing our entire life around avoiding it. We keep moving long after the danger has passed, apologizing when no harm has been done and shrinking in rooms where no one has asked us to disappear. The old protection remains at its post, faithfully guarding a doorway that no longer leads to the same world.
When Insight Isn’t the Same as Freedom
This is why recognizing the shadow is not always enough. We may understand where a belief came from and still feel its pull. We may know why a coping strategy developed and still find ourselves repeating it when our nervous system senses even the faintest echo of the past. Insight matters, but healing asks more of us than explanation. It asks us to turn toward the places we have spent years organizing our lives around avoiding.
Healing Does Not Require Glorifying the Wound
That does not mean suffering is noble, necessary, or secretly good for us. There is nothing inherently transformative about being hurt. Pain does not become meaningful simply because we endured it, and no one needs to be grateful for the wounds that shaped them. The transformation comes from what becomes possible when those wounds are finally witnessed, understood, and tended to rather than hidden beneath another layer of productivity, positivity, or highly curated indifference.
Why We Still Have to Descend
Plato tells us that we must turn toward the light. Dante reminds us that there are times when the path toward that light first leads downward, into grief that was never mourned, anger that was never permitted, fear that had been speaking for so long it began to sound like intuition, and younger versions of ourselves who learned to survive by becoming invisible. We descend not to remain there, punish ourselves, or prove that we can endure more pain. We descend because what has been exiled does not disappear. It waits in the dark, often shaping our lives from places we have been afraid to visit.
Perhaps this is one of the central paradoxes of healing. We cannot free ourselves from what we refuse to see, yet we were never meant to face every hidden chamber alone. The descent may belong to the person taking the journey, but that does not mean they must enter the underworld without companionship, without witness, or without light. This is where therapy enters the story, not as a rescue mission or a heroic battle against everything difficult within us, but as the arrival of another human being carrying a lantern.
The Lantern Between Us
Carl Jung once wrote, “No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.” It is one of those beautifully inconvenient truths that refuses to fit on a motivational poster. Most of us would much rather believe healing is a straight path paved with insight, positive affirmations, and perhaps one particularly life-changing therapy session before lunch on Tuesday. Instead, growth tends to resemble the slow work of roots, moving quietly beneath the surface and disappearing underground for long stretches while asking us to trust that something meaningful is happening long before we can see the first green shoots emerge.
What the Lantern Actually Offers
This is where therapy quietly departs from the stories we often tell ourselves about healing. Many people arrive believing the goal is to get rid of the anxiety, silence the inner critic, banish the shame, or finally defeat whatever monster has been following them through life. We speak about our struggles as though they are dragons waiting to be slain or enemies occupying territory that rightfully belongs to us. It is an understandable hope. After all, who wouldn’t prefer a dramatic final battle over years of patient tending?
Yet therapy rarely unfolds like an action film.
More often, it resembles two people walking through unfamiliar woods after sunset. One of them knows the landscape intimately because they have lived there for years, even if they have never found words for it. The other brings a lantern. Neither can rush the journey. Neither can skip over the difficult terrain. Together they move carefully enough to notice what could not be seen in the dark.
The lantern is not knowledge alone. It is curiosity when shame insists on certainty, compassion when self-criticism demands punishment, and presence when old survival strategies urge someone to run, freeze, please, or disappear. Sometimes the greatest gift a therapist offers is not an answer but the steady reminder that another human being can remain with you while you encounter parts of yourself you have spent a lifetime avoiding.
When the Monster Changes Shape
This is one of the quiet miracles that happens in therapy. The monsters begin to change the closer we are willing to look at them. The perfectionism that once seemed relentless reveals itself as a frightened protector convinced mistakes are dangerous. The anger that felt destructive begins pointing toward grief that never had permission to exist. The relentless drive to keep everyone else comfortable slowly uncovers a younger self who learned that belonging depended on becoming whoever other people needed them to be. The closer the lantern comes, the less these monsters resemble villains and the more they resemble adaptations that have simply outlived the circumstances that created them.
When Understanding Reaches the Body
That does not make the suffering any less real. Fear still feels like fear. Shame still has an uncanny ability to convince us it is telling the truth. Old nervous system patterns do not dissolve because we finally understand where they came from. Insight is important, but insight alone rarely rewrites years of lived experience. Healing happens as the body slowly learns what the mind has begun to understand. It unfolds each time we remain present with an emotion we once avoided, set a boundary we once believed impossible, rest without earning it, or choose authenticity over the exhausting work of performing a version of ourselves designed to keep everyone else comfortable.
Illuminating What We Once Feared
This is why therapy is not about slaying monsters. It is about illuminating them. It is about discovering that what once looked terrifying from across the room often changes shape when approached with curiosity instead of combat. Some monsters dissolve into grief. Others soften into loneliness. Many reveal themselves to be younger parts of ourselves who have been standing guard for years, faithfully protecting us with strategies that no longer fit the life we are living today.
Perhaps that is why the image of the lantern has endured in stories across cultures and centuries. A lantern does not erase the darkness, nor does it pretend the path is without danger. It simply offers enough light to take the next step. Then the next. And eventually, without quite realizing when it happened, the person who once depended entirely on someone else’s lantern begins carrying one of their own.
Remember. Reclaim. Rewild.
Perhaps that is why stories like Plato’s cave and Dante’s Inferno have survived for thousands of years while countless others have faded into history. They were never simply trying to explain philosophy, religion, or the afterlife. They were offering maps for what it means to be human. Every generation discovers its own caves, wanders through forests it never expected to enter, and builds monsters from fear, shame, certainty, and survival. The scenery changes. Human beings remain wonderfully, frustratingly familiar.
The beautiful thing about maps, however, is that they are not the territory. A map can tell you where others have traveled, but it cannot decide where your story ends. Plato’s prisoner was never meant to remain in the cave. Dante was never meant to build a home in the underworld. Their journeys mattered because they kept moving. The cave was a beginning. The descent was a passage. Neither was the destination.
The Way Back to Yourself
I think therapy asks something remarkably similar of us. It gently wonders what would happen if we stopped measuring ourselves by the shadows on the wall or by the circles we seem destined to walk over and over again. What if the stories we inherited were not the only stories available to us? Could the adaptations that once kept us alive loosen their grip on the rest of our lives? And might the parts of ourselves we buried in order to belong have been waiting all along for us to find the path back?
In many ways, that is the work of remembering. Not remembering every detail of our past, but remembering who we were before fear convinced us we had to earn our worth, shrink our joy, silence our voice, or trade authenticity for acceptance. Beneath the layers of expectation, performance, and protection, there has always been a self quietly waiting. Therapy is often less about creating someone new than about clearing away what has obscured the person who has been there all along.
When Healing Becomes Rewilding
As we begin remembering, we also begin reclaiming. We reclaim our stories from shame and our bodies from the constant expectation of danger, while curiosity begins to loosen itself from certainty. Boundaries can separate from guilt, grief can emerge from silence, and hope can return from the parts of us that quietly concluded it was safer not to expect too much from life. Reclaiming is rarely loud or dramatic. More often, it happens in ordinary moments that almost go unnoticed: saying no without apologizing, resting before exhaustion demands it, asking for help, laughing without checking who might be watching, or allowing ourselves to be fully seen by someone who has earned the right to witness us.
Eventually, something else begins to happen. We stop trying so hard to become the person we think we should be and slowly grow into the person we have always been. That is what I mean by rewilding. A forest does not become healthy because someone forces every tree to grow into the same shape. It flourishes because each living thing is allowed to grow according to its own nature while remaining deeply connected to the ecosystem around it. Human beings are not so different. Healing is not about becoming a polished, perfected version of yourself. It is about becoming more fully, more honestly, and more courageously yourself than the world ever gave you permission to be.
Returning to the Dark Differently
Maybe that is why I find October so comforting. Beneath the costumes, candlelight, and ghost stories, it quietly reminds us that darkness has never been the enemy. It is simply where forgotten things wait to be found. The old stories knew this long before psychology gave us words like conditioning, nervous systems, attachment, or protective adaptations. They understood that every monster carries a question, every shadow invites curiosity, and every journey through the unknown has the potential to return us to ourselves.
So if you find yourself wandering through your own cave, your own forest, or your own underworld, I hope you remember this: you were never asked to stay there. The stories that have endured for centuries all whisper the same promise. There is a way through, another side to the forest, and stars waiting beyond the darkness. And perhaps the greatest gift therapy offers is not the promise of a life without monsters or shadows, but the quiet assurance that you do not have to walk toward them alone. Sometimes healing begins with nothing more extraordinary than another human being arriving beside you with a lantern, walking at your pace until, somewhere along the way, you realize you have begun carrying the light yourself.
What It Means to Walk Beside You
At Storm Haven, we have never believed therapy is about fixing people. Human beings are not broken machines waiting for replacement parts. We see people as living ecosystems, shaped by stories, relationships, losses, joys, hopes, and the remarkable ways they have learned to survive. Sometimes those survival strategies still serve us. Sometimes they quietly become the very caves, forests, or circles we have been exploring together throughout this article. Our work is not to shame those adaptations or tear them away before you’re ready. It is to understand them with curiosity, compassion, and care while walking beside you as something new begins to emerge.
That is why stories have always mattered here. Stories help us name what once felt impossible to describe. They remind us that fear is part of being human, that monsters often become less frightening when we understand what they are protecting, and that every meaningful journey asks something different of us. Sometimes it asks us to climb. Sometimes it asks us to descend. More often than not, it simply asks us to keep walking.
Whether your cave was built by childhood experiences, impossible expectations, perfectionism, anxiety, trauma, grief, or years spent believing you had to become someone else in order to belong, our hope is not to tell you who you should become. Our hope is to help you remember who you have always been beneath the shadows.
Because that has always been the invitation waiting here.
You are not asked to fit in. You are invited to belong.
About the Author
Jennifer Hyatt, LMFT, is a psychotherapist, clinical supervisor, writer, and the founder of Storm Haven Counseling & Wellness. Her work is rooted in the belief that people are not problems to be solved, but living ecosystems shaped by relationships, experiences, inherited stories, and the creative ways they have learned to survive.
Drawing from neurodivergent-affirming therapy, depth psychology, nervous system awareness, storytelling, symbolism, and relational approaches to healing, Jennifer helps people look beneath the surface of symptoms and reconnect with the parts of themselves that may have been hidden, silenced, or set aside in the pursuit of safety and belonging. She is also the creator of The Nerdie Therapist, where she writes and speaks about the beautifully complicated work of being a therapist, including the clinical, relational, systemic, and deeply human realities that exist both inside and outside the therapy room.
Jennifer is the author of The Understory: Going Beneath the Surface in Psychotherapy, a Therapist’s Guide to the Hidden Ecosystems Beneath Symptoms, Stories, and the Roots of Change.
Through her clinical work and writing, Jennifer invites readers and clients to remember what has been obscured, reclaim what has been abandoned, and rewild the parts of themselves that were never meant to be confined.
If This Story Felt Familiar
If there is one thing the old stories seem to agree upon, it is this: no one makes the journey alone.
Dante had Virgil. Countless heroes throughout mythology found guides waiting at the edge of forests, crossroads, and mountains. Even Plato’s freed prisoner returned to tell others that another world existed beyond the cave. Across cultures and centuries, the stories repeat the same quiet truth. Transformation may be deeply personal, but it has rarely been solitary.
That has always felt deeply hopeful to me because healing asks us to visit places that can feel profoundly lonely. Shame has a way of convincing us that our struggles are uniquely ours, that everyone else received a map we somehow misplaced. We begin believing we are the only one wandering through unfamiliar woods, carrying questions too heavy or too strange to speak aloud. Yet one of the most healing moments in therapy often arrives when someone discovers they no longer have to carry the lantern by themselves.
Disclaimer
This blog is intended for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for psychotherapy, medical care, diagnosis, or individualized mental health treatment. The ideas explored here, including references to mythology, psychology, nervous system responses, protective adaptations, and parts of self, are offered as frameworks for reflection rather than as explanations that will fit every person or experience.
Reading this article does not establish a therapist-client relationship with Jennifer Hyatt, LMFT, Storm Haven Counseling & Wellness, or any Storm Haven clinician. If something in this piece brings up distress, difficult memories, or questions about your own mental health, consider discussing what you are noticing with a qualified mental health professional who can understand your individual history, needs, and circumstances.
References to Plato, Dante, Jung, mythology, folklore, monsters, shadows, caves, and other symbolic imagery are used metaphorically to explore aspects of the human experience. They are not intended to minimize the reality of trauma, mental health conditions, systemic harm, or other forms of suffering. Healing is deeply personal, and there is no single path, timeline, or story that everyone is expected to follow.