“Pick up the phone, damn it!”, she screamed as she clutched her cell phone against her ear. Her other hand violently gripped the steering wheel as if her life depended on that single action. It did.

They usually talked at least once during a work day, so getting a phone call from her was not unusual for him.

“Hi, love. What’s up?” he answered after a couple of rings.

Quickly, he sensed something was very wrong that day.

“I can’t go on like this. I’m in so much pain. My head hurts. I can’t think straight. I can’t take this anymore. I see a truck in front of me. I wish it would just hit me.”

— From the Prologue of The Way Back Home: An Anthology

Finally, I had to say, “I need help.”

But it was not easy. The clinician in me wanted evidence. The poet in me wanted to feel before she understood. The thinker wanted to categorize what the witness was still too close to see clearly. The seeker kept moving when every other part of me wanted to stop. These were not complementary forces operating in smooth collaboration. They were, for years, in genuine conflict. The precision of clinical training and the surrender required by the unconscious do not come naturally to each other.

Learning to hold both has been the work.

The Way Back Home® (TWBH) is the body of work I have been building for the past decade.

Expanding consciousness to create new realities is the work.

“Sunita Merriman’s book Stripping-My Fight to Find Me is of great importance to the future of dynamic psychotherapy and humanity.”

-Habib Davanloo, MD, Founder of Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy, Emeritus Professor, McGill University

“The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves.”

-Carl Jung, Aion, Christ: A Symbol of the Self