Why I love being a Catholic Therapist

Written by Ashley Schumacher, M.S.

There is an awe and wonder that lives at the heart of my work as a Catholic therapist, a sense that I am continually being invited to behold faces in all forms of the human experience, both in real time and across human and salvation history. Allow me to explain...

At Divine Mercy University, we are formed to perceive and receive each individual in their truest identity: as being known, loved, and awaited both by God and by the therapist. They come to be seen, and their dignity encountered. To discover, sometimes for the first time, that they are persons held in a deeper narrative of teleological meaning, relationship, and love.

I find myself deeply moved by the way grace transfigures the ordinary space of human relationship. The therapeutic relationship is uniquely structured and carefully safeguarded, becoming a sacred, and in many ways a sacramental place where something remarkable can occur: this beholding of the beloved, the knowing, the loving, the awaiting. It is truly a “ministry of presence.” This idea is not new to me, having served in the United States Navy Chaplain Corps, but my understanding of it, my own capacity and ability to hold and engage its deeper meanings, has been a work of grace in my own formation as a therapist.

In this space, I have the profound privilege of accompanying clients as they discover or rediscover, become reacquainted with, who they always were, truly are, and who they are meant to be-their highest vocational calling to wholeness and holiness. Even more profoundly, I have witnessed individuals come to new understandings of who God is to them (Luke 9:20), and who they are to God, a reflected question mirrored in their unique expression of imago Dei.

These are moments I carry with reverence long after they have passed. (Luke 2:19)

And again and again, I am left with wonder: that I am allowed to be present when a human heart begins to remember and encounters its own dignity. Here human and salvation history are both re-enacted and newly enacted in ongoing transformation and transfiguration.

In these beautiful faces, I have beheld the universal human experience across the ages. I have sat with the hesitant courage of Naaman, unsure if the process is too simple to be effective.

I have become the vessel gathering Rachel’s tears, catching the echoes of her weeping with grief that has no language yet still asks to be witnessed without explanation or resolution.

I have sat with Joseph's (Egypt) bewildering task of holding both betrayal and mercy in the same wounded heart.

I have marveled with the ‘Man born Blind’ at new insight.

Like Veronica, I have reached out and touched disfigurement and beauty in disguise. Like the Blessed Mother along the Via Dolorosa, I have cradled in knowing the face of pain that is unrecognizable in human form (soul pain/moral injury).

These are not just biblical accounts to me; they are archetypal patterns of human experience that continue to unfold in real time, in current salvation history, within the therapeutic encounter. They are living contours of the human heart and soul as it moves toward being ever more fully known, loved, and awaited, until it cries out with the most pure and tender recognition, “There You are!” In this moment, the soul begins to recognize the truth of its own imago Dei, and in that recognition, to perceive God more clearly as the One who has been seeking it from the beginning. It is as though the Father’s question in the Garden, “Where are you?”finds its healing echo again across salvation history, not only in being heard, but in being answered in, by and for Love.

What I love most about being a Catholic therapist is this: I am invited to witness, behold, and love sacred faces. Faces marked by joy, sorrow, pain, anger, courage and fear, longing and hope. Faces that simultaneously reveal the universal contours of the human experience and the singular dignity of the person before me. And in these faces, I catch glimpses of the Face of God anew, reflected in the unique beauty and dignity of each person's imago Dei.