"Mary Hunt: A place to start pursuing this topic is in the interface between psychology and spirituality. A lot of what you said sounds like clinical depression, though I know that isn’t what you mean. It reminds of the difference between PTSD and moral injury, which we’ve been talking about at WATER with Rita Nakashima Brock, and the difference between what happens to the psyche and to the soul. How do you tease out clinical issues at play in this?
Joan: I can only tell you that my own development comes when spiritual people, who had been trained in a culture like confession, discovered that confession was punitive but that these conversations still needed to be addressed. There was a search for psychologists in the late 50s and 60s to help people understand, but psychology cannot answer a spiritual question, emotional, or developmental question. You can get very lost if your soul is in struggle."