Why I Don't Separate Psychology and Magical Practice
One of the questions I get asked most often is how I reconcile being an educational psychologist with practicing magic. It has never bothered me much. What fascinates me is the assumption buried inside the question, that these two worlds are supposed to be enemies. Psychology belongs to reason, the thinking goes, and magic belongs to belief, and if you take one seriously you must have quietly given up on the other. That has never been how I've lived it.
For as long as I can remember, psychology and magical practice have asked the same thing of me. Pay attention. Slow down enough that an experience starts revealing more of itself instead of racing toward certainty. As far as I can tell, that is where both disciplines actually begin.
Psychology didn't teach me to explain people. It taught me to watch them.
In my training I spent years on how people learn, remember, perceive, attach meaning, build identities. What stuck with me most was how rarely behavior stands on its own. It comes threaded through a whole web of experience, relationship, expectation, and history that stays invisible unless you slow down and actually look. The more I studied, the less patience I had for tidy explanations. People are stubbornly resistant to simplicity. Someone who looks angry might be grieving. Someone withdrawn might just be overwhelmed. A kid who won't follow instructions isn't necessarily oppositional; sometimes they're protecting the one thing they still control. A recurring dream might be memory, or longing, or trauma, or nothing you can pin down with a single word. Getting to the first satisfying explanation was never the point. Becoming a better observer was.
That habit followed me straight into magical practice before I really noticed it happening.
When I started studying witchcraft as a kid, I wanted answers. What every symbol meant, which herb did what, whether some spiritual explanation was waiting behind every strange experience. Over the years that hunger changed shape. Instead of asking what something means, I started asking what it was inviting me to notice, which is a much slower question. A dream stops being a puzzle to crack. A recurring symbol stops being a definition you look up in a correspondence table. An unexpected wave of emotion during ritual doesn't get explained away, and it doesn't get inflated into proof of anything either. It just becomes something to sit with, something to be in relationship with. That shift changed a great deal for me.
People sometimes assume psychology made me more skeptical of magic. What it really did was make me more skeptical of certainty in general. Psychology is very good at showing you how easily the mind fills a gap with a story. We see patterns that aren't there and miss patterns that are quietly running our lives. We project our fears onto other people, mistake familiarity for truth, remember selectively, and build narratives that protect our sense of self without ever admitting that's what we're doing. Knowing all that hasn't weakened my magical practice. If anything it has made it more honest.
Magic has made me a better psychologist too, for what it's worth. It keeps reminding me that not everything meaningful can be measured. People have always lived through symbol, ritual, dream, myth, song, and encounter, none of which were ever going to fit neatly inside a lab. Whatever framework you use to interpret them, psychological or spiritual or cultural or some mix of the three, they still shape us. People change because of symbols, though not because a symbol carries some hidden universal code. They change because a symbol reorganizes how we live inside our own lives. A wedding ring is just metal until it becomes a promise. A photograph is just paper until it becomes memory. A key is just shaped brass until it opens the one door that changes everything.
Magic understands that, and so does psychology in its own way. They just come at the conversation from different angles.
Which is why I've never really understood the impulse to ask whether some experience was "really psychological" or "really spiritual." The question forces a choice that doesn't need making. Say someone keeps dreaming about standing at a crossroads. A psychologist might ask what transition they're navigating. A folklorist might trace the symbolism of crossroads through history. A magical practitioner might weave the dream into ritual. A devotee of Hekate might recognize imagery already thick with devotional meaning. Does only one of those readings get to be true? I've never found that a useful place to land. Human experience has always been able to hold more than one layer of meaning at once.
That goes double for spirits. Some people assume that because I've studied psychology, every encounter with the unseen must secretly be an unconscious projection. Others assume that because I do spirit work, I've thrown out psychological explanation in favor of the supernatural. Neither one describes how I actually move through the world. Sometimes what I experience tells me something about myself. Sometimes it tells me something about someone else. Sometimes it uncovers grief I hadn't noticed, or exposes a fear I'd mistaken for intuition. And sometimes I just don't know.
I've gotten remarkably comfortable saying that. I don't know. There's a real humility in admitting an experience might be bigger than my current understanding of it, and that humility has protected me far more than certainty ever did.
It's part of why discernment has become such a central value in my work. Discernment is a form of attention rather than a form of suspicion, and what it asks for is presence, staying with an experience a little longer instead of forcing it into whatever explanation sits closest at hand. Noticing what repeats. Noticing what shifts. Examining your assumptions without abandoning the experience itself. Letting a few possibilities sit side by side while you keep learning. People read that as indecision sometimes. I'd call it honesty, intellectual and spiritual both.
When someone sits with me in Threshold Practice, I'm not there to tell them what to believe, or to explain away something that clearly moved them. I get curious with them instead. What happened? How did it feel? What changed afterward? What emotions keep coming back? What symbols keep showing up? What assumptions might be shaping how you're reading this? What haven't you considered yet? None of those questions asks anyone to choose between psychology and magic. They just ask for attention.
I keep coming back to that. Attention before explanation, observation before certainty, relationship before conclusion. The older I get, the less interest I have in defending one worldview against another. I'd rather get better at noticing, better at holding mystery without rushing to fill it in. At their best, psychology and magic are both invitations into deeper relationship, with ourselves, with each other, with the symbols that shape our lives, and sometimes with whatever sits just past the edge of ordinary language.
Psychology gave me real tools for understanding the architecture of human experience. Magic keeps me honest about how much of that experience will never sit still long enough to be measured. Neither has ever asked me to give up the other. Both just ask me to pay attention. That's the whole reason I've never felt the need to separate them. They have always been the same road, lighting up different stretches of it as I keep walking toward whatever threshold comes next.
